worry-sitter

Having had the better part of the last week to lounge around and use an excessive number of tissues (I'm rapidly tearing through box #3), today I started thinking about how I could have made better use of that time. I mean, it's just a rotten cold. What a waste. If you're going to be house-bound and cranky and generally worthless, you should at least have the flu. So it occurred to me that I should have been able to find a way to make things worse. And that's when I came up with it.

Wouldn't it be great if we could volunteer to take on other people's worries temporarily? Really, completely take them on so the other person is totally relieved of a specific burden or two for a short period of time? Kind of like baby-sitting, only without the awesome responsibility of keeping the offspring alive/wholesomely entertained for an entire evening.

For example, my friend Marzipan Pig has a brain tumor and her Pappa-san has cancer, too. Now, that's a lot of blech for one little piggy. While snuffling and coughing and napping on my futon, I could have taken on all of MP's worries so she could've had a fancy-free holiday week. (Well, just the cancer-related worries, not every little worry. Wouldn't want MP getting so carefree she'd forget that you shouldn't touch a hot stove or that you shouldn't lick the spoon when you're making a batch of soap, eh?)

And you wouldn't have to wait for a bad cold or the flu to sign up for worry-sitting duty. Doing laundry? Cleaning the house? Visiting relatives? You're not going to be having fun anyway, so why not take some worries with you?

Well, I've come up with the idea, K. Now all you have to do is find a safe and effective method for transference of worries. You work at a university, get the Academy working on that.