I couldn’t help it – it’s the day after Healthcare’s passage, and I was freaking irritated.  I had been irritated all morning.  I was irritated yesterday too, after Stupak rolled over.  Don’t ask me how I could have been foolish enough to even consider the possibility that he wouldn’t.  Even though I knew intellectually that this train wreck was going to pass, I was still angry when it did.

It’s like when your town’s last place NFL team plays the Superbowl champs.  How much emotional energy are you ready to expend knowing they are likely to get hammered?  Hopefully not that much.  But I expend the energy anyway, get involved in the game, then when they lose I walk around the house with a black cloud over my head for a period of time till I get over it.

It’s emotion at war with intellect.  It’s the term ‘don’t get mad, get even’ brought to life.  The worst thing about having your favorite team lose again is that emotion is all you have.  I am never ever going to be able to go try out for a pro football team so next time we can beat those rotten you-know-who’s.  All the intellect can say is ‘Hey, it’s just a game.  Life goes on’.

This morning, emotion was at war with intellect, and intellect finally had something to do beyond philosophizing.  ‘Hey, you know this time I CAN do something about it.  This time I can fight back.’  ‘Don’t get mad, get even’ became achievable. 

So I had the ‘get even’ part right, but it wasn’t till I was at the gym today that I realized if I were to engage my least favorite lib in an argument I would have sounded like Al Franken.  Not in terms of the arguments, but in terms of sounding, and maybe even being, bitter, unhappy and irritated.  I would sound like an angry liberal, except I’d be an angry conservative.  And if someone were just walking down the street and engaged me in conversation on the issues they would think I wasn’t much fun, because I was too irritated to have a sense of humor. 

I want to be seen as an optimistic, positive-thinking conservative with a sense of humor.  So I am going to enjoy this fight, and I’m going to laugh at the bums instead of letting them make me mad.

Don’t get mad, get even.  And have a great time doing it.