October 13, 1999

I have to work so hard on controlling my irritation with work, sometimes. It's not a bad job. It's a good job. I just get needlessly irritated about it sometimes.

I mean, when I'm sitting here quietly in my office, surfing web journals, checking my email, and listening to the classical station, and someone interrupts my pleasant solitude with a request to print out thirty copies of one of our ERISA tabs... I get irritated.

Really, really irritated, disproportionately irritated. It's a struggle for me not to yell at the person who asked me to do the job, something to the effect of "Don't you know I'm trying to better my mind in here! Who the hell do you think you are, asking me to do piddly stuff like this at work?!"

Of course, printing out document requests is part of my job. It's not a particularly enjoyable part of my job, and it's not the part I like the best, but it's definitely in my job description. So I shouldn't get so irritated at people who ask me to do it, especially when I'm not doing anything else besides surfing the Web.

It's just so bothersome.

I feel like I'm much more in control of my temper than I was for a long time. Ask anyone who knew me in high school. I was prone to rageful outbursts all the time, whenever anybody did anything that I disagreed with or that I thought was stupid. I even screamed at my teachers a few times. Luckily, I was an "honor student", so no disciplinary action was taken against me, but still, my temper was pretty out of control.

It remained out of control for a long time. I'm sure that Danny can attest to that. We had some real knockdown drag out fights, especially while we were living in the same house. I found him to be absolutely infuriating sometimes, and instead of cooling off and thinking about it calmly, I'd just blow up in a huge explosion that didn't help anything, and it's amazing we managed to stay friends.

My point is that lately I feel like I've had my temper much more under control. I still find it infuriating when people do stupid things, but I don't scream and yell at them about it anymore. I just find out where they live and send them mail bombs.

Just kidding! Ha ha, that was a joke, especially for any of you USPS workers out there reading this.

In other news. I've switched to Diet Coke from regular Coke. This is a big step for me. I'm a huge Coke addict. I can't get through the day without at least one, and sometimes I have as many as three. But I think my sugar intake is way too high, so I'm switching to Diet. I like the taste of it, and no matter what my Mom says, aspartame is not going to give me cancer unless I ingest like, 10 times my body weight of it every day.

My Coke addiction started in college, when I had free and easy access to it whenever I wanted it, by virtue of the dorm vending machines and the local supermarket. When I lived at home, Mom never kept it in the house, because she said it was bad for us. Well, she was right, it was bad for us, but that didn't stop me from drinking massive quantities of it in college. On one particularly memorable night, I pulled an all-nighter for my philosophy class, and consumed an entire 12-pack of Coke and half of a pizza. I felt like shit the next afternoon, but I did get an A on the final, so I guess it was worth it.

Still other news. Keith is at a job fair as I type this. We spent an hour yesterday nitpicking his resume, and went to Kinko's and got it printed on nice paper, and everything. He even got a haircut (they cut five whole inches off -- it looks much better without the split ends). Anyway, I think I'm actually more nervous than he is about the whole thing. I hope it goes well today and he makes good contacts with employers. I really want him to be able to find a job he likes. I'm almost tempted to go home early so that I can ask him how it went and debrief him, but 1) I'm way too busy at work today, and 2) I can wait til 5PM. Well, maybe I'll call before then.

News, Part the Last.Remember I mentioned about a month ago that I started the Pill? Well, two days ago I started the placebos, and yesterday, just like clockwork, I got my period. I'm happy about this, because I had WAY less cramping than I usually do, which is a Very Very Good Thing. God bless the Pill (I don't care what the Pope says).

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