Thursday, February 28, 2013

How Does One Handle Overwhelming Stress Caused By External Factors?

This is a question I'm dealing with at present.

In addition to many of the challenges I face at present, I'm about to enter a period of massive uncertainty. Despite working 200 miles from my family, and only seeing them for a weekend every 3 weeks at present, and living with the consequences of some almost 10 year old financial mistakes, my employer is throwing a new one, and it's called Sequestration.

What Sequestration will do to me is, result in about a 20 percent reduction in pay over a 6 month period. This will result in not being able to cover my obligations by a considerable margin. There's little left to cut, other than my already infrequent visits home.

So it gets a little overwhelming. I can almost feel my stomach eating itself alive and on some days I'm having trouble breathing.

And I need to figure out a way to stop before the worry seriously impacts my health.

So far I've tried listening to inspiring podcasts, music, and such. I've tried repeating Bible verses and motivational quotes. Tried comedy. Tried not thinking about it. Obviously, worry accomplishes nothing.

Sequestration is what happens when you take the dumbest students in every math class, make them a government, and somehow expect them to figure a budget out. Oh, yeah, and they're all pretty much psychopaths with no ability to feel empathy for anybody else, have no conscience, and are unable to see anything other than their own short term interests.

I'm thinking about conducting an experiment. I'm going to see if Aaron Cleary's "Worthless" plays out in government. I know the President has a law degree. I get the feeling if I survey Pres, VP, cabinet, and all members of Congress, I will come up with a majority having soft degrees that don't require math ability.

In fact, I'll call it right now. The people YOU expect to be YOUR government probably can't do math very well, which would explain why we haven't even had a budget in several years. (The government has been operating on a CR, or Continuing Resolution, essentially on a budget passed a few years ago.) The majority of them don't do much anyway, including reading the bills they pass, so I bet most of them have staff that can't do math very well either. They probably aren't making leaps of logic equal to "I only have $3 in my pocket, so I should eat off the dollar menu".

I'm also willing to bet the predominant degree among Congressional staffers is Political Science, or Law. Not a STEM field.

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