Spring Niggles
Hi! I’m The Niggle. I solve crimes by eating your brains slowly over an agonizing period of time. Artist rendition.
I am The Niggle
And I’m here to say
I bore in your skull
Every hour of the day
You wanna live your life?
You wanna get away?
I’m gonna stalk you down
I’m gonna make you pay
I’m a patient guy
I got plenty o’ time
No matter how long it takes
I’m gonna own your mind
Introducing my good buddy The Niggle. He’s an ornery rambunctious sort. Invisible and sneaky, at any given moment in time there are literally thousands of him latched on tight, gnawing at our skulls, always desperately trying to get in. Fun stuff, huh?
The Niggle is the price we pay for this modern life. He hangs on dearly when we look around and ask, “What gives? Is this all there is?”
He’s the background highway noise that permeates our fancy homes. A little drill bit of omnipresent pressure that pushes us one step closer to the edge. Our brains may have long since given up and deemed those road sounds as mere “white noise,” but even if we’re no longer conscious of it, it’s always there, chipping away. Chip, chip, chip.
The dictionary describes a niggle as something that causes “slight but persistent annoyance, discomfort, or anxiety.” But, to me, he’s a modern day superhero of goodness and fun.
What other forms does this little devil take? Read on. He might even be working through this very blog post.
Continue reading →
Stressure
December 23rd. Woot. Doing the lame “what I was posting a year ago” thing is a cheap way to milk out the start of a new post. Last year on the 23rd I blogged about some women who stole a child’s WalMart gift card and wrote about some really cool photography by a woman who has been featured in National Geographic magazine…
If Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I? I’m going to invent my own words, too. I’ll start with this one:
stressure – A place where stress and pressure meet
LOLZ! RAWR! Mother Grizzly is in the house, yo.
So yeah, I was having another heart to heart with my new boss. We were talking about my fun-filled work days of balls to walls and hair on fire. Days that are so busy and hectic I don’t usually have time to take my breaks or even sit in a chair.
He was asking me about why I was letting the stress get to me.
“What would you do if you were an emergency room surgeon?,” he asked. “How would you handle the stress then, eh? They have a lot of stress!”
Wow. He really thought he had me there. So, so very clever.
I thought it over for a couple of nanoseconds and volleyed back with my rebuttal.
“Well, the first mother fucking thought that pops into my head is, oh, I don’t know. What? An emergency room surgeon? I’d probably be making what? Five million fucking dollars a year?!?!?”
I’m working on a new mathematical formula to explain this phenomenon. Think about it. Let us consider someone with a minimum wage job and no stress. Say it’s pumping gas at the local station. Now someone comes along and says, “Wanna get out of this dump? I’ll pay you $1 an hour more but I’ll literally blow your fucking head off with pressure and stress. Sound good?”
The point here is simple: I don’t want a level of stress equal to an “emergency room surgeon” while making damn near minimum wage. Seems simple, eh? Yet in my boss’s mind that level of stress in exchange for peanuts sounds perfectly reasonable.
The formula for this seems simple. If the situation you have to go through at work isn’t worth the level of pay, then you won’t give much a shit, will you?
Shouts from the Abyss 
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