What's Up, Tsuts?

by Cathy

Indulge me as I vent about one of several pet peeves I have about my husband.

Let me preface this by saying that he is usually asleep when this occurs, rendering him clueless (I think) about what he does, but STILL. 

So picture this: he's fallen asleep, usually way too early for my taste. He's either laying on the living room couch with the lights off, the television now watching him instead of the other way around, or he's already in bed, mummified under the covers, which are pulled up to his nose.

Since I am always shuffling around the house until some crazy hour because of the million little things I have to do  before I can carelessly flop into bed, I am walking in and out of rooms constantly. Most of the time, I am in my own world of To Do's, so I may or may not be aware that he has fallen asleep in a particular room. Regardless, I usually try to keep the noise level down.

However, there comes a time where I HAVE to turn on a light, or check the sound on my alarm clock so that I don't oversleep the following morning, or clean up, or look for something or maybe, just turn on my bedside lamp so I can sneak in a few pages of reading before I hit the hay.

And how does he react to any one of those things? He tsutses. You know, that noise you make when you click your tongue off your upper teeth in annoyance? Yeah, that. He tsutses.

Now if I've purposely woken him up, dropped something ridiculously loud or started singing at the top of my lungs, I can see how he would react like that. But to tsuts at my cleaning the house and preparing to go to bed, I mean, come ON. I know he doesn't know the difference if he's asleep so I try to ignore it sometimes, but others, I respond with a "WHY are you tsutsing?!?" And almost always, I get no response because he's back asleep in no time.

I then chalk up his tsutsing to a mindless reaction - an instinctive reflex.
A rather annoying one.