I've decided to stop aggressive behavior. Angry aggressive behavior anyway. It's not really in my nature and I feel like it's a misguided attempt at a defense mechanism that living in New York has brought out in me. This mostly applies to two areas of my life. (1)Working and (2) Bicycling.

In the case of working, what can I say. Most people lack common sense these days and I tend to take my work pretty seriously, whatever I happen to be doing. First my shoulders and back tighten, like I'm turning into a werewolf. Then my hands go into seizure mode and I start mock-scratching the skin off my face. This happens daily on average. I usually yell profanity, too. Someone always seems to be doing something stupid that either makes more work for me or causes more work/less progress in the grand scheme of things. Or that consumes more resources. I'm always thinking about resources, especially energy.


As for bicycling, I get upset with inconsiderate drivers, often yelling at them, flipping them off, sarcastically thanking them, and punching their vehicles. This rarely does anything but raise my blood pressure (i.e., cause the relentless knots in my shoulders to tighten even more). In one instance, a guy actually caught up with me going down 2nd Avenue. He'd been honking at me for taking up too much of the right lane. (Never mind that it was a Saturday morning with virtually no traffic and he had 3 or 4 other lanes to choose from.) So I flipped him off. He caught up with me, but by the time he got out of his car I'd passed him. HAH! This happened two or three more times before he finally got in front of me, right up in my grill and dared me to flip him off again. This is where I chimed in with one of my greatest comebacks EVER. Adam was there, he'll concur. I look the guy up and down, nervously. Feet on pedals. Look him in the eye. And all I could think of was the most hurtful thing I can remember kids saying to me from childhood. Probably one of the older Hoppe boys or Jay Leitz or Bobby Rourke. "Just go home." And I rode on. I wish I could've seen his reaction.