It was a sunny day, so I decided to head to the lake to see the ducks who were incidentally “quacking me up” with their hydro-plane-like take-offs and landings. I was happy to be alone.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone for long.

I know full well that I was in a public space and that I do not own the park, but I was more than a little annoyed when two young-ish women sat less than a foot away from me and began talking blathering nonsense in their exaggerated Valley Girl accents (apparently having failed to realize that the early 80’s have long since died and have yet to be resurrected), which subsequently temporarily destroyed my peace of mind.

There were other benches in the park that they could have sat on, there was a small beach that they could have walked on, and two unoccupied picnic tables, all with water-front views where the “ladies” could have quacked to their hearts content without disturbing me or the ducks, but they chose instead to sit right next to me.

The park had plenty of signs warning me to put my imaginary dog on a leash and to pick up its poop, signs forbidding me to feed any food to either the quacking Mallards or the honking geese, but lacked a single sign about the importance of giving people their personal space.

Before you argue that that would be a ridiculous sign, consider the fact that this is Seattle, which will be quite possibly the first city in the entire world to ban smoking in public parks, so reminding fellow-park-goers to give others shouldn’t be that much of a stretch, should it?

Of course, I agree that a sign would be a little ridiculous, but  someone who is in the park sitting on a bench alone is not exactly anxious to be forced into eavesdropping on a boring conversation in the first place. Isn’t this like a little like sitting next to someone at a coffee shop in which all the tables are empty? I don’t mean someone politely asking if there is room to sit down- I mean two people sitting down right next to you, without asking and having the loudest conversation that you’ve truthfully ever heard in your entire life.

If I were a different sort of person, I probably would have given them the evil eye, which I am told is quite powerful, but instead tried my best to ignore them without telling them to “Shut the F- Up”.