On Stress and Semi-Truck Accidents

Fact: My friend Juliet Soper, who was from New Zealand (not important to this story, but I like to add a little detail every once in a while), once told me about how her father was hit by a semi truck and walked away, unscathed.


“What the fuck, Juliet,” I responded.

“It’s true,” she said in her adorable Kiwi accent, which sounds like an Aussie accent if the Aussie was standing in the bottom of a barrel filled with feathers. “He got thrown thirty feet (yes, they measure in feet in New Zealand) and then got up and walked away.”

“How did he manage that?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “He had no idea the truck was coming, and so he didn’t tense up any of his muscles. Because he was completely relaxed, he didn’t break any bones. It was a minor miracle!”

Now, I suspect alcohol had something to do with the fact that he was a) hit by a truck, b) completely relaxed, and c) didn’t hear the damn thing coming, but that is merely a suspicion. The more important lesson in this is that this story would have been a lot less interesting if he would have broken all of his bones and died.

And I’m telling you this story as a lead in to something I just read in Mindy Kaling’s memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Mindy Kaling was a writer and actor on The Office, and now has her own show called The Mindy Project. I bought her memoir because I was killing time in the Denver airport, and it was either that or Fifty Shades of Grey, and I will GO TO MY GRAVE before I buy into that fifty shades nonsense. Here’s what Mindy Kaling says: “No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, ‘Wow…you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.’"

I totally agree. I have found that the people I tend to be friends with are the ones who look at life as a series of highly inconvenient circumstances that prevent them from watching more Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The people I tend to not be friends with are the ones who see everything that occurs in the world as a catastrophic event that has to be shouted about and continually validated on Facebook every other second. Nobody thinks your stress makes you look like a badass. It just makes you look like someone who has nothing more interesting to talk about than the mundane shit that we all have to deal with. Not to say that NO stress is interesting. Here are a few examples of interesting versus uninteresting stress:

Uninteresting:
Your homework

Interesting!
You mistook your homework for a bowl of potato chips and methodically ate it all while watching The Voice!

Uninteresting:
Your schedule

Interesting!
Videos of people falling down set to music!

Uninteresting:
Your children’s schedule

Interesting!
Your children are missing! (Zombies?)

Uninteresting:
Everything that needs to get done in order for you to go on vacation

Interesting!
Everything that needs to get done in order for your house to not fall into an ever-growing sinkhole!

Uninteresting:
Your goddamn exercise schedule

Interesting!
Tigers!

Uninteresting:
How hard your job is

Interesting!
How hard your job as a cagefighter is!

Uninteresting:
The fact that you have a million things to do and you are also sick

So Interesting!
The plot of Season I of Homeland*

Do you see the difference between interesting and not interesting? I hope so. If not, I can’t help you. But here’s the thing, from the very bottom of my heart. Juliet Soper’s dad is proof positive that being consumed by stress is one way to get tossed to pieces by a semi-truck. Instead of being all about the stress, he just went with the flow, and lived to tell about it. So take a lesson from a drunk Kiwi – don’t let your stress be the most important factor in your life. It could save your ass.


* I just discovered Homeland, and now I’m obsessed. I’m not quite finished watching season one. Wondering when Brian Krakow is going to make his first appearance. Anyone who wants to talk about Homeland with me should DO SO IMMEDIATELY! I am open for all Homeland-discussion-business!