Just Because You're Paranoid...

There's a place in the world for the angry young man
With his working class ties and his radical plans
He refuses to bend, he refuses to crawl,
He's always at home with his back to the wall.
And he's proud of his scars and the battles he's lost,
And he struggles and bleeds as he hangs on the cross-
And he likes to be known as the angry young man.
--Billy Joel, “Angry Young Man”

We all have our character flaws, and among my many shortcomings I count my temper. I'd say that problem peaked about 5 or 6 years ago when my mom, in an effort to persuade me to change a pair of dress socks she didn't like, told me they made me look like a nerd. “DON'T...CALL ME...NERD!!!” I screamed, Hulking out and putting my fist right through the sheetrock in our hallway. I'd never punched a hole in the wall before, and the one time I put my fist through a window as a kid was an act of stupidity, not anger. I was talking to a friend through my window and he kept swinging it closed. I'd shout ”COLOSSUS!” and tap the window back open, but on one of the swings the latch caught, so the window stayed put while my fist went through it, of course at the precise moment my mom was walking up the driveway with a bag of groceries. “I gotta go!” said my friend, darting past my mom and down the block back to his house.

We have to learn from our mistakes, lest we repeat them. When I put my fist through that window I learned not to throw fists at glass, even in play. When I smashed through that wall, I learned how to spackel. I also realized that when people push certain buttons, I need to restrain myself because I only end up looking foolish and feeling immediately guilty. I'm fairly diplomatic in my business dealings, and remain cheerful and nonconfrontational in the office environment. The unfortunate truth is that I'm so comfortable around my parents, I tend to let out anger that I might have been holding in from something else that was bothering me during the day. My mom once cautioned me that the way we treat our mother is the way we'll treat our wife. I don't want to be the type of husband who snaps at his wife at dinner because he's stressed over an insurmountable workload, or something equally insignificant in the grand scheme of what's really important. If I can't learn patience, I might as well not inflict myself on anyone else ever.

I've gotten much better over the years, and I don't hit walls as much when I get angry. I'm not perfect nor mature, so there's still the occasional verbal outburst. A lot of time this is frustration over having to repeat myself. My folks are getting older, and sometimes they forget things. My dad doesn't hear very well, so I end up shouting by the third or fourth time he asks me the same question. I'm getting older too, so I sometimes forget whom I told what. My mom might ask me a question I think I've already answered, when it was in fact something I'd told my father. After 12 hours of driving, working, exercising, and driving again, I'm often too tired to converse with anyone. Again, this is a flaw I'll need to overcome if I ever become a husband.

My dad has an interesting hit or miss technique to deal with my temper tantrums: “Stop yelling; the neighbors are all laughing at you.” Sometimes, embarrassing me sobers me up quickly, and the idea that other people hear me shouting and carrying on like a child is enough for me to catch my breath, and discuss things rationally. There are, unfortunately, plenty of times in which this psychology has the opposite effect, and makes me angrier. It works a little better if we're outside, perhaps arguing about shoveling snow, since on those occasions there are other people around who can hear me and I'd be better off working faster instead of wasting time trying to get my dad to go back in the house. When we're inside, I would hope that I'm not so loud that all the neighbors can hear, which means that line is less of a deterrent. No one has called Cops yet, so I'm hoping it all sounds much worse from inside my skull than from outside the house.

What was a semi-regular problem in my teen years and part of my twenties now only happens once a month or so, if that often. I've been especially careful to be patient with my dad since we got him back from the hospital; he doesn't need that kind of stress. On Sunday, we went to check out how his lot endured the Winter. I evened out some hedges with electric clippers, since he can't lift his arms above the shoulder anymore, and I pulled down some rose vines in the back by out pear tree and cleared the ones tugging down the neighbor's fence. I needed thicker workgloves, I can't see the tiny cuts from the thorns that still hurt now. I also tried to fix a wobbly gate hinged on a buried pipe. After hammering down another piece of metal alongside the pipe to no avail, my dad not hearing or not listening as I told him it wasn't working and he kept telling me to hit it, I pulled the whole gate out of the ground and tossed it aside in frustration.

I cleared debris from around the hole and gathered some rocks. Cement would have been ideal but we had neither that nor running water. We didn't even have a proper hammer, only another smaller section of pipe. With a clear opening in the ground, I repositioned the gate and tried to push it down. I tried to discourage my dad from supporting the gate and putting strain on his shoulder, but I couldn't hold it up on my own. I also had to raise my voice, moreso because he wasn't hearing me than because of anger. “Be quiet; people are laughing at you!” he admonished. To my credit, I suppressed my next outburst into a literal biting of my tongue, and kept working.

I got frustrated earlier because every time I thought the gate was almost steady, he'd decide to shake it and “test” it, loosening the dirt around the pipe again. This time I hammered at the top of the pipe with the smaller pipe, supporting most of the weight while he held it steady and told me I wasn't hitting it hard enough. I apologized half sarcastically for having a desk job and not developing the strength he had in his career as a mechanic. “How's it going?” murmured a pedestrian, some random dude walking past. I muttered a greeting without looking, and continued hitting that pipe. Weak as I am, I ended up cracking the metal cap that covered the top of it. But I did get it far enough into the ground to remain steady long enough to add some rocks around the base. When all was said and done, the gate was straighter and steadier than it had been in years, and my dad was actually pleased and proud.

On Monday, it was back to the grind of the office where deadlines might cause stress, but they won't put little cuts and calluses on my hands. This is our busy season, and I haven't even had time for the gym in about three weeks. I'm just about caught up, which means of course that I got a few more extra assignments. Still, I know exercise is important not just for my physical health, but for my mental health. If I can run out the frustrations of the day on a treadmill, I'm less likely to snap at the old people for asking me simple questions. “Did I see you yesterday?” asked the gym manager as I walked through the door. “I don't think so,” I replied, knowing full well that I hadn't gone to the gym over the weekend any more than I'd been in there during the weekdays this past month. “Are you sure?” he persisted, walking along with me, “I didn't see you helping someone in his yard? Putting up a fence or something? Over on Avenue X?”

I work in the same town where my dad and my aunts grew up, where he still owns that small bit of property. And now that I know people in the area from my office and my gym, it never occurred to me that I'd run into people I knew. “You were frustrated or something because you wanted to do one thing, and he was doing the opposite. I said hello to break the tension.” Not only had the guy spotted me, but he was the random pedestrian that I barely acknowledged, that walked by uncomfortably as I was snapping at my dad! “Sorry, man,” I apologized, for not giving a better greeting. I found myself spilling more information than necessary, about how my dad was from the area and the lot once belonged to my grandfather, and how my dad needed my help since he's almost 80 years old.

When I'd act up as a child, my mom would sometimes warn me that God was watching me. The idea of an omniscient being who could see me at all times, even when I was alone, made me very paranoid. It's one of those aspects of faith we sometimes dismiss or try not to think about, since we'd go mad with paranoia otherwise. And over the years, I've taken it less and less seriously when my dad tells me people are watching or laughing at me. And yet, there I was outside in a presumably neutral environment losing patience and baring my irrational side, not caring what strangers thought, only to learn that not everyone around us was a stranger that day. It all makes a good case for paranoia, to play it safe because you never know who's watching us. You never know...