Lending ears

The ear is a wonderful thing - to use it, you need to have at least 2 parties. One is yourself, another one is the message sender which is dumping whatever thing that you are going to hear into your dear ears. It's like clapping, but you need something apart from yourself to use it.

Freepik is amazing.

Sometimes it gets interesting when someone says "thank you for lending me your ears" - to be exact, you can only lend your ears to one person at a time, and if you are not lending it, you are not using it. See the interaction? If no one is talking to you, the thing stays idle. I mean, of course, you will still need to use it to make sure that your cat is not starving outside of the door or if you bumped into some other car when trying to do the hardest side-parking ever (I know, certain car owners love to leave just-as-sufficient space for the next car to park, as if they can teleport their car into it), but in terms of human interactions, not using the ear means not using it, while using it means you can only use it on one person at a time. Trust me, multitasking does not work for the ear. I tried.

For computers, time spent idling is wasted. So, CPUs pipeline to squeeze out as much work as they can do within a specific time frame - running the second task while the first one is waiting for data to be read in hard disks, running the third task while waiting for the second task's data to be downloaded...etc. That's how pipelining works, for computers, and by saying that I mean don't use it on humans, things does not work that way. As I said, listening is unique. You listen to one person at a time, and you should not pause, because we don't reconstruct data as well as computers. The emotional bump and the instinct will be different after you paused a conversation. If you can, don't do that. That's my advice anyway, you can say no to your friend who asks you about nonsense at 4am...better pause the urge to slap him before things get real. But, as long as you are not listening to someone, your ears are idle. You can lend them to anyone that wishes to talk to you, and you does not really spend a thing. Except for time, well, can't help with that. You can't defeat time no matter what.

Sometimes when people say "thank you for lending me your ears" I don't know what to say, but probably, "no problem, I have ears anyway". Since well, what else can I use that thing for? Having the chance to be someone else' listener is pretty lucky. Believe it or not, I don't really listen to anyone for a big part of my every day routine. Me and my roommate literally don't talk, I am alone out there most of the times, and to fill up my empty ear I abuse various kinds of music and chatrooms (they don't fill the ear, but they do in some ways). It actually feels good to be able to interact with humans and hear things from them, even in text form. I don't know why, but it do feels like that for me.

I guess that's quite a random write-up on lending ears eh? You don't even lend them, you just open them up for others to use them. English is strange too.

I'll just stop here, you know, I might have to lend myself my ears too. Time to listen to what myself have to tell myself in dreams.

See you next time.

--Lilacse