I wanted to get angry....but couldn't

Hello all

As some of you know, I have a big announcement coming up on July 2nd and in preparation for what it relates to I had organised a shopping trip with my friend Michelle.

Now, I have mentioned Michelle in this blog before, more precisely in the "Bantre Bus" blog when I mentioned that I had known of her for a year but had never had a conversation, well after that blog I decided to add her on Facebook and try and have a conversation. That was about 6 weeks ago and we've had the odd conversation and I do quite like Michelle, she's unlike any friend that I already have and that's a good thing.

So anyway, this shopping trip with Michelle was organised to start at 11/12ish on Saturday but I get a message asking it to be pushed back to 1pm as she was feeling a bit ill, which was fine by me. So after a bit of mulling around Lincoln, it gets to 1pm so I wait at the agreed location.......

1:15 - Ok, she's a little late but I'll let her off.....afterall, she is doing me a favour.
1:30 - Bit of slack timekeeping but oh well, I'll sit and read my book.
1:45 - Oh, that's quite a random fact (it was a book of useless facts), *looks up* Oh, still no Michelle.
2:00 - "Sir, can you please move along or we'll have to ban you from the Waterside for excessive loitering!" ....What? all I'm doing is waiting for my friend.....who, by the way, is now an hour late.
2:15 - I wonder how long people on Facebook would wait? General consensus being that I should have left after 15 minutes. I want to stay because I have a lot of patience but I don't want to end up wasting the only day off that I had for a while.
2:30 - Looking at it logically and it seemed she wasn't going to come....there's a train in 15 minutes.....fuck it, I'm off. Even now I feel bad leaving though.

So I'm there on the train home and to be honest, I was quite annoyed, however, I was strangely not angry. I get back to my flat about 45 minutes later and there's a message from Michelle on Facebook where she explained what had happened and to be honest, I could have easily got very angry, but I didn't, which surprised me, as I would normally have gotten quite angry.

Maybe it's because I had been listening to Sound of Arrows (I've included two of their songs in this blog entry) for the three hours leading up to that, or because I would feel bad getting angry at a girl who has been awesome since we became friends, but I don't know, I just didn't get angry.

I've been mellowing out in recent months and don't get even slightly annoyed by stuff that used to bug the shit out of me. I used to get angry all of the time but now I don't. Now I just let things slide, I just, I don't know, tend not to give much of a shit anymore. I think I spent most of my life taking everything far too seriously, so me mellowing out is definitely a good thing.

As I've been getting older and slowly creep up on being 30 (still just over 2 years to go) but it feels like it's only a short time, I have also noticed that my tastes have changed.....most notably in music. I used to only really listen to rock music, but I've started going right off that now and have been getting into synth pop, such as the aforementioned arrows. Maybe that's helped towards chilling out.

However, I think it all stems back to a conversation I had a few months ago with my boss. On the most basically level she made me realise that if I can't control the situation, why get angry about the result? What's the point in getting angry about something I can't influence, and I think that's what happened her. Other than physically picking Michelle up out of her bed and plopping her down in a shop, there was nothing I could do, so why get angry about it.

I have spoke to her a few times since and it's all good between us as far as I can tell. Hopefully that shopping trip can be rearranged for the near future.

Peace Out!