Turn that noise down

There are certain sounds people make that cause me such discomfort, sounds so tingly and itchy when my skin absorbs the vibrations my body shudders and shuts down. Constant, heavy breathing; the squishing and smacking of lips, tongue, and teeth as they suck and bite and tear fingernails; full, open mouths eating soft foods; cracking knuckles.

I wonder why I have such a fixation on oral sounds? Now that I think about it they're almost the same  noises a dude makes while going down on me but I'm usually able to ignore the unpleasantness of the slurping .. unless it's all slurp and no satisfaction (ha ha?).

Anyway I hear all of these damn sounds (except the pussy one) at work. It's especially irksome because hearing them somehow feels too...intimate. Loud open-mawed chewing is not only sloppy as fuck (how old are y'all) but it forces me to imagine your mouth and the sludge that you're moving in and around your teeth before it goes sliding down your gullet. I don't want to think about your Lean Cuisines like that. No one does. Nail biting is a pruning and preening that should be reserved for the home (pray tell where do all those nail bits go oh right the carpet we all walk on that's NASTY) but it's also an undeniable manifestation of anxiety; it opens the floodgate for all sorts of personal and private problems I now imagine you have.

I'm fairly good friends with my coworkers but it's no doubt superficial on all fronts. I don't like most of them enough to really know them and I'm pretty sure they don't like me enough either. Any ~real~ conversation we've had almost always spills out after a few drinks and it's certainly never mentioned again afterwards. I'm not so sure that registers on the Genuine Sincere Friend Scale. Maybe it's not simply an issue of who likes whom, though. Within the coworker-friend relationship there are boundaries to be sure. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. bantering and bitching is cool. If immediately followed by 5-8 drinking, also cool! That's light and fun and forgettable. If we wander into territory outside of work-approved times/subjects/locations conversation becomes clunky and awkward. When relationships gain weight they gain responsibility and I just want to wind down with a beer, man. I don't want to hear about your problems I've got enough of my own.

So coworkers bite fingernails or chew on reheated pasta or scratch dried skin off their head and then maybe eat that dried skin (???? OK that's not a sound there but IT DOES HAPPEN IN MY OFFICE SPACE) and their story, their demons, their insolvable, unpredictable, innumerable issues start to push through and I put on my headphones to drown it out and push right back.