One common thing I’ve heard from people I’ve asked to close their mouths while eating is “I have a small mouth.”

It’s not your mouth being too small, it’s the fact that your trying to put two tons of food in. Take smaller bites, it’s that easy! Why do you need to eat your meal in under five minutes, and why do you need to put as much of it as you can in your mouth. This is not the great depression.

It seems a lot of them have people talking with food in their mouths! It’s so disgusting. I actually wrote the company an email but they’ll probably laugh. Like the yogurt commercials and the jimmy dean sandwich, and a few others. You should write something about these too.

i love my dad. i have absolutely no “daddy issues”. HOWEVER. he makes me feel emotionally abused when he consumes any food or drink. he can’t seem to decide whether to eat or breathe, so he does both very loudly. but how, with the enormous six forkfuls of food he just shoveled into his freakishly eager mouth? well he breathes through his nose, which is the most audible, and his mouth, since it happens to be open while he smacks and slurps and chomps what sounds like stuffing and banana slugs. now, slurping isn’t too frequent with food, as it might require him to close his mouth for a second. with drinks it is absolutely awful. he had an accident when he was young that required him to get stitches on his lip, so he sensibly has always had a mustache. this accident also required him to drink everything through a straw for an extended period of time, causing him to hate using straws. also understandable. this, however, is a combination of things HARD to be understanding of when he drinks anything. he sips from the cup, and whatever liquid is in it gets inevitably trapped in the forest of doom that is his upper lip hair, and he fixes this by bringing his bottom lip and tongue UP TO HIS NOSE and slurping it back down. yikes. how does my mom deal with this?! well she doesn’t eat, really. she snacks. on sunflower seeds. i think the crazy-loud cracking and sucking of those drowns out any other noises. now somehow, my sister and i have very silent eating habits, and concluded that being irritable to noisy eating has made us…not gross. we also have always related my father’s eating to his being fat and gluttonous. yes we love him, we swear. and we haven’t figured out our mother, though we theorize that she only does this in her own home.

now the other top offender (possibly of all time) is my friend-that-annoys-me. do you have one? the friend you stayed friends with because they’ve been there so long, and when you see them once every other week, tops, they really are lovely. well she used to be reserved, hardworking, and easily liked. somewhere along the line, she developed into a woman and realized she loved attention. she is hands-down the loudest person. ever. her voice is shrill and eardrum-bursting, with a sometimes too-forced shrieking laugh. she is small and thin, but has a walk like her sandals are made of lead. she fancies herself a singer and her voice broadway belt-y. but if i feel like i should be warned before you start singing in my face, “belting” is not the word for it. she is conveniently also rude, because she thinks she knows everything and likes to talk. her personality reminds me of scuttle the seagull from the little mermaid. or an all too real jack from will and grace. now when she eats, it is so ridiculous that it sounds exaggerated. pause…smack! pause…banana noise! now her character also requires her to be way too freaking close to me and in my space, and if i leave my living room with her eating in front of the tv, she will get up and follow me to the kitchen, and then meander aimlessly next to me to do nothing but eat. oh my god, why?! why would you act like you’re shy and can’t be left alone in my house?! you come here like kramer, just putting on my shoes until i throw one at you and eating whatever you please from my fridge without asking until you ask my to spend my last bills on pizza for you! i am not sure how to tell her in the moments that she’s chewing just like a slow cow, that this is probably why men don’t want to see her again after a date, but obviously we are all here because we wish for a little more tact from the world.

if anyone figures out how to get this from people, please, for the sake of decent folks on here, let us know!