I spent a good deal of this past weekend frustrated.  It wasn’t “ruin-the-weekend” frustrated; more like “life’s-little-annoyances” frustrated.  I had three distinct frustrating events, each eliciting drastically different feelings that all still somehow could be described as “frustrating”. 

The first frustrating experience of my weekend involved chocolate chip cookies.  That’s right, chocolate chip cookies.  Strap into your spaceship chair, close your eyes, and clench your butt muscles in preparation for warp speed, because we are heading for the Worm Hole of Serious Conversation.  I am not an excellent cook or baker by any means, but given a recipe, a kitchen, most of the necessary ingredients, and access to the internet I can typically make something edible appear.  With practice I can do this fairly consistently.  One item that has eluded me, to my specifications at least, is the chocolate chip cookie, the most basic of baked goods.  They’ve always turned out a bit crispier, or drier, or…browner than I’d like.  They were never doomed to the trash can though, and my guinea pigs always gobbled them down anyway, but it rankles me that I can’t get a nice, soft chocolate chip cookie. 

This weekend I decided it was time to try again.  I followed the recipe to the letter, and was once again met with edible, but crispy and dry, chocolate chip cookies.  It was frustrating!  I’m sure my forehead was furrowed as I put them on a plate and fed them to my guinea pigs (a.k.a. my husband’s D&D group) who promptly told me they were great anyway. 

The second frustration came that same evening, when I just couldn’t fall asleep.  I had a headache and was very tired, but my mind was Hell-bent on running through every individual thought I’d had that day while my body was tense and my joints were sore.  After an hour or two of lying in bed trying to relax and thinking about distant ocean waves, or whatever nonsense I could come up with, I was finally just on the cusp of blissful unconsciousness when my husband came home and crawled into bed.  The poor guy didn’t know what he was walking into.  He cuddled right up to me, instantly bringing me back to miserable consciousness and a raging headache.  It took me another hour to fall asleep, after I got up and took some more ibuprofen, and it didn’t help that my bewildered husband quickly fell asleep once I pushed him away to the other side of the bed. 

The final event occurred Sunday morning.  I walked out of church and started rummaging around in the black hole that I carry around on a strap on my shoulder looking for my car keys.  I couldn’t immediately find them, but that isn’t unusual, so I kept digging and sifting.  As I made my way across the parking lot I got more concerned, and when I finally reached my locked car I peered inside to see my keys still hanging from the ignition.  Some context: this is not the first or the second, or even the third, time I have locked my keys in my car, but it was the second time in about a month.  After the last time I got an oversized key chain to make it easier to see and remember them, but that obviously didn’t work.  I called my husband to come get me and waited to call AAA until that afternoon when there wouldn’t be people to stare at me (and, in my mind, judge me) and I had less to do. 

None of these events ruined my weekend or fed into each other, and none of them were of any real consequence – I baked a second batch of cookies the next day and adjusted the baking time for softer cookies, I eventually did fall asleep, and the guy AAA called had my car unlocked in about 45 seconds – but each of them was “frustrating”.  That got me wondering how each of these events, and the feelings they elicited, could all be summarized by one word.  The cookies were an annoyance; being unable to sleep was rage inducing; and locking my keys in my car – again – was kind of depressing and demoralizing with just a dash of ridiculousness (seriously, I keep expecting AAA to cut me off).  These are all vastly different situations, so how could ‘frustrating’ still describe them all? 

It isn’t like ‘frustrating’ is a chameleon of a word.  It has a fairly specific use – to describe a situation where one is prevented from progressing, changing, or achieving something.  Re-examining my incidents, they all meet this definition in some way: my initial failure to improve my cookies from past attempts, my inability to fall asleep, and my locking my keys in my car (sigh) despite a deliberate effort and change of behavior to avoid doing so. 

I can hear the writing gremlins (they live in my head) whispering, “Is there a point to all of this?”  I guess my answer to them is that I thought it was really interesting that a single word, which we typically only think about in one way, could describe so many events with such disparate emotions between them.  I think this demonstrates the advantages and limitations of language – an advantage being that a single word can be so widely applied, and a limitation being that the same word can in no way describe all the nuances of a single situation.  This is okay, since we have so many other words out there that we can use together to describe a unique situation.  I just thought it was interesting, and it isn’t something we think about very often when we’re out in the world, or on the internet, dragging language around like a toddler’s well-loved, well-used blanket.