one challenge i think i'll save for later

When I went to visit my brother in Alabama last month, I noticed a glass jar on their kitchen counter with the words 'FESS UP scrawled on it in permanent marker. There were about three coins in the jar, and my brother's use of obscenities seemed pretty seriously curbed.

I was impressed. Mostly because I have known him to be quite a curser at times, which has never bothered me because I can be quite the curser myself. My dirty mouth is especially jarring to people who haven't been around me much because I come off as a sweet little ethnic girl who knits and bakes zucchini bread. And that is mostly true--until you're sitting in the passenger seat of my car when I'm following a chronic braker or I'm bumping up against a big deadline and starting to lose it. At those times, there's a veritable hailstorm of four-letter-word combinations, complete with fist-shaking and voice-raising.

I blame my line of work. In the Waiting For Reports world, there can be a lot of last-minute do-overs and attempts to accomplish what would normally take eight hours in what is closer to 20 minutes. And one common denominator of all the places I've worked is that the more important the assignment, the more drops of the F-bomb. It's not every day you hear "b*stard "and "c*cksucker" flying around the office and realize it's an exchange between your supervisors about that evening's schedule. Granted, these words are never used against anyone personally--they're just an expression of the stress that we can sometimes be under. It's so prevalent that one of my colleagues at the last place would play this Bud Light commercial every morning after she started her computer. You know, just to get in the mood.

H suggested I get my own 'Fess Up bucket and put in five bucks every time I slip up, "so then you can come visit me ALL the time!" He tends to exaggerate, but I do think that I probably should try and vent my frustration some other way. But even though I love myself a challenge, I refuse to put myself on the jar system. As you may have seen from the last 30 days, I really go out of my way to keep promises--even if that means telling my boyfriend to busy himself with something else for an hour every night he's in town or take myself to a library under construction to make sure I've maintained my oath to Nablopomo. Once I sign up for something, I'm in it for the long haul.

But dammit, only for those hauls that I think I can manage.