love like winter

It turns out that it's a marginally good thing that I got used to drinking hot tea with lots of sugar and no milk; while the sugar can't be good for me, a new study shows that drinking tea with milk eliminates all of the beneficial properties of tea. Yay! As much tea as I drink, my vessels must be dilated to the point that I could inject a small hamster into my veins and it would be able to do laps with ease.

Anyway, today was a regular ol' day. I went to work and had an extremely annoying conference call that would have been just fine had I been able to maintain an even keel on my temper. I usually do a pretty good job of trying to understand others' viewpoints, facilitating a conversation, and reaching compromise--but there was something that was just stopping me from getting a rein on my annoyance, even though I kept trying to take deep breaths. I haven't had nearly as many ruinous temper moments in the past few months as I used to have, so today was a little surprising, but I could feel my pulse racing and my jaw clenching. I tried to be polite, and I didn't say anything that I shouldn't have said, but it must have been obvious that I at the very least wasn't happy--I'm usually very vocal and upbeat and driven on conference calls, and this one I just said things like 'what do you want to do about it?' and 'so can you come up with a plan?' Even think about it again is making the anger well up again, so I should stop.

I think I don't like the messy sides of anger, so I use sarcasm as a weapon instead because it's like constantly cutting the ground out from under my counterparts' feet without being as overtly hostile as a bomb or an uzi. I don't know that my super-sarcastic side is any better, really, than the side that I would have if I actually expressed my anger in a louder and more honest format, but it's more socially acceptable, and I'm usually good-natured enough that I can get by with some heavy-duty sarcasm when I feel like it. However, I bet that you could tell when I'm at my most angry, because I get so quiet that I'm not even sarcastic--being sarcastic would take me too close to the edge of the boiling (but carefully-lidded) cauldron where my temper resides.

The worst thing is that I either get angry for some completely justifiable reason (rarely), or, more often, I get angry at a really small thing that is just the last straw on a series of large things. Today was one of the latter times, and I really had no reason to be angry at all, which just made me feel worse about it. Luckily, the rest of the day was pretty good, and I came home to eat some mac and cheese and watch 'Scrubs' and 'The Office', so things definitely got better. Now I should go to bed so that I can get through tomorrow, and then enjoy the three-day weekend! Goodnight!