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High Anxiety—All Stressed up
and Nowhere to Blow
It’s said that the Roman Empire was
destroyed not by one attack but by “a thousand small cuts,” that the
continual barrage of hostility from Barbarian armies eventually wore the
empire down.
I know just how Rome felt.
I don’t handle stress well. Last year
after the Twin Towers collapsed and some of my friends and family back
east weren’t accounted for, I coped in my usual time-honored way: I
ate an entire half gallon of ice cream. “It’s World War III,” I
thought, “Screw the diet.”
But it’s the day-to-day hassles that
really work my nerves. I’m partially responsible, of course. Working
two jobs for the past five years has left me feeling overworked and
underlaid. My personal to-do list looks something like this:
• Pick up last year’s dry-cleaning.
• Buy groceries.
• Never mind about the groceries. Be creative with remaining contents
in fridge.
• Go to gym. Avoid eye contact with hostile straight guys.
• Fix broken lamp.
• Fix broken table.
• Fix broken promises.
• Write screenplay you can sell for obscene amounts of money to escape
this mundane life.
• Wallow in doubt and self-pity.
And that’s just before I get to work.
It’s no wonder I’m so cranky and impatient. The other day I found
myself standing in front of the fax machine screaming, “For Chrissake,
hurry up! I haven’t got all minute!”
But I also blame my family. Not just
because it’s convenient and fun, but because I’ve inherited a
genetic predisposition for anxiety, descending as I do from a long line
of small, worried people. Consequently, anytime I get a backache I
always think, “That’s it, the cancer has eaten away at the bone,
just like it did Debra Winger in Shadowlands.”
I’m easily overwhelmed by the simplest
aspects of everyday living, like using a cell phone, for instance. I
finally had to stop wearing mine on my hip—not only did it spoil the
line, but every time I put my seat belt on it speed dialed my friend Tim
(the poor soul who made the mistake of showing me how to set up speed
dial in the first place). So now I leave it in my car, which is fine,
except that I don’t know how to retrieve my calls. My phone will say,
“You have three unplayed messages” and I’ll just think,
“Hmm…bummer.”
It’s the same with computers. It took
me the longest time just to realize there was no such thing as the
“Any” key. And as far as I’m concerned, chatting on-line still
means flirting with the bag boy at the grocery store. But since my CPU
insists on making a noise that sounds like a flock of pigeons, I have to
enlist the aid of more technologically advanced persons (like anyone
without a serious head injury). But they always end up showing me some
feature I don’t care about like how my monitor can be used as a
microwave oven or as a means of contacting the dead.
Above all else, though, it’s home
ownership that pushes me over the edge. We have a very unhealthy
relationship, my house and I. It’s always coming to me with some
problem or other, (“I’m leaking, I’m rotting,” blah, blah, blah)
and I’m always bailing it out by writing checks. I was just about to
organize an intervention when my HVAC system started smelling like dead
fish.
That was two years ago.
Since then a changing cast of repair guys
(some with butt cleavage, some without) have come out to fix the problem
but all they know for certain is that a fish did not crawl into my duct
work and die there. Meanwhile I’m convinced Floyd and I are going to
develop leukemia from breathing tainted air. I’m ready to call Erin
Brockovich.
It’s endlessly frustrating to turn to
experts for solutions only to discover that they don’t know what to
do, but it made me come to an important realization: nobody really knows
anything—not me, not the HVAC guys, not doctors or ministers or even
Oprah. All we can do is guess.
Most of us woke up on September 11th
thinking it would be just another day, maybe a really good one because
the weather was so beautiful. Now every time an ambulance passes I
think, “Right now someone is having the worst day of their lives.”
It’s very humbling and it proves that you can never know what will
happen.
So I’ve stopped trying to resolve every
little inconvenience in my life, which means I probably won’t get
around to fixing my house until I try to sell it. But I figure with so
much truly beyond my control, there’s really nothing to be gained by
worrying.
And that, my friends, is The Gospel
According to Marc.
Marc Acito’s column appears in a
dozen papers nationwide. Write him at MarcAcito@attbi.com.
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