Recently, I discovered that they've come up with a name for my disorder. Thank goodness, if there's one thing I hate, it's for my disorders to go unlabeled. The name is "misophonia" and it's defined as follows:
Misophonia – literally the hatred of sound -can be defined as a hypersensitivity to background sounds or visual stimuli that are generally ignored by other people. More importantly than the individuals inability to block out the offending stimuli or “trigger” is the acute negative emotional response experienced as a direct result of being in contact with a trigger.
There you have it. I hate the sound of chewing. It inspires anger in my soul. Combine that with the smell of Corn Nuts (oh the horror!) and it puts me in a rage.
I was sitting in a training class for work yesterday when I figured out why I hate trainings so much. After lunch, which we were graciously provided 45 minutes to complete the chewing and swallowing of our food, one guy decided that he was too busy for lunch at lunch time and proceeded to eat his meal after lunch, in training. His lunch included a noisy wrapped bag of almonds. Oh the almonds. And when he was done crunching the almonds, he started in on his (huge) apple. I kept glaring at his plate, trying to figure out how much longer this was going to go on. Still MORE almonds! To top it all off, my hands hurt from the pregnancy induced carpal tunnel, so plugging my ears was agony. By the end of the training, as with all trainings I attend, I was about to have a meltdown and vowed to never attend another training again. Only online trainings for me.
This only bugs me when I'm not chewing too. If I'm sitting down at the dinner table having dinner myself, I don't notice the noise. I guess taste trumps hearing in the battle of the senses.
I do know that I'm not alone with this disorder. My mother and my sister have it too. I remember sitting in the kitchen when I was in elementary school. I was eating my cereal and my mom was glaring at me from across the table. "Please stop chewing so loudly," she said. And from that moment on, I knew that to eat breakfast around my mom, I would have to suck on my cereal until it became soggy in my mouth and then I can chew it up. I can only hope my children show me the same courtesy.
To sum up, save your masticating for dinner time, or just stay out of hearing distance. And if you're in a training with several other people, eat your lunch at lunch time. Have a little class.
Earlier this week Evan and I took a tour of Lovelace Women's Hospital. (It's a lovely hospital and we're so excited that D-Day is getting closer). While on this tour we were grouped with about 4 other couples and a tour guide. You can imagine that with 5 couples, there's bound to be a weird one. And this time, it wasn't us. Score one for the Ottesens! For reference in this post, we'll call our group's weird couple, "Team Weirdo".
The tour guide explained that if the husbands/partners and families were there for lunch, they usually have a grill going outside and you can come down and get some BBQ. To this, Team Weirdo's male component said, "can we bring our own food and use the grill?". While the rest of us looked at him with a look of exhaustion and ever so slight amusement (we've watched A LOT of The Big Bang Theory lately...love it), the tour guide very politely said that there were legal issues that wouldn't allow for that sort of thing.