Your Problems Are Just That: Yours

Of the many things my wife inherited from her father, debilitating motion sickness is one of the less desirable ones.  All it takes is a sudden stop or curve in the road and my wife spends the remainder of the trip in agonizing pain.  There is little she can do to placate the nausea.  But one step she can take is cranking up the air conditioning to full blast.  This eases the discomfort ever so much as to make it barely tolerable.

But… in the course of doing so… she makes the car unbearably cold.  I mean, I’m not one to complain about the cold.  One of the many nicknames I acquired in college was “polar bear” because I would routinely go out into the wintery Boston nights sans shirt and challenge my roommates to wrestling matches in the snow.  Yet the car A/C, blasting freezing cold air directly into my face, is too much.  I lose feeling in my fingers and nose and survive solely through the warmth generated by the fiery glances I shoot at her as she writhes in agony.

As such, this has become a new battleground in our relationship.  And though I typically lose — eventually acquiesing to her shouts about exactly where I can shove my frozen fingers — I have no doubt that I have the moral high ground.  I mean, she is the one with motion sickness so why should I be made to feel so cold?

Look… I get that she didn’t choose to have motion sickness.  But there are probably things she could to do to mitigate it, right?  Ginger pills, meditation, those little wristband doohickeys… something, right?  And until she exhausts these solutions, it is unfair and immoral of her to impose the consequences of her own problems on to me.  Ultimately, she is attempting to subsidize her suffering by transporting it to me.  And that is wrong.  She has no right to demand that I suffer through an uncomfortable car ride just because she was unfortunate enough to be born with circumstances that make her car ride uncomfortable.

Your problems are your own.  Be they motion sickness, poverty, health issues, whatever.  Stop expecting other people to suffer just because you are.  Fix your own damn problems.  And leave my fingers and nose out of it.

On Opposite Day, we do our best to argue in service of a position that, under normal circumstances, we argue against. Coke people might sing the praises of Pepsi, Cat people might talk about why Dogs make for superior pets, Political Types might put forward the position that is usually held by their opponents. After all, *ANYONE* can beat up a strawman.