Date: 2007-10-29 13:45 Subject: Rage Security: Public

Every once in a very great while, usually when I'm engaged in some pedestrian but maddening task of home maintenance, I have a glimpse of the slumbering primeval male animal that lies just beneath the varnished surface of my cultured, civilized self. For instance, I had a moment this weekend when I nearly threw a stepladder through a window. I was standing atop said stepladder, trying to wire a new light fixture, and things weren't going well. No matter what I did, whenever I flipped the circuit breaker back on, the light would turn on but not turn off. (This is the light at the top of the stairs, which has one of those three-way switches connected to it, and I'm sure this is the source of the problem, but I don't know what to do about it.) Keeping the white wires together long enough that I could put one of those wire cap connectors on the end proved beyond my meager capabilities. When I dropped the cap on the floor for the fourth time, I couldn't stand it any more. I jumped down, grabbed the stepladder, screamed something along the lines of, "F- you, you mother-f-ing son of a f-ing mother-fer who f-s f-ing mother-f-ers! F-! F-, f-, f-!!!", picked up the stepladder, and got ready to send it crashing through the window next to me. Some neuron in the reasoning part of my brain must have fired, because instead I just slammed the ladder against the floor a few times (probably cracked the plywood underneath the carpet), then stormed off towards the bedroom looking for something safer to throw. There was a large stuffed duck on the floor, and I picked that up and hurled it as hard as I could against the bed, ripping half the nail off my ring finger in the process. The duck bounced off the head of the bed and knocked the top part of Jen's bedside lamp to the floor; luckily, the lamp did not shatter. Then I lay down on the bed and just tried to breathe for a few minutes and calm the berserker part of my brain.

This rage of mine didn't come out of nowhere. I'd been up too late on Saturday night, and Harper had woken me up in the morning about two hours before I was ready to be awake. I was wiped out because I'd spent two hours cleaning up Esme's room, and before that I'd straightened and vacuumed the entire rest of the house, and before that I'd cut the grass. I was stressing about the fact that I needed to cook dinner before Jen went off to meet with some of her colleagues, and I knew that the dish we were supposed to have was going to take at least a couple of hours to prepare. I hadn't had the greatest weekend with Esme, for reasons I'll blog about separately, and I was ticked off that she and I hadn't been able to drive to the pumpkin patch that afternoon and pick out pumpkins together, which might have gone some way towards putting things right between us. Jen and the girls, in the meantime, were carving the two small pumpkins we'd already bought (which, in the state of mind I was in, just had the effect of needling me and making me feel reproached about the missed pumpkin patch opportunity, although that wasn't Jen's intention at all), and I much rather would have been spending time with them than doing a thankless chore that made me feel frustrated and incompetent. To top it all off, it was Sunday afternoon, which meant Monday was coming, and another week of joyless dancing for my paycheck.

Nevertheless, I find it profoundly depressing that I lost it so completely over such a trivial matter. It's the kind of thing that makes me despair for humanity. I felt ashamed to be around people last night, and today I feel like I'm recovering from an ordeal; my legs and shoulders are sore, I can't stop grinding my teeth, and only a large dose of aspirin is keeping me from being disabled by a killer headache. I don't know what kind of dreams I was having last night, but even though I was asleep for almost eight hours I feel completely unrested. If I hadn't had to come to work, I probably would have spent the day in bed.

There's a new book out by Philip Zimbardo, the guy who devised the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971, where he talks about the ample research that shows how situational factors have a stronger effect than inherent personality traits in determining how an individual will behave in a given scenario. Zimbardo's main objective in the book is to explain how something like Abu Ghraib can happen, but I think his theory also has pertinence to my behavior yesterday. I don't mean to say, "The situation made me do it." But long before I exploded in rage, I should have recognized that I wasn't in the right frame of mind to tackle a job that was bound to make me crazy. I created a situation that had a better-than-even chance of ending with me screaming obscenities and throwing a stuffed duck across the room, and that's a situation I should have avoided.

Jen sent me an Arborparents posting from a parent who was advocating a particular method of teaching children self-control. But maybe the key isn't to learn self-control; maybe the key is to learn how to avoid those situations where self-control will be impossible.