Lost my temper the other day, which is a rarity -- this old guy blithely ran a stop sign at a pedestrian crosswalk I happened to be crossing, and the guy nearly hit me, had to swerve to avoid me, and I shouted at him "STOP SIGN. STOP. SIGN!" and then gestured, yelling "PEDESTRIAN! CROSSWALK! YOU [BLEEEP-BLEEEP] IDIOT!" The guy saw me and took off. He looked like he was afraid I was going to stomp on his car (and I was tempted, but I held back). I was so pissed, for like a minute, which is about how I operate. I so seldom lose my cool like that, but when somebody does stuff like running a stop sign and nearly clipping a pedestrian (who happens to be me), it pisses me off. The moment made me realize how rare it is for me to get pissed like that. I try to take most things in stride, and am largely successful at that -- I don't whine or complain, I don't get pissed very often. I do get annoyed from time to time, but that's about it. It takes something particularly bad to piss me off, I guess, and even then, I am probably likelier to laugh at the absurdity of it than to shout about it.
Speaking of shouting, I took the boys to their favorite pizza place, and we were in a nice corner booth, and across the room was another family -- dad, mom, and two boys, one of whom was very young, I'm guessing about 4 years old? My boys were kind of fascinated by that, because the little kid looked over at us and made noise, and my sweet boys waved to the kid. But the dad was this surly guy, and he actually yelled at his kids a couple of times (one of the exchanges was him yelling at his son "Go ahead! Take a bite of the pizza, you'll burn your mouth, and I guarantee you'll never do THAT again!"), and it totally upset my boys. They were like "Those poor kids; they have a mean, yelly daddy!" And the dad was browbeating the waitress, too, which was upsetting to me (he kept after her, kept carping about things, barking orders, like "Bring me another water. With lemon. Make it a FRESH lemon! And plenty of ICE! No, wait -- make it a LIME. Do you understand? A FRESH. LIME." -- and he's yelling this at her) and the waitress caught my eye as she went off to do that with a look like "Yeah, that guy's a fucking asshole!" B1 said to me later about it (I always know when something bothers him like that, because he mulls it over and will talk to me about it later) "Why'd he yell at the little boy? The kid was too young to know he'd done anything wrong. That'll just scare him." I just said that some parents thought yelling was the way to keep their kids in line, and B1 said "But that doesn't work; it'll just make the kids mad or scared of their own parents." B2 had his own opinions on it, mostly saying that he was really glad I wasn't a "Yelly Daddy." And I'm not, thankfully; I take most everything in stride where the kids are concerned. I think Exene yells more than I do, from what the boys say. I don't know; I think seeing a "Yelly Daddy" in action seemed very strange and unfamiliar to the boys, so they reacted to it with contempt and dismay.
Of course, if they'd seen me at that stop sign, they'd have been shocked by that, too. And if I'd had the boys with me when that prick had run that stop sign, I'd have probably broken his windshield with my invective.
