Monday, August 31, 2020

Death by a Thousand Papercuts, I

There’s a saying gets used around here: “Death by a thousand papercuts.”  It’s what you say when the spouse comes home, and asks how the day has gone with X number of small people running about; or, alternatively, when you ask said spouse how the day has gone at work.

“Death by a thousand papercuts.”

A papercut isn’t so bad, after all—they sting, and some of them bleed a lot (which can lead to yet more unmentionable horrors, like doing laundry) but on a scale of Thing I Can Handle, where one is “Breezin’ Right Along” and ten is “Fingernails Shredding as I Hold on For Dear Life,” a bad papercut is about a 1.5.  Nothing that a band aid can’t fix.

But the trouble is that many days, papercuts don’t come by ones and twos but rather by the score.  And at a certain point comes one that, like the straw that broke the camel’s back, is Death.

At which point there are two things one can do: lie down and bleed out (metaphorically!) or laugh.  Because, when you think about it, dying by a thousand paper cuts is a really, really silly way to die, n’est-ce pas?

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