Dan Walsh's "Odds of Annoyance"

While doing research recently for a Genre Whore blog post on the existentialist genius that is the website Garfield Minus Garfield, I stumbled upon the blog of the site's creator, Dublin-based artist, musician and writer Dan Walsh.

Among other gems, the blog -- travors.com -- includes the following keen and wonderfully depressing observation, posted Feb. 22 and reprinted here with permission in its entirety. The post is titled, "The odds of annoyance."

"At the age of 34, with some good luck and modern medicine, you could say I'm less than half way through my life. Taking that as a given, let's make a few assumptions:

> I started interacting with other people, through speech and actions, around the age of four.

> That gives me 30 years of interaction with other humans.

> During that time I've met many people and been in many situations. Sometimes these people have been annoying, and annoying things have happened.

> Let's be optimistic and say I'll live to 100. That means I've had, roughly, a third of all the interactions with other humans, that I’ll ever have.

> If that is the case, and we take into account some basic laws of probability, then that means I probably haven't met the most annoying person I'll ever meet.

> In other words, the most annoying thing that will ever happen to me, probably hasn't happened yet.

This is pretty distressing.

I've met some huge assholes in my time. HUGE.

Casting my mind back on the scale of all the annoying things that have happened to me, inevitably leads me to this conclusion:

Sometime in my future, I'm going to be kicked in the balls by George Bush, while he sings 'I Gotta Feeling' by the Black Eyed Peas."

Puts things in perspective, no?