Middle School

I just finished the latest episode of This American Life.  It's about middle school students and spends a lot of time discussing how stressful things can be for them.  The stresses revolve around close friends growing apart, being made fun of for not bathing, or trying to find someone to slow dance with.  It was great.  It made me so thankful to not be in middle school anymore.  I don't want to know what it's like to smoke a cigarette and whether or not that will give me enough cool points to sit in the back of the bus.

And so the episode got me thinking about  something I have been tossing around in my dome for a while now.  The broad term- STRESS.

Here is an idea I want to be true: what if stress is just always the exact same number of brain synapses in every single humans brain at any given time.  Every one gets one stressy per second to use as they please.  The middle school kids are using it on looking cool, the high school kids are using it on getting kissed, the adults are using it on life and the old people are using it on death.  Your stressy-per-second allowance will never go up, it's just up to you and any given chain of events on how that stressy is utilized.

Now, stressy isn't the best word to make this point... it's silly.  However, think about how often you stress out.  If you are me, you constantly stress about all sorts of things... While I am stressing about money (and not having any) people with a lot of money are stressing about family or work or business and people without those stresses are stressing about global warming or how their socks have too many holes in them or about how their dog is sick.  Everyone gets the same number of stressys, its just how it is.  While you may think your life is crazier and more stressful than a middle school students, listen to the podcast and hear about the kid that throws up at lunch every day because he doesn't have any friends at his new school.  If you think your life is less stressful than the president's life, think about how many people he has to help him make all his difficult decisions and how in 1 or 5 years, he will be all set for the rest of his life.  His lifetime stressy-count will not be anymore than anyone elses.

Now, I feel like maybe there are some flaws to this argument:

First- are you less stressful if you don't have to worry about death?  Is death-stress a heavier weight than money-stress or friendship-stress?  I feel like maybe marines that are being shot at every day are more stressed than someone who lives in the Hamptons on his inherited trust fund.  But, for the sake of argument, lets look at it from the stressy system of stress equality.  Don't a lot of marines re-enlist?  Don't they develop a level of camaraderie with their friends that is unmatched?  If they die, aren't their families well-compensated (or at least compensated)? And don't a lot of rich kids in the Hamptons get addicted to drugs?  Don't they over medicate themselves and take anti-depressents all the time?  Don't they always have therapy sessions?  Are their stressys, without a doubt, any less than the stressys of a war bound marine?  maybe/maybe not.

Second- doesn't everyone always think that their life is too stressful at times?  Without a doubt, everyone has climaxed on stress and it is not a good kind of climax.  It is sweaty and wide eyed and hair raising, but it is not an orgasm. So maybe if you are climaxing on stress during midterms or a loved one's illness it balances out when you have no stress on Christmas day or sitting on a beach with a margarita.  So instead of an exact stressy-per-second rate, instead you have a stressy allotment for your lifetime that will get used up and it is the same allotment for everyone.

So maybe I am thinking in scientific terms (stressy? scientific?) when I should be thinkin' in religious terms.  I love a lot of buddhist philosophies, and one of them is that everything is flowing in one giant union.  All matter, consciousness, and everything is a giant pool rippling in with the high tide and out with the low tide.  Everything is shared and nothing and no one is anything more than a collective flowing force.  You can take it as far as you want, but I just like to think of it as everyone being connected and sharing the universe.  If this idea makes you want to barf, so be it, but remember you only have so much of a stressy-allotment for the day.  If we are all sharing everything, than wouldn't we share the burdens of stress?  Even though we don't realize it, we are passing around the stress from the middle school student puking in the boys room to the investment banker thinking about jumping out his office window.

Okay, the religious outlook makes me feel even more silly.  I just know that when I am overwhelmed with stress and wanting to go into the bathroom and puke my guts out, it is no more or less stressed than any of my fellow humans.  At that moment, I am consoled by the thought of a Radio Shack employee labeling 3 cases of AA batteries as AAA batteries and missing his date on a Friday night because he had to stay late and re-label the AA batteries or the small business owner whose business just didn't pan out like they planned it and now they are scouring the want ads because their mortgage notice just changed colors or the footy player who was to take a free kick with his team down by 1 towards the end of the big game or Steve Bartman or the boat captain who is being overtaken by pirates.

Stress is weird like that.  As you stress, you yearn for the porch-chill, or the peaceful car ride, or the morning you get to sleep in... The non-stressy moments that are so closely related to the stressy moments they could be siblings.  They could be the Olsen twins, so similar in so many ways, but perfectly unique in so many other ways.  Either way, embrace them and remember that you can't ever lower your stressy-quota, so you just gots to deal.