My Choice

I would like to talk about the link between communication and anger.  This school year I have been living alone for the second time in my life.  Over the past 2 years I have really calm down from the wild behavior of my past.  I quit drinking and smoking. I didn't really smoke much before I quit, but when I would get drunk I would smoke eventhough I always thought it was gross.  Smoking was a major conflict with my otherwise healthy lifestyle. So, I thought with my bad habits behind me my anger and frustration with other people would lessen or cease.  Unfortunately, when I quit drinking I lost alot of friends. I say that I lost friends which would be more my opinion I guess and I will tell you why.  I say that I lost them because I never see hardly anybody, much less my friends.  "My friends" and I still stay in contact which I think is pathetic because they live in the same town. I guess not all my friends live in the Grand Forks area, but I have more actual conversations with the ones that live far away. For the most part the local ones never understood me, but I feel like I had a good understanding of what they were about.  The reason I think they were easy to understand is because I pay close attention to how they act and what they say.  It is almost like I am waiting for them to do something that an aplology cannot cover.  Which is pretty sad, but I am used to people abandoning me when it suits them.  I am sort of an over thinker too, so if I become friends with someone I will tell them things and neglect what I think is obvious explaination. I don't have a problem with a little explaination here and there, but it seems like I am misunderstood constantly.
I have had problems with my temper in the past, not to the point of putting my hands on somebody, unless they did first.haha. My anger comes in the form of verbal abuse.  When I consider most the people that I have verbally abused were really selfish or jerks.  I base that opinion off of what I have heard from others when I asked them their opinion.  Anger does have its benefits, if there is alot of manual labor to be done or I am at the gym it comes in real handy.  It has no place in a conversation between people though, if someone is pig headed or incompetent getting angry with them won't help. Over the couple years I have taken the advice of an old sweethearted man I met while working in the oil field.  I had told him how I was having problems with this beautiful girl I was dating at the time. I explained to the old man how I tried to show this girl how I cared for her by telling her how she made me feel and doing things she liked to do.  I gave her flowers the first time we spent time together, but now I was out west and she was still in Grand Forks.  She became hard to get in contact with and I figured she was probably seeing someone else(which she was).  Then, one time after I hadn't talked to her for four days I called her and she answered.  I got excited and told her she didn't understand what I was going through and that she had always had things handed to her.  I also tried to make her see that we did only the things she wanted. That was the last time I talked to her until months later she tried to talk to me at a bar and I told her to stay away from me.  Anyways, the older gentlement told me to be grateful towards people and always try to show a good mood towards them.  I didn't agree with him at the time, but now I do. I am not under the impression that all of my relationships would be saved if I had been more accomodating to people, but I would know I did what I could.  There are a handful of people I would want to be in my life still that would probably still be around if my behavior didn't frighten them or piss them off. I still don't think ninety percent of my past relations are worth my time, but I'm learning.