Public service announcement: your pet peeves are meh. Shocking, I know but most things are relative and sometimes even our riffs with relatives don’t register on life’s Richter scale. My son, brilliant, handsome guy that he is, (but I’m not prejudiced) nailed it perfectly one day when he termed offhanded laments about the obvious lack of beautiful weather as ‘first world problems’. Duh. That term alone puts a lot of things in stark perspective.

The Urban dictionary defines first world problems as those “trivial or minor frustrations from living in a wealthy, industrialized nation that third-worlders would probably roll their eyes at.” Point taken, especially when you realize a British survey listed a runny nose as tops in the peevish category. When you envision all the outpost clinics in third world countries where children still die from such things as cholera and measles, a runny nose is a pretty benign annoyance. Yet, our list of every day annoyances seem valid, right? They still tick us off, still irritate and prickle our days. Hey, why wouldn’t you get annoyed with:

• Finding no toilet paper in a public bathroom stall.
• Uber annoying year round postnasal drip
• Spam callers, spam mail and okay, spam period.
• Drivers who somehow can’t find their turn signal
• Spam calls
• No WiFi. Phones that run out of charge. Password amnesia.  Boohoo.
• That kid who kicks the back of your plane seat.
• Papercuts
• Friends who are late . . . for the 300th time.
• People who don’t cover their mouths when they cough, or shut phones off in a theater.

We each have our own, plenty in fact. On any given day, our list of peeves could fill a spiral notebook. The incendiary political climate alone these days can easily send blood pressures soaring. If we’re lucky, though, we remember: Life. Is. Short. All of us who walked through that long valley of grief, know that fact all too well yet even we get sucked into the vortex of every day detritus. Continue reading →