Where does your week fall on the It Could Be Worse Spectrum?

I’m having a tough week.  It’s one of those weeks where nothing big is going wrong, just a lot of little things that add up and make you want to scream.  I imagine this sort of week was Lucy’s norm—things break, you get locked out of your house or car, you embarrass yourself, etc. 

I imagine Audrey hardly ever had weeks like this (and when she did there was always a dashing fellow to save her from her near fall, or to catch her priceless vase that she knocked off a completely sturdy surface, or to carry her twelve blocks when she broke a heel). 

So my week has been definitely more on the Lucy end of the spectrum but I’m trying to be positive and not let it get me down.  I’m trying to do this by using a trick that parents the world over use on children who think the world is falling apart because they have to eat 14 green peas. “It’s not that bad, you could be…..” or “You’re lucky, there are….”  You know this trick; it goes a little something like this:   

You’re lucky, there are children starving in the Sudan.

You’re lucky, you could be homeless living on the street.

You’re lucky, you could be Jessica Simpson*.

And that got me to thinking….if you were to follow the chain of all the “you could be’s”, where do you end up? 

For instance, if rich parents in the United States say to their children, “don’t complain, you’re lucky, you could have to go to public school”

Then maybe middle class parents say to their children “you’re lucky, you could be homeless”

And homeless parents say “you’re lucky, you could be an orphan”

And orphan directors say (to little girls) “you’re lucky, you could live in China where they’d kill you”

And Chinese orphan directors say (to the little Chinese boys) “you’re lucky, you could be starving in an peaceful but economically depressed country in Africa”

And peaceful starving Africans say “you’re lucky, you could live across the border and be starving in a war torn, economically depressed country in Africa”

and on and on and on. 

But it has to end somewhere.  There has to be someone at the end that everyone, upon hearing their story, would say “you’re lucky….oh, no wait, you’re not, I really can’t think of anything worse than that.”  I imagine it might end in a tiny village in the Himalayas with some guy who lost his whole family in an avalanche and is missing parts of his nose and all of his toes due to frost bite (which render him unable to stand up since apparently your toes are an important part of balance).  Then his hut burned down while he was heating the cup of snow he was going to drink for dinner so now he lives in a lean-to outside his brother’s hut and his sister-in-law hates him.  

I’d like to buy that guy lunch and just say “wow, I’m sorry, you really are the saddest sack alive” Because he’s gotta be at the wrong end of the It Could Be Worse Spectrum, right? 

But that led me to think that maybe me buying him a hot meal would bump him up above the next worse-off case and disrupt the balance of the universe the way Marty McFly did when he went back in time. 

Right about there in my day dream I realized I was spilling coffee over the edges of my cup and onto the floor of the break room and thought to myself “god, could my life get any worse?!?” cleaned it up and went back to my desk. 

But what do I know, maybe the guy in the lean-to is totally happy because the view there is way better than it was in his hut and it turns out he didn’t like his wife and kids that much anyway.  Plus, now that he can’t walk he gets waited on like a king. 

*In a separate post I will explain why I feel so bad for Jessica Simpson and why I’m pretty sure she’s kinda far down on the It Could Be Worse Spectrum.