I don't express a whole lot of emotion. Most of the time it feels like a nuisance to bother with them at all. To be honest, most days I have a slightly larger range of emotions than the average banana. However, there is one thing that stirs up emotion and gets me hot under the collar with unfailing regularity: the self-checkout lines at grocery stores.
Nothing gets my blood boiling like watching someone cradle a cabbage like a baby while struggling to find the code to enter. And don't get me started on the folks who use cash to pay their bills. The whole thing is just an exercise in futility for most people.
It doesn't help that I have really bad luck in picking the right people to follow. I tend to choose to follow the guy with the 4 identical cans of soup in his basket over the hipster chick with her wide array vegetables without bar codes and overpriced organic health food. And inevitably it turns out that the veggies/no bar code girl can kick a registers butt, moving with precision and expertise while the 4-cans-of-soup dude gets dumbfounded with each can as he tries to swipe it across the scanner over and over. And over. And over.
Why do I always choose the slow person? And no that isn't a question about my wife. Although some mornings....but I digress.
As an introvert I rarely have the urge to strike up conversations with strangers but when I find myself in these situations I come dangerously close to blurting out phrases that would best be described as colorful and unsavory.
Before you judge me too harshly, let me confess that I wish it weren't so. I wish I could master my emotions. With as few as I have you'd think it would be easier! I wish that 3 minutes of my time lost didn't bring up such ugliness. And I wish I picked better lines!
The good Lord must think that I need extra practice in patience. There is nothing like being at the mercy of someone else's incompetence for surfacing some suprising and unpleasant emotions (hello parenting).
There is two millennium of speculation about what the "thorns in the flesh" were for Paul. Most people go for really serious, deep stuff but my guess is that it was some trivial thing like the self-checkout line that kept bringing out the worst in him. We all seem to have 'triggers' that are guaranteed to make us forget everything our parents told us about being kind and gracious towards others.
More and more, I think that those are the moments that we are most truly ourselves and the rest of the time we are just lucky enough to have some measure of control over our circumstances so that we can keep the ugly stuff in. What we are at our worst is far more telling about who we really are than who we are at our best. For me every trip to the grocery store is a reminder that I'm not quite the guy that others usually think me to be.
So, if you see me at the grocery store pray for me. Even if I pick the line with the cut-my-coupons-while-everyone-else-waits person. I hope that I can get better at avoiding my usual surge of anger.
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