“I’m seriously so afraid to talk to anyone that I just walk around campus with my headphones on and mind my own damn business,” said Ferris freshman communications major Edward Nifetoes.
Nifetoes, who lives in a residence hall on campus, says that he is just so terrified of speaking to anyone in fear that they’ll look at him in a negative light.
“This one time, in the seventh grade, I raised my hand in class to answer a math question, thinking that people would think I was smart. The teacher called on me and I answered the question correctly but for the rest of the year, all of my classmates called me ‘fucking nerd’ because I knew the area of an equilateral triangle,” Nifetoes said.
Ever since, Nifetoes has decided that the best way to go about his day without being bothered by his peers is to put on his sound-cancelling headphones and pretend to listen to music in order to block out the world around him. The catch is that under those headphones, Nifetoes isn’t listening to anything at all.
“I tried to listen to a bunch of different types of music but I realized after a week or two that I don’t really like music because it makes me have feelings, and my classmates used to always tell me that feelings made you weak. So I just put the headphone plug into my pocket so that it appears to people that I’m listening to music and that way they don’t bother me,” Nifetoes said.
Nifetoes did say that he is getting into electronic music a little bit because it doesn’t make him feel anything at all. He has been slowly adding electronic music into his daily listening regimen.
“It’s just kind of emotionless music. With things that sound kind of like hacksaws and power drills, I can’t really associate any emotional attachment with them,” Nifetoes said. “Except I did hear this one song last week that sounded like a battle between two ‘Transformers,’ which in turn made me sad about the downward spiral of Shia Labeouf’s acting career. I immediately deleted that song from my playlist, and now I’m back to listening to music that makes me feel like an inanimate object, almost like a stapler.”