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Misophonia and the Agape Orifice

The longer you live, the less you know. I have always had “sensitive ears” — meaning that small sounds really drive me insane. That ear sensitivity can be helpful, though, in a radio career, or during audio production, because I can catch errors, and erroneous sounds, that others around me, miss. However, having “super hearing” is also a curse because you can hear dogs barking from far away, children crying two floors away, and every street sound echoes in your head all day, every day.

This week, I just happened to stumble upon the exact medical description of my Superpower Curse: Misophonia!

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That Ringing in Your Ears is the Music of Your Mind

We have a horrible new neighbor living above us, and she’s young and preppy and VERY LOUD!  She bangs things on her wood floor/our ceiling all day and all night long.  She walks heavy on her heels back and forth and back again.  She drags her furniture across her wood floor/our ceiling that creates fingernails-on-chalkboard by osmosis.

I have taken to using earplugs when she’s at her most obnoxious and the earplugs do seem to filter out the precise range of her banging on our heads to make her terrorism from above us sort of tolerable.  I’ll leave the whole injustice of, “Why should I have to wear earplugs all day long so I can’t hear you being obnoxious?” question for another day.

Continue reading → That Ringing in Your Ears is the Music of Your Mind

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The Curse of Super Hearing

I am cursed with the Super Hearing SuperPower.  It’s a curse because I can hear everything at any volume tone or decibel.  There is likely some irony in my “db” email sign off — in fact, several people mock me by addressing me as “dB” — not because I am loud, but because every noise at any level appears loud to me.

Having Super Hearing can be a problem as an apartment dweller in The Big City:

When you live in a building with other people, you always have to negotiate the tricksy totems of living.  Loud music, wild children, stomping feet above you, and banging on walls can quickly descend into ongoing fights and rifts that can never heal.

In my experience in apartment dwelling, I have learned that some neighbors are never worth the time it might take to ask them to temper their behavior because they are so totally unaware of how they come across in the building community; and to waste even a moment of your time trying to help them fit in is time lost when you could be out doing something useful like banging your head against a concrete wall to get them out of your mind.

Continue reading → The Curse of Super Hearing