I get these episodes I call ragey rumination. They're where I ruminate about something that makes me furious. It's usually justifiable anger, but my degree of anger is often out of proportion to the cause and I sometimes even have them over incidents that occurred years, even DECADES ago.

Last night I had one over something that had not yet happened. (Brilliant, right?) I used to cope with these by drinking. Not getting sloshed (although I'm no stranger to getting sloshed) but a good stiff drink would calm me down. But I stopped drinking last week and was left to figure out how to cope with it sober (the horror!) I told myself that even if it did happen, it wasn't the end of the world; I'd get it sorted eventually. Then I drank a bunch of flavored seltzer while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and fitness-booking. (Like scrapbooking, but working on my fitness inspiration journal.) It did a surprisingly good job at calming me down.

And it did happen. I made the very wise move of waiting until after I'd eaten lunch to call the city marshall's office* so I was able to be civil and polite to the lady who basically told me it's payroll at my work who's effing this up, not them. She gave me dates, dollar amounts, and everything, which was helpful. This is good news, because I think I have a far better chance at getting a co-worker to fix this snafu than I do a New York City employee. I'm still waiting for the payroll coordinator to call me back, but I can always start bugging the VP of HR if I don't see some progress soon. We're mostly good people here - it'll get fixed and fortunately I'm hard to embarrass so I have no problem talking about my legal issues with HR.

*My wages are being garnished because a creditor filed a small claims lawsuit against me, but failed to serve me, which is completely illegal. I defaulted, as I didn't know I was being sued. I settled the matter with the city marshall to whom the claim was referred, but wages are still being garnished, currently to the tune of $500 (total, not per paycheck.)