Happy Birthday Again, Doc Sleaze!

So here I am, another year older. Another year closer to the boneyard, as the late Philip Larkin would have put it. Birthdays are the times when you tend to take stock of things, look back at your life. That sort of thing. "Are you happy with your life?" people tend to ask. Usually just before they proceed to tell you how you aren't really happy and how following their advice will improve your life. I'm happy to say that psychoanalysing people I don't really know and presuming to tell them how they should be living their lives, isn't one of my many faults. Who am I to tell people how to live? After all, my own life is hardly a shining example. That said, I can't say I'm really unhappy with where and who I am, right now. that's not to say there are things I wouldn't change, given the chance. Mainly, I'd like to exert greater control over my ego and temper. They've caused me all manner of problems in the past, and continue to do so. It's not that my temper is violent or anything, it's just short and pushes me into pointless confrontations. I don't know what sets it off sometimes. Quite often its just some inexplicable desire to be contrary - someone will say something and I'll immediately have to disagree.

Then there's the ego - combined with the temper it just pushes me to prove my 'superiority' by 'outsmarting' authority figures. This hubris has come close to destroying me in the past - I can't deny that at least once over the past few years I've been the architect of my own spectacular downfall. Most of the time I can keep them in check by channeling them into other avenues - writing The Sleaze, for instance. I know that my ego and temper make me impossible for friends and colleagues to deal with a lot of the time. I know I must seem infuriating. If not for my ego, I'd apologise. But that would set my temper bristling again and just make me worse. Now, I understand that all this must make me sound as if I have a poor self image, but I also accept that these character traits are an integral part of me - they help define who I am. And as I said, I quite like who I am. I'm also aware that my good points usually outweigh my inadequacies. Moreover, being occasionally infuriating doesn't necessarily make anyone either dislikeable or a bad person. Possibly the most infuriating person I know is also one of the nicest people I know. Indeed, they are probably the person in the world I've felt closest too in many years. Although, due to personal circumstances, I rarely see them now, I still feel an enormous warmth toward them. The fact is that if they weren't so bloody infuriating, I wouldn't like them half as much. So there you have it, another birthday nearly done - time to stop being introspective and get back to normal!