Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Temper, temper

I act like a New Yorker from time to time. At Christmas someone sped up instead of stopping at a crosswalk, and I yelled (loudly--so they could hear through their car window), "Merry Christmas to you too! Not like I wasn't walking here with my kids and all--you keep driving though!" People stopped walking to look at me, and I just rolled my shoulders and went on my way.

Sometimes I just can't let injustice pass. If I see anyone getting hurt or treated bad, I step in and voice my opinion. Once at my former job (public library) I heard a lady crying in the lobby bathroom and raced toward the scene to see what was going on. A woman with blood pouring from her scalp came stumbling out and I went into protector mode. "Who did this? Where are they? Come with me!" I led her into the service office, even though, as I said, I no longer worked there, and grabbed some paper towels to dab at her forehead. She told me her boyfriend had beaten her up and was in the parking lot. I called the police. They found him and started questioning both him and the female victim. She began to retract her story, saying she had slipped in the bathroom. "Oh no she didn't." I looked right at the jerk boyfriend and repeated what I'd been told earlier. No one was going to get away with that kind of behavior if I had a say. The terrible thing was, Liam was in my arms the whole time and I'd done all of that without thinking of his welfare. I suffered guilt the rest of the day, but in the end, felt I had done the right thing. Again, if someone is getting hurt, I can't let it go.

Today, someone walked right in front of me while I was waiting for an elderly couple to enter into a store. My old temper flared and I said some 'notsonice' things. So, I guess I'm an incurable hothead. I always feel sort of bad, and then I'm kind of amused.

Anyone else have a bad temper?

12 comments:

  1. yes! But I bite my tongue a lot.

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  2. Yep, but like you, Amy I've got a high boiling point and the kind of things that make you angry, make me angry too. I was in the park once with my granddaughter when she was little, a girl of about eleven or twelve was on one of the lower of the children's swings. A boy a couple of years older was kicking her in the small of her back with his Doc Martins. He was really hurting her. She was in floods of tears. I stood there and gave him the rollicking of a lifetime. He slunk off, apparently he was her brother and then I worried like mad, in case he was supposed to make sure she got home OK.

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  3. mshatch-I really do need to bite my tongue more often as well.

    Molly- Yep, I would have said something too. I really dislike kids hurting other kids.

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  4. Nothing wrong with acting like a New Yorker!
    Arleen from the Bronx.

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  5. Let them have it Amy. It seems to me that these folks have never had anyone tell them what is and isn't appropriate behaviour. Their education has to start somewhere.

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  6. ME - A BAD TEMPER??? NO I F****** DON'T!!!

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  7. I can relate, Amy. I "used" to have a temper, but with age and its related loss of energy, I've managed the keep it in check these last few years :)

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  8. Tom : D

    So it looks like we all have tempers, and are in different stages of refining them. That's kind of nice to know!

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  9. I think I was born without the temper part of my brain. The only thing that now makes me angry, is other people's anger. But even then, I tend to ignore.

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  10. Cro- That's something to be proud of. I'm actually not a big hothead--guess I'm sort of in the middle. I am part Irish. Anyway, that's my excuse.

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  11. I'm usually quite calm but nothing annoys me more than people cutting into queues. In Britain it's probably the worse crime you can commit. :)

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  12. I speak up too, including when someone pushes ahead in a line, but I try to do it low key in order to not upset myself.

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