There's
sky diving and bungee jumping and motorcycle racing. There's that
thing where you hold your breath and try to go deeper underwater than
anyone else has without dying. There's bull riding and bull racing
(you know, the men running in
front of the bulls in Pamplona, the idiots). There's Parkour, every
seven-year-old boy's dream. Don't forget hang gliding and hurricane
chasing. Does the adrenaline rush verify existence? What's
it take?
I have a
young friend who is a record-holding slack-liner. There she walks
between mountain peaks, wind buffeting her, rope swaying under her
feet. She'll take a little bounce on the line; for heaven's sake, is
she bored? She climbs sheer rock with nothing but pitons and boots.
I can't even make it to the top of a climbing wall. She says no one
else can say how much risk is too much for her. For her, the
exhilaration outweighs the danger.
Allow me
to digress. I promise to return to the question.
Have you
ever felt exasperated with your computer? I mean, are you human? My
computer crashed a few weeks ago, but is that aggravating enough?
Noooo. Nope. It turns out my back-up drive failed last December.
Oopsie. To add insult to injury, when they transferred my stuff to
a new hard drive, oh, well, Microsoft Office – originally installed
from a no-longer-to-be-found disc – was lost. My docs transferred
to the new drive, but there was no Word to read them. (I was saved a
heart attack as all my blogs were saved to Dropbox.) Microsoft had a
two hour wait in their phone queue, so I sent them an e-mail.
Fortunately I did not expect a response so I was not disappointed. I
was NOT going to buy a new Office Suite for an old computer, so what
to do? Hello, Open Office, you beauty, you!
A
week after fussing with my documents, I went to transfer a CD onto my
drive, and, oh, iTunes was gone. The tech thought my music had also
disappeared, but I showed him where I'd seen it. He reinstalled
i-tunes and my own tunes. It took me two weeks to get close to the
starting point, TWO
WEEKS
of thorough, time-wasting exasperation.
Now everything
is saved to the lovely Clouououd. (I have a metaphor as the Cloud as
God, but perhaps that's a topic for another Post.)
Let's
talk about the bank. We are so spoiled. Gone are the days when a
bank drive-through window was the great convenience. (Of course,
also gone are the days when I walked into my bank, and the teller
said, “Good morning, Mrs. Simon.”) Do you need cash? Pull over
to the nearest ATM. Easier still, get some back at the grocery
store. But if someone sends you a big check (you can only hope), or
you need a to your bank. We put the errand off. We think, it will
be easier to do it tomorrow. It niggles away at the the back of the
brain, I have to go to
the bank.
How can one errand so irritating? What has the bank ever done to
us that we find it so annoying?
Oho,
then make a phone call, any call to any institution. Listen to the
menu, push a button. Listen, push. Listen, push. By the time
you're put on hold, you're so ticked off, you are screaming at the
muzak. When a person finally answers, you are so fed up and grateful
at the same time, you almost forget why you called.
Traffic.
Need I say more? What are all those people doing out on the road?
Don't they know I want to go somewhere? Don't they know I have to
park? Don't they know I'm in
a hurry?
Now,
remember our original question? You don't have to be an adrenaline
junkie to know you're alive. You don't have to do anything at all.
Every daily irritation is existential proof. You know you're alive
because you're annoyed.
