Name Calling

My train of thought is often sporadic. I'm a tangential thinker. One thought will remind me of something else, which leads immediately to a completely different line of thought that in turn brings up another issue, and so on and so forth until I can't remember how I even started thinking about the last thing I was thinking about. The structure of that last sentence slightly mirrors that thought process.

This morning I started thinking about babies that friends and people I know have had recently or are expecting to have soon. One of my favorite parts of thinking about babies are their names. I get very excited about names. I wrote down a list of six first and middle names for my future children when I was in middle school: Rowan Dade, Ian Lowry, Samuel Seamus, Gavin Ezekiel, Emma Jean, and Llivinia Anne. Granted that list is slightly out of date with my current taste in names, but I still make a list on occasion.

Thinking of names for future children, which lasted for at least ten minutes of my commute, led to thinking about my family. Thinking about my family was not a good succession from the previously happy line of thought.

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Family is a crazy thing. You can't choose them, and they can't choose you. Everyone is stuck in the same situation and must make the best of it. Some of us are better at adapting than others. I believe that often I fail at this. I constantly find myself stuck in the middle of things, and I don't know how to fix them or change them or make everyone happy. Maybe that is the lot of the youngest.

I screamed at my family on the way to work this morning. I experienced a period of inner road rage. I yelled at the pictures of them in my mind because I can never yell at them in person.

A coworker told me that while this may seem therapeutic it can actually lead to trouble with the law. She was on her way home from a holiday get together with family where she could not have politely said what she was really feeling. She had her own screaming session on the drive home, and a highway patrol officer eventually pulled her over. She had not been speeding or doing anything else wrong, but apparently several truck drivers had witness her release of rage and called her in to the highway patrol because they were worried about her.

I think that I will refrain from doing my yelling in the car for the future, especially as it will most likely be while in traffic. Rage, we need to get it out, but our outlets for it are so limited. Perhaps I just need to join a firing range.