"I'm not really an angry person, I just keep finding myself in these situations"

My wife recently explained to me how it is she thinks. She traces all her thoughts and ideas back to relationships and personal experiences and interaction. When she has a story or a thought about something, it rides closely with someone she knows, what they have said or done or her thoughts even spring simply from how she feels about those relationships in her life. I find this amazing and altogether diametrically opposite of my process of thought.

My thoughts resemble more closely a desk with documents moving across it. I have realized in the past week that my thought process actually looks very much like my job. How this happened I am not sure. Did my job make my mind this way or vice versa, or do I just see similarity between the two to make myself feel like I know what I'm doing more than I actually do? These are not important questions because, for one thing, they're almost unanswerable and another, if I did answer them, that answer could potentially make my job situation quite awkward.

I think in terms of filing. Documents run through my mind. These documents could be representations of anything. Movies I've seen, books or other articles I've read, people I've seen, conversations had, anything. All these events as they pass get filed away in my mind, somewhere. I realize that I can't use them all at once nor are all of them usable at first look or alone as they come, but everything gets filed, nothing is passed by or written off as meaningless.
I think this may be why I like quiet so much, why I can be so silent much of the time. Any noise or talk disrupts my filing work. I can't become distracted because then I may move onto something else and that leaves a pile of unfiled documents sitting on the desk of my mind. If I leave a pile, then the next time I want to think through something, I would first have to dig through a pile of miscellaneous documents. This doesn't go over so well at work, nor does it in my mind.

This train of thought is also why I end up writing the way I do. I don't really have the desire to write all the time, everyday, jotting down every thought and feeling I may have. What I think happens is that at some point in this process something changes and this change causes a handful of my files to line up in some particular order, at which point, a blog comes flowing out. All of the sudden, a portion of all those documents I have been saving up just all make sense together and create a story or a picture. One leads to another, some answer others, one that didn't make sense before now does, another that I thought was monumental is now just a single line or fragment. It's interesting when this happens because in the event of this coordination occurring the need to write becomes the number one priority and I can become quite irritable the longer I have to wait to get it down.

This can create problems, say, if someone I live with has made dinner and it's waiting to be eaten. It's urgent, though. Just as I file away all my thoughts, I feel that when they line up, the thoughts in that bunch end up corrupting and sort of partially dissolving if I don't write them out. Times when I have waited, going to write it out at a later time it all comes out weird and messed up and I'm left shaking my head in irritation, feeling like I just wrote an important paper and the computer has gone and deleted it.

I suppose the real question then is what is it that causes these files to line the way they do when they do? I can answer this easily, but I can't produce it as easily. Irritation is what motivates my writing when it all comes down to it. That little thing that changes is simple, basic raw human emotion, and the cheapest kind at that, anger. I will be watching TV and some commercial will come on that just rubs me the wrong way, someone will be talking loud and about nothing on their phone on the train, the train won't come when it should. Or, as history shows it, the most potent irritation causer in my life, I have to deal with an organization (also a large part of my job).

There's nothing better than an organized public office to push that button in me that just makes me want to wish the human race right out of existence. I find myself empathizing with those psychos who are now in prison for walking through some office unloading round after round into staff members and authorized personal. Upon getting off the phone with most any staff members at the local court, after my immediate question, "why the hell did you even pick the phone up," dissipates, I can't help but wonder, how many "crazy" shooters were just trying to obtain some simple public record or perhaps a license renewal?

The college I attended allows alumni to make use of their fitness facilities for a small fee and the requirement that an alum must obtain a pass each month. At first look, this seems wonderful, how thoughtful of the school to do this. Don't get me wrong, I truly find this very thoughtful. Of course, upon attempting to reap these benefits as an alum, one finds themselves wondering whether all that is just a hoax and they really don't want us taking up space at their facilities.

In order to obtain an alum pass, one must go to the Alumni Office during business hours (8:30 am to 4:30 pm). Most of us who upon graduation went out and acquired full time jobs find it difficult to run such an errand during these hours. However, the gym we're obtaining the pass for in order to enter is open until 10 or 11pm most evenings. This immediately causes one to think logically. "If the gym is open so late, and the alumni office only during normal business hours, and most alumni, who work NORMAL business hours, want to access the gym AFTER said business hours, would it not make sense to distribute the alum cards at the GYM?" This thought is counteracted by the fact that at the gym, they do not have access to the alum lists needed in order to make sure you're kosher. In which I would AGAIN reply with simple logic...give them the list, give them some sort of access to some list. This is a college campus, make use of the local intranet.

Once you as an alum make it through those steps, probably by using half a sick day making up some story about seeing your doctor, other barriers exist. I desire access to this gym because they have racket ball courts. However, upon calling one day, I am told that they only allow people to reserve courts before 10 am the day they want the court. This is strange and unfortunate as it is now 11:30 am. I ask whether any of the courts at this time have been reserved, the answer is none. I plead to the worker to reserve one of the courts for me anyway, no such action may be done. Finally, logic kicks in again and I just throw out the question of why this policy is in place. Now at this point any reason would still irritate me, but it would have been a reason none the less. The worker on the other end of the line, however, proceeds to quickly and definitively tell me they do not have any idea why that is, "but you're not going to reserve me one" I retort, "no."

The files line up and I feel I have a bit more insight all of the sudden as to why people hate each other so much. Organizations all have a few things in common, to start, workers who don't want to be there, don't like or care about what they're doing, are more interested in finding ways to do as little as possible rather than doing what they have to do well and at the end of the day questioning nothing and large volumes of rules and regulations, most of which are outdated but still in practice, others that never made sense but have never been challenged probably because the individual who thought them up in the first place was some irritating control freak who was attempting to fill some familial void . Of course, with situations like mine with the gym or dealing with city workers, these are innocent and at the end of the day, really don't amount to much in the grand scheme of the human race. But what happens when these attitudes and actions are compounded, what happens when it's all added up into society as a whole? What happens when these same situations occur in politics and religion?

No wonder people run around killing others for thinking different than they do, no wonder we find it so easy to judge actions not our own. We're all working on inbred bad protocol. We're all willing to stand up for something we don't fully understand or know about because we're too scared or lazy or stupid to ask questions. We love our comfort and if eight hours a day, doing as little as possible, knowing better how to get rid of customers rather than truly help needs is affording us what we personally find comfortable, why do anything more?

Today I had a crazy idea that just might work. Usually my solutions to these situations, tongue and cheek heavily involved, have something to do with some kind of xenocide or someone at the very least getting the hell beat from them. However this idea is much cleaner. The first step would be for society as a whole to simply fire all those who suck at their jobs and/or didn't want to work anyways. Once fired, these individuals would be promptly put on unemployment. Meanwhile, all those still working would immediately receive major raises in pay, of course, at the same time, more would have to be taken out tax wise to balance out the deficit all those now on unemployment would now have created. This would end in those who actually come to work to work being able to get more done because all those they're working with and needing will be hard at work as well, while making around the same amount of money (more taxes as I said), but now there would be no more dealing with idiots who shouldn't have picked up the phone in the first place and ultimately just end up wasting your time.

I feel that this could work and I wish I would have had this thought about five years ago because I would have written something like this for my ACT essay portion when they slapped you with one of those overgeneralized questions about how we think society should run or what two things would make the world perfect. These questions are ultimately bogus because the ACT or SAT is the only time in life anyone is going to ask you this, the rest of life is the askers trying to get you to stop thinking about it and just take your lunch break already. Of course, we all know they take the good essays and implement them as public policy, which is, again, why I wish I would have thought of this sooner.