Anger Management

Ok, high time I came here and ranted. Well, it's not ranting. It's just some anger management right now.

I'm being really patient these days. With everything. Yes, I don't really want everyone to understand it. In fact I don't expect anyone to understand or whatever. It's just that I feel if I kept repeating it to myself, I'd be good at it. Gosh, I can never get that thing out of my head. I have, for some reason, always told myself that I will become what I tell myself. If I told myself I'm being patient, I will be so. I need more convincing for myself than for others. Or maybe I can't convince others about how convinced I am because I can't convince myself. This doesn't help but prove only one thing- I CANNOT SELL.

So, back to anger management. It is particularly difficult when you aren't burning your lungs out. It's even more difficult when you can't call up your best friend(s) because your head's so swollen with fake ego. And listening to all your favorite sweet songs doesn't help in writing or as they say, channelizing your energy to create something profound, meaningful and deep.

So yes, I am angry. Pissed. Angry. Irritated. All of those things that I could otherwise blame on PMS, and which I could get away with if it was for less than 6 hours. But, never mind. Things are definitely not looking good, despite me listening to all the sweet/happy songs. Only I can lie to myself well enough and delude myself into anger or happy highs. And with all that anger channelization, all I've doing is setting a record for saving drafts (thank you google for autosave). So far the count is : 4 blog posts, 3 mails. All resting safely somewhere where they wouldn't hurt/harm/maim/injure/kill anyone. Or lead to the same aforementioned happening to me afterward.

With all of this, I've made a list of things one should not do when angry. Some are based on real experiences and some are things I assume would hold good in a hypothetical situation:

1) Do not email. Type it out. Don't hit "Send". Let gmail do the "draft autosaved" thingy for you.
2) Do not talk on the phone if you're home and are not sure if your parents are asleep. Your parents don't need to know you've improved your swearocabulary over the years.
3)Do not kick your CPU when you know your PC is recuperating from the crash it went through 3 weeks back. It wouldn't help to have no music, no e-books, no sitcoms, no movies, no xkcd, when you're fuming.
4) Do not go for a haircut. Just in case.
5) Do not watch movies where the protagonists look real cool stabbing themselves with needles in the first half and real sad-ass losers by the other half, and by which time you'd have probably given up on watching it.
6) Do not go down memory lane if you're angry in a combination- like angry and sad or angry and lonely or angry and whatever else. Remember- thinking about good old days when life sucked and you couldn't do anything about it would not help the days when life still sucks and you can do something about it but refuse to do so.
7) Do not drink too much coffee/alcohol/cola or eat too much of chips/spicy food/chocolate.
8) Do not keep precious objects within your reach. Do not keep them in the company of sharp/heavy/both objects.
9) Do not try those counting from 20 to 1 or saying the alphabet backwards kind of tricks. You'd only lose momentum in your angry tirade and miss an epiphany, if any.
10) Do not look for therapy from music-Listening to some chick singing about her boyfriend not understanding her or a crazed guy with laryngitis screaming about his skin bleeding and intestines boiling in bile won't help you. If anything, it will only make it worse. Go classical. Only instrumental. Listen to Beethoven, if anything. That is, if you have any of it or can be patient enough to download it.
11) Do not try that whole 'breathe deeply and break your ribs exercise". All you manage to do is create an atmospheric imbalance of some sorts around you. Not to mention, you feel more tired than before.
12) Do not get into the whole sweating it out drama. You decide to go loosen some fat and push all that anger through kick boxing or aerobics or whatever it is that you do in the name of exercise, and then you pull a hamstring, sprain an ankle or break your hip and get confined to bed rest thus earning yourself some more time to brood and work yourself into a frenzy.
13) Do not get angry at the beginning or middle of your weekend. Get into those furies just a day before getting back to work on a weekday. You can let it all out and only blame work. Or you'd get so mad with work, you'd sort of forget about the original anger situation.
14) And don't waste time blogging. And if you've done that already, don't let it go to waste by shoving it into "Drafts". And no, there are no funny scribbles, comics kinda things going with this one. Take it or leave it.
15) And lastly, if you are mildly sleepy, forget all the crap about not taking anger to bed. Just take it and go flat on it. Don't waste time thinking, blogging, reading, listening to music, watching stuff, talking etc. Just sleep. That's probably the best thing to do. Apart from burning your lungs and killing the germs inside with some well turned out ethanol. But, never mind.

How to get over Writer's Block.

We all suffer from this one. Well not all of us, only those of us who claim to be writers, or just write and when we are completely bamboozled as to what we can write that would amuse or mildly entertain us we transfer all the blame to this overused apology for lack of any creative brilliance called Writer's Block.

So what do we do to combat this illness?

Wake up and brush and take a shower. Turn off the TV and get off the couch. Get a pet guniea pig. Go walk the dog. Walk and get over the block.

Go green and stop eating for a day or two. Make resolution to write a page every day.

Go bungee jumping. Do aventure and extreme sports. Dabble in the occult. Learn fang-shui and tarot and crystal-ball reading.

Participate in a reality show or a talent hunt. Sign up to enter a secret military intelligence gathering agency.

Drink soup. Or liquor. Anything, just drink. Something's bound to get you worked up and if you remember what you did, probably you can just pen it down and it may turn out to be not that bad for a start.

If these don't work, watch a movie or read a book. You might get suddenly inspired and produce a imitation or a review or either disguised under the other.

In case you are worried you might get influenced, albeit subconsciously, by the perusal of such iterms, then just stare. Have a good look at the world around you. Stare at the ceiling fan and think about the cycle of life and its futilty ( Try keeping images of people hanging from the ceiling out of your mind here). Look outside the window, see how people rush about their daily lives and for once, get over yourself and try, try really hard to weave a story about those random strangers walking in front of you. If nothing fails to grab your attention, look harder and find someone really good looking and just stare. This may lead you to two things- you might just find your muse and a story henceforth or you might end up being reported to the cops on grounds of harrassment and hell, that might be some experience to write about!!

For those who seek inspiraton within, stare at your diary with a pen stuck in your mouth, fingers tapping to some tuneless rhythm while you are drooling on the page. You may go back a fifty odd pages and find something to read and wonder why in the world would you bother to write something so trivial in your diary, and that too in such detail. Then you'd come back again to the blank page st taring back at you. Here you might want to doodle and scribble and draw tiny hearts or smileys or stars or you might just sign your name again and again till you move on to another fresh page. Do a small recap and think of all that has happened to you in the recent past- would you want to put down your encounter with the dentist or your seventy seventh failed attempt to start gymming into words and seal them for posterity and private use? If you are a person with feelings and emotions and acknowledgement of the same, you might as well pour out all that you feel, wanted to feel or think you could have felt. You can garnish this with some help from your pocket dictionary and voila! you have a heart warming account of whatever monumental event that occured in your life.

But for those handicapped by the very prospect of having to use pen and paper for writing, well, boot up! Stare at your screen, with that cursor blinking on that white background and resist the urge to do the following things:
*Open other old files and just read them.
*Watch sitcoms ( Those addictive things are pure evil, but more about them later)
*Go online on pretext of using reference or online dictionary, because once you are there you might get tempted to do these :

- Look up stuff for reference and one thing leads to another and you end up reading Lindsay Lohan's latest blog post about new shoes.
- Chat up with the never-ending list of online friends and you go on talking about what flavour of ice cream you had for dinner last night.
- Visit Facebook and check out photo-albums and upload some more photos and this goes on for days!!!
- Dabble in the piracy debate with someone while downloading movies and music by the dozen.
- Just "surf" (rather cruise) the internet and amuse yourself into boredom.

So there, once you have been staring at the cursor for more than eight minutes, let your fingers dance away on the keyboard and just type. Practise typing if you may, just type. You are bound to form comprehensible words and meaningful sentences after a while.

Ok, these are the standard issue methods. For the ones ready to go that extra mile here's what to do.

Talk to friends, foes and strangers. Go to cafes and work the coffee and conversation formula. Just talk, and discuss and argue and talk some more. Share, listen, laugh, cry, give all the appropriate expressions with the aaah, hmmm, oooh, yeah? and chat up with people. Engage youself in a conversation with someone who speaks a language completely foreign. Act like a journalist, complete with notepad and pen, and interview people. Pretend and lie and become another person and talk. Talk to shady characters, to indifferent ones, to the bold and beautiful and allow yourself to be bothered enough to take an interest in their lives. Steal away their small glories and convert them into magnificient tales.

Fall in love. Fall, go all the way and mess yourself up. Go through all those feelings and emotions capable of mention in your all time favorite phil collins or lionel richie song. Listen to all those love songs, sit and day-dream under the sun. Abandon work and lie in bed all day, doing nothing. Talk for hours and smile a lot. Fight and cry, a lot. Sing and scream. Make up and make out. Forgive and forget and reminisce. Walk the bed of nails and tread the carpet of roses. Wait and let go. Possess and permit. Give away and take it back. Take away and return the favour. Wear red.

If you possess a full pocket to finance trips and expenses or passion for places, travel. Go exploring. Venture into uncharted territories. Board a bus, train or a flight, hitch-hike a ride, hop on to a boat, go to unmarked destinations. Visit the seven wonders of the world. Swim the deep waters and scale the great heights. Live in suitcases and tents, in student hostels or luxury hotels. In the name of cuisine, experiment with local delicacies. Do a hula dance. Fall sick with food poisoning. Get frost-bite. Try living in the desert with one single flask of water for five days. Go without a raincoat or umbrella where it never stops raining. Go to a sunny beach without sunscreen. Cycle across countries. Swim across the English Channel. Go Natgeo!

All these methods can be adopted in different permutations and combinations, as deemed fit by your inner wrting advisor. And if you find time from executing all these magic tircks, you can sit down and just write and get over that uninvited guest of a writer's block.