My Anxieties

Are you anxious? I'm anxious. I can't help it, I've always been this way. I can't be sure but I think it's my brain punishing me because I've stopped feeding it television for five minutes and asked it to help me behave like a productive member of society. It gets up to all sorts and I've just got to roll with it. Now, I'm not talking about things that get on my nerves here, I'm talking about heart-pounding, palm sweating anxiety. I've got the same big worries as everybody else, but this isn't about the obvious- keys, passport, dying alone.  I'm talking about the everyday things that most people take for granted. The very things that (I have decided) allow me to be the creative and empathetic (or as my brother puts it, “ridiculous”) person that I am. 

In no particular order: 

Dying in a plane crash without first having cleaned my house. Out of diligence, I've organized a friend to stash my vibrators before my family comes through, but for some reason the vacuuming seems a lot to ask, I guess because in a way it is like asking them to lie about my entire character. “Tell people I was the kind of person that would never, ever go on vacation with shit stains in her toilet.”

Videos, Vines, GIFs and pop-up ads that autoplay and basically anything that makes me break into a sweat trying to locate the little box-closey x on the screen. Why? Why? I'd be less stressed out diffusing a bomb using IKEA instructions than I am getting a page of GIFs to please just stop fucking GIFing already! Sometimes it is not an x at all! Sometimes you have to locate the word 'close' in invisible letters and sometimes you even have to do a quiz just to see a stupid recipe for something that ends up requiring a double-boiler or full fat-milk as if I am ever going to buy any of those! Where is that music even coming from? Burn it all!

Self-flush toilets (do you sense a theme?) that flush repeatedly while I am on the can but mysteriously not when I stand up. Automatic sinks that won't give me water despite the complicated rain dance I am offering up. I've tried voguing, jazz hands, disappearing thumb trick. There's nothing for it. One time in the work bathroom I screamed I AM NOT INVISIBLE at the sinks and they let me go home early.

Math

Calling in sick. Calling anybody on the phone in general but especially if I need a favour as though giving me a sick day is a favour and not something my company is interested in doing rather than having me infect the rest of the staff which is what I usually opt for because I can't muster the nerve to make the call.

Take-out restaurants judging the size or healthfulness of my order. Actually, we can scratch this one. It doesn't bother me so much anymore which I guess is a sign that I'm growing or I've given up. Let's call it a win either way.

Having to quickly choose between the door-open and door-close buttons on the elevator. Panic induced arrow dyslexia, I'll stick out a leg or an arm and risk amputation rather than offend a neighbour.

I'm afraid to eat hard candy in my house by myself because I don't think I'll have the nerve to heimlich myself if I choke and by the time I work up the courage to ask a neighbour for help I'd probably be cold and blue and dead and for what, a Polo? That's not even that delicious.

Punctuation in and around quotation marks, and possessive and plurals of things ending in s. I can google the correct usage all day but can never shake the self-consciousness. I don't even want to talk about it.

I get scared that the part of my brain that tells me not to jump off a balcony or subway platform or to not yell out during a play will malfunction. I suppose I could look up the science behind this but in some cases the more information you have, the more things you find to terrify you so perhaps one of you should do it and please only tell me if this is an absolute impossibility. Well? Is it? 

Look, I know very well that if these are the worst things that happen to me in a day that I am, as they say on Instagram, #blessed. But they still weigh on me, knotting up my shoulders and furrowing my brow. I can't help it, but I can choose to instead focus on how my day is filled with a million little victories. Nobody else in the world may give themselves grey hairs screaming at the contestants on Jeopardy for choosing the questions from the bottom first but nobody else gets to feel this amazing for calculating a tip or taking a Ricola, which I guess you could kind of argue is my brain's way of giving me a little treat for getting out from in front of the television for five minutes.

Monster in the Closet

The NFL does not care about domestic violence. This may mirror the attitude of a lot of society, but, it turns out, not as much as the NFL thought it would.

Yes, Ray Rice behaved like a monster. Maybe he is repentant. Maybe he is getting help. I hope those things are true for him and for his family, but he committed a crime when he beat Janay Palmer and had this tape not magically appeared, he would have suffered the consequence of a two-game penalty because this is what the NFL thinks that we think of domestic abuse.

But Lo, Goodell heard the outcry, Two games? Two games for this man that was on video dragging a live person down a hall with less care than he manages for his football equipment? That is some bullshit, commish! And Lo did the commissioner say unto the public, I hear your outcry, for I am not a monster, and he did change that rule and all was well. Phew. Are you ready for some football?

And that was that, until this. TMZ releases a tape early Monday morning and suddenly everything changes. Because now it's real. Ray Rice punched a women and knocked her out and that is a disgusting thing, so the Ravens fire him. Then Goodell fires him. Goodell, who had just decided that two games was too few and six games was appropriate for a first offence sees this video and outright fires him.

Is Goodell so disgusted by what he sees that he decides six games is not enough?

Did Goodell not realize that domestic violence is about literally beating on your partner? Did it just become real to him? I can't understand how this is so abstract to so many people. How they didn't get it until they saw Janay being knocked out. How they have to substitute a sister/mother/wife/child/animal to relate. I do not know a single woman that needed any of these aids to make this properly horrifying.

And here is the most depressing part: nobody cares. Nobody cares about the crime committed by Rice. It airs on TV over and over again. I have watched Janay's legs being dragged down the hall like a fucking carcass enough times to sketch it from memory but all anybody can talk about is the NFL getting caught with their pants down, where the real evil is in the cover-up, in the NFL's arrogance believing that they could suppress evidence and not get caught because FOOTBALL.

But why is this a conversation? They already fucking knew. Everybody knew. The court knew. The Ravens knew. Roger Goodell knew. You knew. I knew. Everybody fucking knew that Ray Rice knocked out Janay Palmer when they saw him dragging her down the hall, watched him dragging her, on the internet, on the news, watched this video of him dragging her over and over and over again. Second tape or not, everybody knew that this violent, heinous act had taken place and didn't do a thing about it because FOOTBALL.

Whether or not the NFL saw the second tape and lied about it is irrelevant in light of the fact that all the evidence they needed was on the first tape. It is irrelevant in light of the fact that beating up women is so clearly wrong and when they had the opportunity to take an easy, obvious stand, they did not.

So, again, why is this cover-up the conversation? People are talking of Goodell “falling on his sword” but isn't optics what got you into this mess in the first place? Perhaps if the NFL were to stop trying to cull and anticipate reaction and just try thinking like a human it would do more toward dissembling this culture of blamelessness and entitlement where the act of beating up on your partner or trying to manipulate the public are just dirty little secrets meant to be kept secret.

Goodell sacrifices himself and what? Clean slate? This is how we got here. Sport does not exist in a bubble, it exists in the same world, on the same plane, as the rest of humanity. Maybe when it comes to human decency it should follow the same rules, messy as they may be. If these guys had taken this issue seriously in the first place, we would not be here right now.

So here is my advice for the NFL: Clean your fucking closets.

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