Angst, angst, existential dread!

Well, not quite that bad, and not mine.

My younger daughter is having back and neck issues since she hurt her ribs coughing last month.  She is very upset that I am expecting her to go to school since her sister is a piece of glass which we let get away with doing nothing.  That her sister has had six vertebrae fused in her lower back, as well as developing an anxiety disorder which leaver her in full blown panic attack mode after a few hours at school has nothing to do with it.

This morning in the car on the way to school we went from tears of pain to "I should just move in with hobos, they'd treat me better", to "I should just kill myself because then I wouldn't be in pain for the rest of my life."  I'm not taking the latter to seriously since it was shouted at me in the heat of battle, so to speak.  I dropped her off at school, and after very emphatically slamming the car door (hard to do you'd think if her back were really that non-functional), and watched her stump her way angrily to the door, again not showing any signs of back or neck issues.  If they were really as bad as she's trying to make out, she wouldn't have been able to do that impressive stumping.  I know, having been there.  I will admit that she probably has back and neck pain, but it's not the mountain she's trying to make of it.

The title has to do with a housemate back in college.  I don't know where the others dredged him up, but he was a philosophy major, and had a tendency when things weren't going his way to start getting all angst-y.  The thing is that I'd never seen the word before, and tended to pronounce it American, not German.  Another housemate and I were discussing his issues over lunch one day and I used the "hang" version and she corrected me.  I thought about it for a moment and then suggested that for this guy, hang was more appropriate than "tong".  She thought about that and agreed.  From then on, whenever he started getting all serious, in the way only a 19 or 20 year old can, we'd start laughing and saying "Angst, angst, existential dread!".  He hated it, and would at least leave and be all angst-y someplace else.  It also probably made it easier to kick him out when we found out he was keeping pot in the house which was a) illegal and b) something another housemate was seriously allergic to.

But it gave me a great phrase for dealing with teenage emotional woes.  I do have a call in to her doctor about whether we should be making an appointment with ortho.  I also need to get her back to the naturopath, and get a refill on her herbal script, because whatever is in that Vitex stuff really seems to help her emotional stability.