Worry Girl

Most days Cindy Lou could effectively block out all of her worries and concerns and hone in on the tasks at hand. Other days, she wondered and worried incessantly about one thing after another, prompting her brother to call her Worry Girl.

She wondered how that man who’d been sleeping on a bench outside the BK for four hours wound up so sad and hopeless. She wondered if she would be the next person at her workplace to lose her job and health benefits, She worried that the hard little lump on her leg was something serious and whether her stiff knee meant that it had spread. …. When it rained, she remembered that she forgot to get new windshield wipers and wondered how long it would be before her roof sprung a leak …

While driving, she worried that some outrageously expensive Escalade would pull out in front of her and she would barrel into it, causing more damage then her insurance would cover. … She also worried she wouldn’t be able to meet her work deadlines, or that she would commit to something bigger than she could handle in her ongoing efforts to prove herself worthy enough to continue employing …

She worried her cat would not recover from his battle wounds and that those waxing strips she bought at the drugstore would pull her whole eyebrow off …. She worried that her long lost relative would never call her again, or that he would and she would have no idea what to say since she doesn’t know why he stopped talking to her to begin with ….

She worried that someday her secret blog would be exposed and all the kids at work would laugh and laugh and laugh and she would simply die from overexposure… She worried that she would die before she got around to making those cremation plans and her kids would get stuck making the tough decisions … She worried that she would wake up one day and realize she’d been so busy working that her entire life had passed her by …. She worried that her kids might never realize how much she loved them … She worried that they would realize it and miss her terribly and be inconsolably sad when she was gone …. She worried about how much she had begun worrying about “when she was gone,” as if she was going somewhere and that maybe this was a sign that she wouldn’t survive the accident with the Escalade that she hoped not to have ….

She worried that the movie The Secret was right and that somehow worrying about these things would cause them to happen …. She worried that her boyfriend would meet someone far more chatty, upbeat and well-suited for him and fall madly in love with her but not have the heart to tell her that and then she’d be forever stuck with someone who secretly wished he was with someone else …. She worried that she left the stove on, the candles burning and the back door unlocked … She worried that she did lock the back door but would lose her keys and not be able to get in the backdoor …

She worried that some old friend would drop by unexpectedly while she was wearing plaid shorts and a striped shirt and fuzzy mismatched socks and her house was a wreck … She worried about all the people wandering the streets all around the world who were displaced, hungry, sad and feeling like no on in this entire earth loved them enough to help them …. She worried, when she couldn’t take much time out of her day to hang out with her little cat Blackie, that he would feel hungry, sad and like no on this earth loved him enough ….

She worried that when the guy on the corner asked her for money that she wouldn’t be able to differentiate between someone who was sad and down on their luck, someone who wanted to buy crack and someone who could no longer afford the meds they needed to treat their depression… She worried that she might one day feel sad, down on her luck or like she needed a drug to get through the day … She thought about all the people she knew who took doctor-recommended meds to get through the day ….

She considered the morning she watched a pharmaceutical company rep arrive at her doctors office and ask how he could get face time with the doctor and the receptionist telling him, without cracking a smile, that it would have to be a luncheon appointment and explaining where the entire staff likes to be taken to lunch …. She considered how he happily agreed to whatever they demanded because he works for a big corporation with an expense account and wants to sell lots of drugs to make his wallet fatter and his employer richer and more powerful so they could continue prompting doctors to push their drugs and make enough money to buy more politicians ….

She worried about the Supreme Court’s decision to further empower giant corporations to buy politicians and envisioned politicians giving speeches in caps with the names of the corporations who support them while a sidekick with a very soothing voice interjects with details about the side effects of certain decisions: "For some, this solution may cause poverty, hopelessness, illness and depression …."

She wondered why her primary care physician’s office had recently become a Botox facility …and worried that she hadn’t yet found a new doctor because all of her friends docs were now Botox clinics too … She wondered if this was a new trend. She googled and discovered that it was ….She wondered whether the Botox patients were more lucrative and if this was why she now had to wait a month for an appointment … She wondered if she should just make an appointment for Botox and then upon arrival tell them she really didn’t need something that would paralyze her facial muscles and simply wanted a Pap smear to make sure she didn’t have cancer. … She wondered why the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force suddenly decided that women in their 40s don’t really need mammograms and how all the women who were diagnosed with breast cancer while in their 40s, or younger, felt about that.

She worried about how little she sometimes thought about all the crooked things going on in this world because she felt powerless to do much about them and was too busy working anyway … She worried how much powerful people would get away with, knowing so many people are too busy working anyway …

On good days, she just worried that she wouldn’t get through all of her work by 6ish on Saturday so that she could go out with her boyfriend and chat and laugh and have a big old glass of wine and worry about nothing except whether to order the burger or the shrimp. … She worried about how all of her worries melted away on Saturdays and what that meant. She began to calculate how many Saturdays she would have in her life if she lived until 70 … then thought better of that and took a little gulp of her Saturday wine and drank to denial, and the comfort it offers.

Then, almost immediately, she felt guilty about just forgetting it all … but not that guilty because, after all, it IS Saturday, and even worry girls should forget about everything once in awhile. If we don't take time out to talk and laugh at ourselves occasionally, we'll never be able to maintain the energy it takes to do all the worrying.

Worry Girl is wrapped in a brown paper package and hiding at the Briny in Fort Lauderdale ... It's where she landed after dinner and a glass of wine. She's on a gigantic tile .... bigger than all of the others, because she was a little worried that no one would find her otherwise.