King of Pain

I confess I can get rather grouchy about inconsequential things at times. The screen on the laptop that was broken by a wayward child, the fact that some weird boot disk gizmo then went wrong, placing thousands of words of my novel in jeopardy, the thousands of dollars that have vanished from the bank account after an online holiday transaction that backfired, without a hint of a beach in sight.

       
And there are then the things I have lived with for longer, like looking as if I'm 9 months pregnant despite stepping up the exercise regime to three times a week and living on a lentil a day, two if I'm feeling greedy.

And I haven't even got to word verification, pingbacks, the cat box, the guy who talks about leaking parts in an A/C system in a form of Mandarin Chinese I don't understand.

Sometimes I have to take a deep breath and remind myself I still wouldn't be happy if I had all the money and success in the world - I'm talking about serious Tom Cruse, John Travolta, Whitney Houston happiness.

But sometimes my Facebook feed helps me put things in perspective and stops me being such a great big whiskery sour puss.

"Another day, another probe up the penis," states one former colleague in his status update. In another he talks of excruciating pain not to mention the pain of the wife who walked out etc. And there's a real anger that shines through the pain. What if he ends up doing something desperate and dangerous? He has nothing to lose. Apart from pain.                            

Someone once told me she thought people were fundamentally good. I asked her how that explained the Holocaust, the Borgias and Joseph Stalin.

Then there's the 10-year-old kid whose group I follow. The kid attended my daughter's school and she took in a bag full of notes and coins one day to raise money for him. He recently had a liver transplant. At times his parents probably go overboard on Facebook but you can't be too critical about parents waxing lyrical about their sick kid.

Then tonight I read an update suggesting the liver was being rejected and the poor kid is struggling.

Perhaps I'm not good at feeling other people's pain at times but there are also occasions when I feel it quite starkly.

Because I appear to have a minuscule shard of glass in my foot and I'm hopping round the room, moaning about it. Because I've felt real pain when I broke a wrist and on another occasion the pain was so bad I was throwing up.

And more than anything I was so relieved when the pain was over that I can't imagine it, day in and day out.

So I feel your pain, while a part of me is selfish it isn't me - although I know it will be one day.

This post is heavy. Maybe I should stick to writing about snogging and heavy duty lager.