mercoledì, settembre 28, 2011

Please relax that asshole, ma'am

Had an actual sleepless night last night. I think it's been years since I had one of those that wasn't on purpose. It's from spending so much time with my mother, of course, more than I have in years. Lord love the woman, because I certainly do,  because she's a jewel among woman, but she worries, and it's infectious.

And of all the people in the world who don't have much to worry about, I must be in the upper hundred thousands. Her too. I mean, holy shit. I could stop working right now, as could my brothers, and she and the father already have, and we'd still know where our meals were coming from for a good forty years. But there you are. We both have depressive personalities, like her awful mother before her (her awful mother, by the way, has just turned a fairly spry 99; never overestimate the power of positive thinking), and when you're a depressive, you can be morbid about it or you can be an asshole about it or you can fucking worry.

Usually I choose the asshole method, especially since that course of psychoanalysis a few years back, before which I tended toward the morbid, which is just a variant of the asshole method. I'm my awful grandmother's awful grand-daughter, after all, and the asshole method is way, way better for the depressive than the worrying method. There's just too much guilt, stress, and - well - worry involved in the worrying method. But the worrying is really infectious. When someone else worries that much, one starts to wonder - well, why aren't I worrying too? Is this hubris? Are the gods about to strike me down? Well, shit.

And then one gets down to worrying.

For this sort of reason, I think the asshole method - as long as the asshole understands they're an asshole and tries not to go apeshit with it - is actually preferable to the worrying method for the people around the depressive. I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with another asshole than a worrier. At least you can have fun playing with assholes. Yeah, I said it. God, I miss my old man. Just another week or so.

2 commenti:

e.f. bartlam ha detto...

You know who should be worried? People that don't.

"Why do you worry about things you can't control?"

Duh...why would I worry about things I can?

The only reason those people aren't ever worried is because they don't have time to for it between doing chores and making lists...they are the insane ones.

I'll consider stopping when I'm told not to worry by someone splayed across a couch lazily fanning themselves with an old unfilled grocery list.

Dread Pirate Jessica ha detto...

It's true that some of my favourite people in the world worry a lot. Hmm.