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The Mental Stress of Uncompleted Tasks
Aug. 21st, 2005 11:18 pmLately I keep remembering a questionnaire ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sabrinamari brought to circle for the coven to play with a few years back. She'd come across it somewhere in the medical anthropology literature and then found it to be useful in her personal life, and in various odd ways, most of us did, too. It purported to be an instrument for measuring people's emotional stress loads. We were to check off items on a very long list of stressful events and circumstances that were going on in our lives right then. There were big things like "home purchase," "home sale," and "getting married," as well as small, everyday things like "carpool arrangements," "the common cold," and "the mental stress of uncompleted tasks." Once we'd tallied up all our stressors, we were to add up the different point values that claimed to measure the quantity of misery each one was imposing on us.
oaktavia pointed out a big limitation of the questionnaire: it was a stress evaluation instrument for yuppies. There was a box to check for buying a house, but none for getting evicted; a box to check for getting married, but not one for being unable to afford an attorney to expedite your divorce; a box for paying college tuition, but none for fighting to get your kid into a special ed classroom. It was so absurd to see that the coven member who anticipated eviction any day looked on paper like the least stressed of us, we got a good cathartic laugh together. And then, just to go for the black comedy, we tried to imagine how a refugee in a war zone would score. Even lower, as it turns out. Hardly any of the boxes really applied.
What was truly universal among the little check boxes? The common cold and the mental stress of uncompleted tasks.
Although that Rildis chapter still isn't done to my satisfaction yet--I keep ripping out the draggy parts and trying to fix the pace--I am at least making headway on the Writer's Weekend program stuff.
From time to time, I look at the scope of what I volunteered for, and it paralyzes me. Thank goodness for that flawed, slightly silly questionnaire, with its one line of accidental iambic pentameter. I have context, and again more context.
sabrinamari brought to circle for the coven to play with a few years back. She'd come across it somewhere in the medical anthropology literature and then found it to be useful in her personal life, and in various odd ways, most of us did, too. It purported to be an instrument for measuring people's emotional stress loads. We were to check off items on a very long list of stressful events and circumstances that were going on in our lives right then. There were big things like "home purchase," "home sale," and "getting married," as well as small, everyday things like "carpool arrangements," "the common cold," and "the mental stress of uncompleted tasks." Once we'd tallied up all our stressors, we were to add up the different point values that claimed to measure the quantity of misery each one was imposing on us.oaktavia pointed out a big limitation of the questionnaire: it was a stress evaluation instrument for yuppies. There was a box to check for buying a house, but none for getting evicted; a box to check for getting married, but not one for being unable to afford an attorney to expedite your divorce; a box for paying college tuition, but none for fighting to get your kid into a special ed classroom. It was so absurd to see that the coven member who anticipated eviction any day looked on paper like the least stressed of us, we got a good cathartic laugh together. And then, just to go for the black comedy, we tried to imagine how a refugee in a war zone would score. Even lower, as it turns out. Hardly any of the boxes really applied.What was truly universal among the little check boxes? The common cold and the mental stress of uncompleted tasks.
Although that Rildis chapter still isn't done to my satisfaction yet--I keep ripping out the draggy parts and trying to fix the pace--I am at least making headway on the Writer's Weekend program stuff.
From time to time, I look at the scope of what I volunteered for, and it paralyzes me. Thank goodness for that flawed, slightly silly questionnaire, with its one line of accidental iambic pentameter. I have context, and again more context.
