The usual.

I'd love to be able to get worked up about politics and eroding privacy and creeping fascism. But how can I get worked up about troubles in our country's public life if I can't even handle my own private life?

This morning was another day of losing my temper and taking it out on my kids. E fell and scraped her knee a little bit. She's extremely pain-averse since she chewed her toenails down to the root a couple weeks ago. Now even the tiniest injury makes her wail and cry. She is only two and a half, after all.

But I couldn't distract her or make her laugh to defuse the situation, no. I just plowed on ahead (we were walking D to his summer camp and on a deadline). So naturally she got more upset the more we walked. I wound up carrying her all the way home after dropping D off, getting more and more angry the whole time.

There's a little more to it than that of course, but what's the difference? The point is, all I could do was get angry. I couldn't stop and calm myself down. Actually, I did try to; but after getting calm, E refused to move, and I got angry again. When we got home, I put her in her room for her own safety. I was drenched with sweat and shaking with rage.

K says I should take an anger management class, and maybe I should. But like a typical male I feel I should be able to fix this problem on my own.

Posts like this are why I keep this blog pseudonymous, so there's no danger my family will Google me and get themselves worried for my (and my kids') safety. Unfortunately, much of my family and a few friends already bookmarked this stupid blog back before it went pseudonymous, and they're my only readers.

So--why am I pressing the "Publish" button?