Misophonic

I'm a sufferer of misophonia.

It's a joy (not!).

There are countless small, background noises that you don't notice that make me want to die.

Gum chewing.

Crunching chips.

Smacking lips.

It's not just sounds, it's any sensory input.

A stray thread brushing my leg.

A nervously tapping foot.

Smell and taste are not so much since those senses are easier to apply a filter.

I've mentioned it before, I'm sure.

How it relates to the previous post.

My friend's wife is a twitcher.  She's in constant motion, ants in her pants.  All gestures are grand and wasteful of motion.  She naturally sprawls out too, so she occupies a large arc of vision.  She chews loudly and her whole face is involved.  There.  Is.  No.  Escape.

What happened yesterday is the site for viewing the eclipse was about an hour from the hotel.  The hotel she chose, the site she chose.

We had to be to that site an hour before dawn to give her time to set up a telescope with sun-filters.

Ediston Beach, South Carolina is rather cooler than Suncoast Florida too.

Because she pegs the irritate Thag meter so hard I attempted to get a moment's peace (and stay out of the bitter 40˚ wind) in the cab of the truck while she yelled at my friend because she brought her telescope and he wasn't helping her to set it up right.  The kind of yelling that if anyone had started in on me that way I'd have been, "you brought it, you deal with it.  Don't like my help, don't get my help."

I don't like seeing my friends abused.

Did I mention that we were stuck in a truck for an hour?  Yeah.  There's no straight shot from St George, SC to Ediston; so we were on smaller roads and making lots of turns.  My friend is driving, she's in the back seat and has programmed the destination into google maps.  For all the good it did, since her phone was in her pocket.  My friend missed a turn, realized he'd missed it and was trying to figure out how to get back on route when she blew up on him about how he wasn't paying attention.

Um, hey, navigator: why didn't you have your app open and let him know we were getting close to the turn?  Then once you have the app open, notice that while the line on screen showing the route is clear to you, we can't see it up front.  Yelling, "that was our turn back there!" doesn't help in the slightest.

She was being unfair to my friend and there was nothing I could do about it.

She billed this eclipse as being near total at dawn.  It was not even close.  Not worth a six hour drive to see.  Worth six hours to hang with my friend, if she wasn't there.  Definitely not worth an hour of her ranting about his driving, and hour of her bitching about how he's not telepathically sensing the "correct" way to set up HER equipment.  Not worth thirty minutes of a not very impressive partial eclipse.  Not worth another hour of her basically doing none of the packing up while ranting at my friend for doing it wrong while she nattered away with two passersby who asked about the scope.  Not worth an hour drive back to the hotel with her running 210% twitch because she's agitated by my friend being so bad at obeying her mental transmissions.

Definitely not worth going through without a means of escape.  Being trapped 30 miles from my car in a situation that's pure torture for me removes nearly all value from the experience.

I can endure a lot.  I really can.  Understanding and compassion from others substantially mitigates the agony and greatly increases my ability to endure.  Clueless self centeredness and not even attempting to change how she does things...  Yeah.

I won't even start in on how she's teaching her dog to be a bad dog by reinforcing it's poor obedience.