/karen/

Crankability

Friday, 19 November, 2004

So lately my sleep has been slowly improving (now that Ben has realised that he should be taking one of his meds in the morning instead of in the night) but I still wake up feeling tired. Fatigue results in crankiness, irritability, impatience and a low tolerance for anything that bugs me. It's hard to be godly when you're like this which is, I suppose, why God considers it to be good training. So I struggle on and often don't feel like I'm handling life very well (eg. booking our movers for the day of our last ever staff get together).

On Wednesday I was extremely angry at everything for reasons which weren't completely rational. The ARC had released the results of this round of grant funding (incidentally, my mother got a Discovery Grant for five years so congratulations to her!). So my superiors wanted the results on our site as soon as possible but the problem is we couldn't get them off the ARC's website until 1:30.

I spent the morning working on the development site to make our site “look” compliant even though it wasn't completely compliant (though certainly more compliant than the Faculty of Science) and then ran into a snag when I converted the top javascript menu into a side javascript menu; the silly menu still appears when you go to print the page and I have no idea how to turn it off. I tried surrounding the script tags with a div and then setting the div id to “display: none” in the print stylesheet but that didn't work. My supervisor, who knows nothing about javascript (hey, neither do I but I managed to teach myself a bit during my idle moments at work; I did Creative Arts and Arts for heaven's sake, not computer science), recommended that I ask ITS for a solution but that will just add to their arsenal in getting us to be totally compliant. I was running out of solutions but then it was time for lunch.

I had a meeting at 12:30 for NTE mission which I am looking forward to less and less (the very thought is exhausting) so that pretty much wiped out my lunchbreak (isn't it great when you go from work to work and back to work again?) That gave me only one and a half hours to put the ARC results online. My supervisor helped. They suggested earlier in the week that I go home earlier on Monday or Tuesday and stay back on Wednesday but Wednesday 3 pm is staff meeting and it would have been our last actualy staff meeting for the year so I said I wouldn't but I would come in on Thursday morning if they wanted. But they wanted the ARC results online by Wednesday night. So before 3 pm I put up the Discovery Projects and the Linkage Projects while my supervisor put up the Linkage Infrastructure and the Linkage International. I was getting more and more frustrated because people would keep on interrupting me and I would lose my rhythm and they couldn't explain to me what APD, ARF and QEII meant and where I was supposed to put them on the site (they mean Australian postdoctoral, Australian Research Fellow and Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship).

What gets me about the whole work situation is that they know I'm good at what I do, they can't give me enough work to do for the hours I'm actually supposed to be there (according to my employment contract) and they are still undecided about letting me work for them for a distance casually next year. I know I shouldn't care about it but the offer of casual work came initially from the PVC and now they're backpeddling because they're thinking of hiring someone else to do the webpage and the Research Profile which will probably mean that they will hire an admin assistant who is a good typist, is very organised with good communication skills but knows nothing about web design or HTML and will rely completely on Dreamweaver to do the coding for her which will mean that the site which I have spent the last seven months looking after will probably end up in as messy a state as when I found it when I first started working there. But why should I care? I care because I hate inefficiency, ineptitude and bad coding. I hate seeing the things that I have worked so hard to build being torn down. I shouldn't care so much but perhaps I am too tired not to care.

I finished later than 3 which meant that Ben, who was also taking Richard, dropped Richard off first and came back for me but didn't see me waiting up near the gate until I called him up on the mobile and told him off which meant that we arrived heaps later to the last staff meeting of the year than intended. By this stage I had really had enough and declared that I was not going to the last staff meeting of the year—I was too angry to go to the last staff meeting of the year—and went home instead, stopping at Gwynneville shops to buy half a kilo of potatoes with the vague thought that I'd make some Shepherd's Pie. But I didn't. I skipped Bible study, ate leftover salad, cried my eyes out because I couldn't yell at people or break things (that would be really ungodly, wouldn't it) and finished knitting another Sophie bag in the same manner as the first Sophie bag.

Which led me to reflecting on the nature of anger while I was sitting being angry and unable to do anything about it. See, I know I have a problem with anger. I come from a family of hot-tempered people. But I don't think the solution is just to tell me simply not to be angry; that doesn't solve anything. Because it's just saying that anger is a negative emotion (the Dark Side of the Force); there is no place for anger in this world. And the issue is far more complicated than that.

I started thinking about the anger of God. God does, indeed, get angry. Particularly at sin and rightly so. Jesus, too, got angry (see Matthew 21:12-13 and Mark 3:1-6). You cannot deny that God gets angry but God gets angry in a way which is different from our anger in that it is rational, it is controlled, it is “slow”, it is righteous indignation at a wrong committed against him. Though God's anger sometimes seems devastating and extreme (eg. wiping out the entire world through the flood), it is never so; it is exactly what people deserve because God is the only one who can judge the world justly.

(Incidentally, the fact that God does get angry with people makes me wonder if there is a better rendering of Matthew 5:21-26, otherwise Jesus is a hypocrite.)

In the New Testament there is plenty to say about anger:

• Vengeance should be left to the Lord and not taken into our own hands;
• Anger can divide a church;
• Anger is a work of the flesh;
• We are not to be angry for longer than a day. When we are angry, we are not to sin because anger opens up opportunities for the devil; anger, instead, should be put away (see also Colossians 3:8);
• We are to be slow to anger for anger does not produce the righteousness that God requires.

(Article on anger from Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Theology.)

I understand that, in a sense, we are to be angry the way God is angry—angry at sin but in a rational, controlled and “slow” way. We are to be angry at the things that God is angry at but we are never to take vengeance because vengeance is the Lord's domain.

But what are we to do about the things that make us angry that do not make God angry? How are we to “put off” anger when we are enraged? Nobody likes me when I'm angry—they would prefer it if I wasn't. I would prefer it if I wasn't but what can I do about my anger except run away and hide and cry because I can't do anything about it and I don't want to sin?

I was talking just now with a friend about the things (above) which made me angry and she said that it was only natural to be angry at those things. She couldn't give me a solution, however. She could only tell me the thing that she was constantly telling herself—to trust God and to know that he will help you in your situation. So I suppose I should pray when I'm angry and ask God to take it away or help me bear it (because he does not always take it away, does he). He will make me less of an angry person. But do I have to become a non-issues person to become a non-angry person? (Non-angry in the sense of being slow to anger at stuff, not an explosive raging person; I don't think I am explosive or raging.)

Current:

Blinks:

Feeds

• Full posts
• Full posts and del.icio.us feed
• Excerpts only
• del.icio.us feed only
• All comments

Social media

• Flickr
• Last FM
• LibraryThing
• Listal
• Ravelry
• Twitter