The final frontier in our society is our individual limits of acceptable aggravation — or willingness to be aggravated.
We must find it and name it and protect ourselves from people coming close to the boundary. Let’s take the woman on the subway senselessly cracking her gum so loud that an entire car full of people were disgusted and searched for the culprit.
But for those we love, we must give them an allowance of indulgences for aggravation. In Yiddish, the word is tsuris. So we must give our friends and loved ones free passes for aggravation. There must be a way to capture this in a phrase . . . .
tsuris visa.
Here is how it works in practice: When my father complains about his aches and pains, which are relatively minor, I grant him a tsuris visa, so he can cross my boundary of tolerable aggravation without my reacting badly (or with my at least feeling bad about reacting badly). Sometimes, as happened this summer, he was really having problems, so no visa is required because the tsuris was necessary and appropriate.
POB (partner of blogger) NEVER gives me tsuris of any kind, so she has most favored person status. My son gives me tsuris occasionally that needs to stop at the border of my aggravation boundary, so sometimes I must deny a visa, followed by some amount of stern talk.
So my bottom line is: that if you are going to give me unnecessary tsuris, you need a visa.
And since No-Where-istan is in my head — L’etat, c’est moi (as said Louis XIV) — visas are required because I want to keep my head and my country un-tsuris-y.
