Push Button Emotional Regulation

NYTimes reporter Kate Zernike tells me I can cultivate a calm temperament.

I experienced it once. Someone was yelling at me. Then I realized that someone was having a fit directed at the world and only consequently directed at me, and for once in my life I did not take it personally. Instead of spending most of his tirade preparing my yell-back, I stopped myself, dropped my shoulders, and relaxed my face to watchful. As my face went, so did my insides. I was inspired. It was like a drug. I'm going to try to do this for a week, starting now. I'm tired of worshiping at the altar of free assocation and whippity swift. As much as I admire rapid fire, it should not have full control over me. For help, Zernike directs us to Professor Gross's five methods of emotional regulation: situation avoidance; situation modification; attention deployment; and repression. All of these seems strange, kind of chicken. But if I employ #1 and don't get out of bed for a week, I'll have this licked. Except for the hiding under the sheets part.

As if a prequel, two weeks ago while traveling about in the car, I suggested to Edit that I needed a button. That if Edit could buzz me when I talked too much or to myself, then I could get conditioned to be more retrospective. Twenty minutes later, at the conclusion of some chatter of mine, Edit said simply, "I wish I had that buzzer now."
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"Why don't you color your hair, Mom," Lex asked. "In fact, you can use my box of L'Oreal. Really. You use it." Another walk by shooting.
"I'm okay with my hair," I say. "I hate the bleached out blond frizz mid-life look."
"You've succeeded. It's green," she said.
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As I worked the automatic checkout line at Ikea, a man came up to the woman who was helping me at self-serve and asked, "I'm getting a Christmas tree from the front lot. Where do I pay?" "You can pay here," the Ikea Elf replied. "How many trees do you want?"
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From RS 1067:
Hirsute: shaggy, course, bristly. mnemomic: Her course suit should have felt better for something bespoke.
Is it just me, or does Rivers Cuomo singing "Don't Worry Baby" sound like someone's playing Brian Wilson on warped vinyl, but so yes to Lily Allen. Oh, gosh. Rolling Stone magazine. I have avoided it as if it were cocaine. I was the worst disc jockey of all times, and had the shortest career track. Worth every second of hell.
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VF
It's a shame one has to travel across so many pages of CN advertising to get to the Editor's Letter. I almost didn't make it. I got to the Carlisle collection ads and began to think about the economic impact on suit lines - how hardly out of the depression early 40's they looked, followed by an ad for another crappy age defying hahaha cream foundation that made me wonder if I was reading Allure. Then Rolex. Then Revlon. Then Ford. Yikes. (Can't. Whatever. Won't.) Distracted as I get, I could barely refocus on font size 10, but I did.
"So here we are in the waning days of his [Bush's] presidency, and he's still at it. Bush and Cheny have been working feverishly to write as many as, by one count, 130 new regulations undermining federal laws protection not just our environment but also our civil liberties and personal safety. And with the nation's attention ping-ponging between Obama-mania and Dow-phobia, the White House is hoping we won't notice. It's the environmental equivalent of stuffing the china and silverware intor your suitcase before clearing out of the guest room. The New York Times and The Washington Post have been particularly diligent in shedding light on these final, grapsing acts of an administration[.]" Graydon Carter

So I guess what the Chicago Tribune needed was more Rolex and Louis Vitton ads, or maybe what it lacked was enough of a backbone to do actual investigative reporting to earn the circulation numbers to get those accounts. Wish I knew - but I hate that it filed.
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