Alternate Title: The Whiny Idiot and Her Woman-Hating Soulmate

Today I spent way too much time around someone who was being a prima donna and a half. I remarked to a fellow sufferer that "It's like The Princess and the Pea up in here!" Met with a blank stare, I realized that I might have spent more time watching "Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre" than other kids did. But I have a feeling I'm going to be bringing that princess up a lot, as people around me seem to become more and more obsessed with their own personal absolute comfort as the rest of the world self-destructs around them. So here's a quick refresher.

The Princess and the Pea

by Hans Christian Andersen, as interpreted by Kimberly Welsh

Once upon a time there was this Prince who was a straight-up class-obsessed jerk. He met plenty of smart, funny, pretty girls, but none of them were completely perfect, and homey don't play that. So he continued to live in the basement of his parents' castle, playing World of Warcraft on an Alienware computer, living off grape Fanta and Cheetos - just generally being a fat, greasy, mysogynistic idiot.

One rainy night, there was a knock at the door. When the Queen went to answer it, she met a small, frail-looking, beautiful young woman who was soaking wet from the rain. The visitor explained that she was a princess who had been caught in the nasty weather, and asked if she could just chill on their couch for the night. The Prince belched and said, "Princess, huh? We'll see about that." And instead of punching him in the face and telling him to get a job, his mother the Queen raced up to the guest room to prepare a test for the young woman. Because clearly there is a whole Oedipal thing going on here and she has no interest in ever getting her son to move the hell out and get a life.

And so she stripped all the bedclothes and laid a single pea on top of the mattress. Then she stacked a bunch of mattresses on top of the pea. Then she stacked a bunch of featherbeds on top of the mattresses. By the time she finished creating the young woman's death trap of a bed, the alleged princess had dried off and prepred to go to sleep. So she climbed into bed, presumably with the aid of a harness and a set of crampons, and closed her eyes.

The next morning, the family was seated at breakfast when the princess came down. Shouting over the din of her 33-year old son slurping his Frosted Flakes, the Queen asked how the princess had slept. Naturally, being a total stranger who had been granted a warm, safe place to sleep free of charge in her hour of need, the princess graciously said she'd slept wonderfully. PSYCH! She replied, "I didn't get a wink of sleep! There was something poking at me from under my mattress all night! Seriously, not only could I not get comfortable, but I am literally - LITERALLY - black and blue all over from that stupid mattress. God, this place is a dump. By the way, I take fresh cream on my Frosted Flakes instead of milk and I only drink Kopi Luwak coffee. And if you don't have any Kopi Luwak coffee, I'm going to sit here and scream until you go get some, you wrinkled old bag." The Queen smiled, thinking that if the young lady's skin was so delicate that she could sense the presence of the pea even through so many layers of soft mattress padding, she must be a real princess, and therefore worthy of her son. Like he's such a freaking prize.

The young couple got married but never moved out of the basement, and the Queen never found out that the pea had rolled out from under the mattresses while the princess was climbing into bed. Nor did she ever learn the truth of the awkward mattress-poking that laid the groundwork for decades of heavily-negotiated, highly unpleasant marital relations. The whole family lived happily ever after, bitching and moaning about the slightest imperfection in temperature, humidity, the saltiness or un-saltiness of their food, slight tingling sensations in their tongues when eating Altoids, every speck of dust that exists, and that weird thing where one of your muscles just starts twitching for no reason.

The End