46.

The other day, I got a titanium rod embedded in my jaw. But wait! It’s too easy to make that sound cooler than it actually is: it’s for a tooth implant and the rod is only about an inch or so long. But wait again, it actually is pretty awesome. The dentist showed me an x-ray and there was this precise, bright rod floating in the middle of all my face bones. I’m bionic!

I have a ladder of worries. It’s always at the back of my mind. When one worry gets resolved or when I realize how stupid it is and get over it, I go up a higher rung and get all worked up and lose sleep over that.

So this is what I’m worrying about, as of this moment, in ascending order: my titanium rod will get infected and my jaw falls off; I will get fired when I walk in on Monday for something I did on Friday thinking everything was hunky-dory; a car will run me over and I barely survive with immense physical and mental problems and I’ll go bankrupt from the medical bills, so I’ll end up a homeless retarded cripple; and at the very top, my constant worry: my parents dying. I’m not sure why I worry about that the most.

Distilling the facetiousness away from that, it’s health, job, and family. So it seems I wouldn’t find present peace until I win the lottery, become an immortal robot, and my entire family becomes immortal robots.

Or, of course, I could be more accepting of the universe and deal with things as they come, like a responsible mature person, which sounds annoying as fuck. Like a cow with its head down standing against the rain (that line’s from a good book).