Anger and dealing with it

Edit: This post moved to http://www.theonlinerant.com/2007/09/23/anger-and-dealing-with-it/

I don't get angry very easily. In fact I rarely let anything make me angry. But the other day I was a little upset. I wouldn't say I was really angry, more I was annoyed and frustrated.

I don't even remember what I was upset about. Which probably means it wasn't a big deal. If it had been, I'm sure I would have remembered what it was. But I do remember the results of my anger. I let that anger affect my whole day. And affect everything around me.

All day I let every little annoyance make me angry. I snapped at people. I was gruff and abrupt to everyone I talked to. All of which just caused everything to get worse. People responded to my bad attitude, and returned it back to me.
Then I felt justified in my bad behavior and my anger. After all, so an so said this bad thing to me. So I have a right to be angry with him. I completely ignored the fact that I had started the problems by my initial bad attitude.

The entire day was ruined. And it was all my own fault. I got angry about something, and took my anger out on everything and everyone around me.

I may or may not have been justified in my initial anger, but I didn't handle it correctly. Instead of dealing with the original problem, I let my anger spill over into other areas. That was wrong. I should have isolated the anger to the thing that caused it. I then should have dealt with that anger and discarded it. Then it wouldn't have affected other areas and people. And I wouldn't have ruined my whole day over something that was so insignificant I don't even remember it.

I'm reminded of Ephesians 4:26 "Be angry and do not sin." That was what I should have remembered when I started my day.

Names and forgetting

Edit: This post moved to http://www.theonlinerant.com/2007/09/14/names-and-forgetting/

Here is another comic from XKCD that really hit just a little too close to home. I'm always forgetting peoples names. And I'm usually too embarrassed to admit that I forgot the name and ask again. Which is stupid. I'd be much better off just admitting I forgot than trying to find out through some underhanded and usually stupid method.

I've even been roped into doing things I didn't want to do,just because I couldn't remember the person's name who asked me to do it. Nothing quite as extreme as the comic above, but still not something I would have done.

I've tried all the tricks the books talk about to help you remember the names of people you meet, but none of them seem to work for me. I guess I'll just have to put up with being embarrassed. Hopefully I can at least keep from getting into as bad a situation as the character in the comic. LOL

Sorry about the long break

I know it's been a little while since I posted here. The reason is that I've been very involved in moving my other Blog over to it's own host. If you are interested, go check it out. www.WhatJamieFound.com. So anyway, I've been a little slow at posting here. So just bear with me, because I'm going to try to fix that.

Thanks