Confessions of an Impatient Person

I'm impatient. Yes, I'm coming clean. If I were cast in a Shakespearean tragedy, impatience may be my tragic flaw.

Well, not about everything. If I were hard core impatient, I would have lost my mind as a teacher by now. Elementary + Middle School kids - Patience = Insanity. But in other things, especially recently, I've been maddeningly reminded of how impatient I can be.

While I'm driving, for instance. I have conversations with all the cars around me. "What were you thinking, Mazda?!" "Don't even think about it, Expedition. You gas guzzling landmass." "Aaargh! Just because you're a Volvo doesn't mean it's cool for you to cut in front of me and then go 5 miles per hour!" I hate extra long red lights too. "Oh, come ON!" Usually I drive around by myself. But now that my aunt is here for the summer, I've been driving around more with her. She looked at me kind of funny after one of my outbursts, and though she didn't say anything, I felt checked. I realized that I really do need to chill out and be a more patient driver.

I was also near tears when I couldn't print out my paper yesterday. I know that is ridiculous, but technology is something else I get disconcertingly impatient with sometimes. I was yelling at my dad's computer, "You stupid computer! Why won't you print? The CD worked fine on my laptop, and now all of a sudden there's an error when I try to pull up my paper? What did I do wrong? All I want to do is print out my paper!"

In the end, I brought my laptop to campus, connected to the wireless connection, emailed the paper to myself, and printed it out at the lab. It wasn't the end of the world. Through this "trauma," I also realized that impatient people are usually the most frustrated people. Because things don't happen their way. Because it's not done how they want and when they want it done. That's an exhausting way to live life.