What did I do in a past life to merit the misery of walking the earth with a constantly dripping nose, rubbed-red-raw from constant futile wiping and blowing, hands full of soggy tissues (which I feel obligated to re-use unless I wish to be solely responsible for the deforestation of a large portion of the world's forests,) snuffling, snorting, hacking, hocking, wiping, and blowing, and grossing out people in my vicinity?
I spent the majority of last night doing nasal-excretion-management. About 30 seconds after having blown my nose, I would begin trying to find a dry spot on one of the 4 kleenexes I was rotating through, and begin to dab, dab, dab, the accumulated moisture from the bottom of my one hyperactively productive nostril. After sufficient time had passed to allow my body to produce a sufficient amount of phlegmy fun to entirely pack and seal one nostril to the point that the accumulated weight was beginning to tip my head to the right, I would once again gracefully dab, and then rise and slouch my way to the door, to blow, to breathe, to enter once again the cycle of mucus.
Now I know, that really, my tribulations are not that great when compared with the sufferings of others. When placed next to the soul-torturing phase of personal growth that Britney Spears is currently undergoing, it makes my troubles resemble nothing more than a moist nostril. But that's the point, isn't it? Just as gas expands to fill the space of it's container, so one's trials expand to fill the mental and emotional space you currently have available to host them. So while not being ethnically cleansed, my nose is indeed significant in its ability to engender suffering. And while not yet reduced to doing commercials for the Psychic Friends Network, Britney's divorce and inability to have a single genuinely original creative concept will torture her mind no less than the destruction of a village in Darfur would weigh on the minds of its former residents. Pain is relative, you see.
So what I am proposing, while revolutionary, is quite necessary. Based on the fact that my particular private pains can have no equal, exact, corollary in your life, I propose a graduated scale of emotional torment be developed. A Moh's scale of Agony, a Richter of Recrudescence, something that would translate "my cat has a raging case of dander" into solid decibels of life-disrupting distress, which you can easily equate to your personal podalgia of "my wife leaves things on the floor and I stumble over them in the dark of night."
The result would be dramatic, and instantaneous. Until now, pain has been a private affair, something that cannot be communicated objectively, a solitary struggle that each person undertakes, knowing that no one can comprehend his personal pangs of woe. Now, though, one has only to say the number - "I am running a 9.2 on the Matt's Distress Distribution" to elicit instant moans of sympathy (true, heart-felt sympathy, as your listener, for the first time in history, can adequately comprehend the scale of your pain) from your listeners.
The results would be far-reaching. For the first time in history, two aggrieved parties could sit down on opposite sides of the negotiating table, and hope to truly understand the hurt the other suffers. "When you launch rockets at our settlements, it gives me a 7.772," the Israelis would say. The Palestinians would respond with "When you deny us the ability to cross a checkpoint to get to our jobs, it gives my whole family a 5.99 increasing by .42 with each passing day." Obviously everyone would need to bring a calculator to the table, and it might take a while to factor in all the components, but in the end whoever came out to have a greater pain index would be the long-suffering winner, hands down, and could dictate terms to the opposing party. Unless, of course, this would cause too much pain to the opposing side, in which case we would just have to re-figure. Obviously.
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