Curmudgeon

Every now and again, someone brings up my actual age and I become a bit surprised. I think that this is mostly because I don’t feel nearly as old as I am. It’s not even that I’m old, per se, just…well, a bit more chronologically advanced than you would imagine at first blush.

Normally, the fact that I don’t perceive myself as being as old as I am is a good thing. There are times when I should be more conservative with things than I am because of my age, but in general my self-perception treats me well. Where I actually feel my age, more often than not, is in the fact that I’m a bit of a curmudgeon at times.

Well, let’s just be honest: I can be cranky.

Of course, I’ve given up negativity for Lent for two consecutive years now, and that has helped a great deal. Karen even acknowledges that I am much more intentional about being positive about things. She points out, though, that if certain hopeful events that are drawing near on the horizon were removed, I would be back to being cranky again.

Of course, if you remove our hope, anyone can become irritable. You know…in my defense…

The reason that this is ricocheting about in my brain is because I often catch myself considering topics to write about here, and one of two things happen: either the topics are something that frustrate me or that I want to disprove, or else it’s a more neutral topic that I have difficulty writing about without sounding negative.

In short, I don’t want to sound or be negative in my writing all the time, because I’m really not such a negative guy. Well, at least not in my own self-perception.

About two years ago, I tweeted about how excited I was about something. A close friend replied with a remark indicating how happy she was to see a positive tweet…the unwritten message being that this apparently didn’t happen very often. I took that to heart. I cut back on my news reading, because it tended to make me frustrated. I tried in general to distance myself from things about which I have difficulty being positive.

That’s a trend that is continuing, and a move that will be happening very soon will assist me in that process. In the meantime, I’m going to keep trying to not be so negative. Because, being curmudgeonly is fun and all…but people tend to not want to hang around you for long.

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