My eye is twitching.
Not even the simple hiccup of an animated Jafar from any number of
Disney “Aladin” movies. No, this thing
is full-on ‘seizure on the dance floor’.
The shimmies and shakes it does would put Pinkamena Diane Pie to
shame. It does this every few months for
no known reason. I used to think it was
spring pollens and such – I mean, I did
have my head cracked at one point. Then
it was the coffee, or rather, my roughly four shots of espresso a day – more,
if during the holidays. Maybe it’s the
stress.
I blame the Dutch for most things. Being an American mutt, I may very well be
blaming myself. In fairness, it’s a
comedic blame to defer from the traditional prejudiced or stereotypical reflex
I was raised with in the blaming department.
Hell, being raised in a multi-racial household with a proud Panther step-father
helped mitigate anything BUT that from ever being a response. It was always a little weird when he expected
me to do the Panther salute in 1994. My
only familiarity with the Panthers as an eleven year old boy in the backwoods
of southwest New York State was from ‘Forest Gump.’ To say that’s lacking in adequacy would be to
draw similarities to the modern American public educational standard.
As far as I know, we have only one person who is part Dutch
(that we know of) in the family, and he married in.
Sucker.
Point being, I don’t know if I can blame the Dutch for my
eye twitch. Stress is the easiest
culprit, so let me give you a better story.
No, we’ll blame this on the great dragonbeast of Bismuth, Azurath of Malachite,
the flaming beast of Meriol and T’edrialle. It was foretold that his return would occur on
the final moon of the Mayan calendar, and I fear his return deeply.
And if you just bought that, let me sell you some headlight
fluid – it will protect you in the coming days of darkness!
What is causing it really doesn’t matter (unless it’s drain
bamage, in which case it might matter a little). But thinking on stress made me think of what
stresses me out. Butterflies that knowingly
cross busy thruways; for that matter, sparrows that dive bomb the same roadways
as if playing ‘chicken’ with the speeding cars.
Driving country roads at night for fear of having deer viscera and excrement
smashed into the fine aluminum folds of my car’s exterior, should I unwittingly
hit one. Number two pencils. Seriously, when have you ever had a plain,
old, number two pencil? And for that
matter, if they’re not made with lead, how do the still work for those scantron
tests?
These are all things well within my control, so why does it
stress me out? Everybody has
stress. That’s like saying you have had
the urge to poop at least once before in your life. Humour me as we look at something for a
moment: we can only be effected by what we let affect us. The understanding I had been traveling under
was to simply be hard and rigid to things that I didn’t want in my life, but I’m
finding that it’s not like that at all.
Not, “It’s not that easy;” not like that at all. ‘Stress’ (of the variety I’m dealing with
here) is very simply defined: put under physical or mental pressure. There are scientific measurements of nominal
standards for most humans and fish, but it is a most interesting concept because
we – as a society – define its limits however we want. My new boss is stressing me, my car is
stressing me out, these tacos are causing some emotional stress (alright, we
can all agree on the last one).
We tell ourselves- and those around us- what it is that’s
bothering us; what it is that’s stressing us.
Couldn’t it be said that we allow ourselves to set these benchmarks for
what makes us stressed? Are we, yet
again, defining the limits to which we want to acclimate to a social norm of
compliance? Or is this an easy out? Do
we typify all these things within a comfort zone, and anything breaching it is
simply a stressor, rather than adapting our ability to grow so that these are
included?
Looking at myself and this twitchy-as-fuck eye, I can say I
am setting my own standard for what is my personal stress. As a personal example from work – both recent
and in a decade’s past - I'm starting to realize the reason people can drive me
nuts with how moronic they sound, is because they're giving me back the same
half-cooked explanations of everything that I don't understand. That is
to say, they irritate me, because they show me what I am doing wrong.
I am getting ‘stressed’ because I’m communicating concepts I
don’t grasp firmly, and that’s causing people to come back to me, stressed, and
asking for clarification. And if you’re
wondering how this applied to selling video games and running a video game
store, all I have to say is: RETAIL. Seriously,
that job may come with a big old manual of what to do, but not HOW to do
it. And for selling, let’s be real for a
moment: over 120 games come out from October to January annually. Are you really so damn thick to think I’ve
played every one of those, worked 60 hours a week to pay for my food and rent,
spent at least 5 hours a week with my wife (while she’s conscious, thanks to
alternating schedules), and then juggled the 9 hours of calls during holidays
from my stores on my personal time off, all to have played these games THE DAY
they came out? Seriously: I could have had
a colonic and not had more shit come out of me after the way I would make that
stuff sell.
In effect, I am my own worst enemy with stress. I accept that there’s a limit to when I will
be susceptible to it, and I allow myself the comfort of its blame, rather than
expanding my own boundaries. So for me,
all ‘stress’ I encounter is simply a self-imposed inability to process or cope
with aspects of my daily life.
Easy enough, right?
Understanding that, I can affect change.
Now, let’s talk about my recent endeavor to stop using
Prilosec after a fifteen year prescribed stint (docs started me YOUNG). Just thought to myself, is this something I
need? No, but I have to re-learn what in
the hell food agrees with me now.
Speaking of, let’s also talk about how I’m not drinking coffee anymore…
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