I’m amazed by my Associate Dean. He is a man of truly infinite patience and kindness. Not remotely a pushover. The expression “balls of steel” was created for this guy. Machiavellian in his plotting capacity. But his reserves of patience are infinite. He has about 70 times more absolute walnuts total morons wonderful people and great intellectuals working under him than I do. Yet he never loses his patience. To give just one example, there’s a form several of us have to sign digitally. We’ve signed these forms for years, yet there’s been an endless exchange of emails about the form because we are just not managing to do it. Instead of telling us all to bite it, he filled the form himself and emailed it to us.
How does he do it? OK, he’s religious. But so am I! And it’s not helping. I told the priest at confession about my irritability. He started giving me instruction, and I immediately got annoyed. So that’s a work in progress.
I’m good when I have time to react. I meditate a lot by way of decorating my notebook. But my instantaneous in-person reaction is too fast. I have the words “wow, what an incredible moron you are” pulsating on my face like a huge neon sign before I can get a handle on myself.
By the way, there are two people on this planet who don’t know about my short fuse, moodiness, and congenital judgmentalism. And they don’t believe me when I tell them. These people are my husband and child. They think I’m the most even-tempered ray of sunshine that ever existed. So I’m not completely hopeless.
I just don’t love people enough, that’s the problem.
Clarissa's Blog 
This and the previous post are the first times in my long life that I’ve heard “walnuts” as a derogatory term. Where does it come from?
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I live to amaze with my wordsmithery.
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I see this with a lot of my religious colleagues, but they’re all American-born Protestants (almost exclusively Lutheran) who were raised in the church. I don’t think it’s the religiousness per se, rather than this patience and automatic magnanimity inculcated from birth in (some? many? most?) Protestant denominations. Or, as I think on my more cynical days, it’s that any natural impetus toward anger or impatience these folks were born with got stamped out in childhood by authority figures. I am extremely impatient and quick to anger (although I control my temper because I’m a grownup), and, like with you, I often think, “God, why is this person so dumb?” In my experience, Catholics and Muslims can be just as hotheaded as the rest of us, but the Lutherans around me have a Stepford-wives quality that adherents of other Christian denominations and other religions don’t seem to have.
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