Wednesday, September 14, 2011

On Stress, Sometimes it Ain't Easy Bein' Cheesey


I recently read a blog about the stresses of air travel with an autistic child.  I commented, but blog life apparently mirrors real life, and, like the people who listen to me prattle on, the automated blog comment moderation software said, "your comment is too long".  It recommended I break it up into multiple comments, which I dutifully did.  Essentially, the comment was about stress levels, and why we often overlook the stress of situations because we mistake the duration of a stressful event with how stressful it will seem to us overall.

Do you eat Cheetos? Bear with me. The best Cheetos, in my opinion, are the Cheetos at the bottom of the bag. The cheetolettes, let's call them. The cheetolettes are the tiny little nubs that have the same magically delicious (apologies to Frosted Lucky Charms (TM)) orange cheesey powder on them. . . but less puff (the vehicle that transports the deliciousness to your mouth). So the RATIO of deliciousness to puff or D/P is much higher. There's more cheeseyness. . . less puffiness.

Looking at it from a stress standpoint, you might assume that in a two leg flight, composed of a short, less-than-two-hour flight, and a long 15-hour flight, you would really need to get mentally psyched up for the 15-hour flight because the sub two-hour flight would be just a hop skip and a jump (as the blogger did), over before the shit hit the fan. But what you'd really have is all the stresses of a 15-hour flight. . . security check, waiting to board, boarding, sitting, drink cart, landing, debarking. . . compressed into an evil little two-hour cheetolette flavored with powdered misery. Your ratio of stress/duration would be MUCH higher. And unlike the joy you get from a cheetolette, the flightlette delivers nothing but pain.

Now if you're excuse me, I have to go buy cheetos.

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