The Little Things

We all know that the little things are what can make one’s life fun or awful, depending on their nature and the degree of accumulation. I had three little things happening to me this week that fall in the rather unpleasant category: a mosquito bite, stench, and a near bicycle accident.

A tiny but aggressive Japanese mosquito bit me in the hand on Monday night. I felt the itchy pain when it stung and even saw the blood sucker and snipped it away, but too late, the damage was done. I am allergic against mosquito bites and as a result the tiny sting of that little animal gives me fun for an entire week with swelling of my hand to epic proportions, the bite getting awfully hot and itching like hell. Tiny thing – big consequences.

Another tiny thing that so much undermines the quality of life (at least in my opinion) is bad smells. On Tuesday morning I managed to get a seat on the cattle wagon to work and sat down between two salary men, both looking neat and respectable in shirt and suit. But alas, a rotten odor arose and reached my nose every few breaths emitting from one of them, I couldn’t pinpoint which one.

It smelled like bad breath and very bad it must have been that it reached me like that. I felt like choking and my imagination was running wild sending me visions of germs and decay, shaping themselves into reality on front of my nose. Images of zombies and rotting innards on a morning ride to work are very entertaining indeed. It was impossible to get up and flee, since the train was packed. No way to escape the zombie… worst thing is, you cannot tell people when they smell bad. I wonder why that is such a taboo. The problem is quite frequent, and yet we negate it and pretend it is not there.

If you tell someone, he/she smells bad or has bad breath he/she will be mortally offended. You do not dare to tell the smelly person, because you fear his/her reaction. It reminded me very vividly of what I have recently learned in all these seminars I am attending for my new job. A human is a trivial machine. If you put in A into a non-trivial machine, you know that B will come out (if the machine works). If you put in A into a trivial machine, you don’t know whether B, C or D or T or X will come out. Unsure of the outcome = the reaction of the smelly, trivial machine, you prefer to keep your mouth shut and endure the stench.

Last but not least I had a near accident this week involving my bicycle and a car.

I rode my bicycle as every day, rushed by a few parked cars and suddenly a car door opens… I had not seen that anybody sat inside and the occupant had forgotten to look into the rear mirror before opening the door. I sailed past the car’s door with a last second swerve and only my pants brushed the metal but if I had been riding only a centimeter closer to the car the door would have caught me and catapulted me through the air. Ouch… the lady who had opened the door shrieked as loud as I did and shouted “sorry” after me and I guess we were both very happy that there was that one centimeter that prevented a rather serious accident.

So, those little things that happen to us every week can/could be quite big. A centimeter more and I might write this from a hospital bed, but I’m not, so lucky me!