When I was in high school, I took a class called "Positive Mental Attitude." If that sounds like a creampuff course with little more to offer than a slightly padded GPA, I thought the same thing when I signed up for the course. While it was the easy A that I anticipated, I must confess that there were elements of that class that have stuck with me. More elements than, say, precalculus, which ended up neither easy nor an A.

Coach Dawkins approached the class more seriously than other coaches approach their theoretically more weighty classes. He knew that most of us thought it was a joke, but he enthusiastically made us jump through all the hoops with lectures, discussions, and Zig Zigler videos. I'm not sure if I took as much away from the class as he had hoped, but there is one phrase that I remember quite clearly:

"When we're upset with ourselves, we will talk about ourselves in ways we would never dare talk about anyone else."

It's been a pretty rough week for me, self-esteem wise. I don't mean that in an angsty "I just can't beleeeeive in myself anymore [sob]" kind of way, but rather that there are tangible ways that I've screwed up in ways that could have costed me well over $1,000.

Last week, my folks got another letter from the Southern Idaho Bureau of Credit (SIBOC) that stated that I needed to sign an affadavit of forgery to settle the matter of a forged check. The only problem was that I sent them that affadavit almost a month ago.

I had intended to copy the affadavit two dozen times just in case they didn't get it. The only problem was that between the police station and Kinkos, I astoundingly managed to lose it. Within the first fifteen minutes of having it in my possession! I made a copy of the letter requesting the affadavit to send with the affadavit, but I realized before I made my second copy that the affadavit itself was missing. Knowing me, since I would be back at Kinko's later, I figured that I would just copy the letter then

So I had to call Detective Morgan and arrange to get another copy. He wonderfully obliged. To make matters worse, the reporting detective is the only one who can give me a copy, so I was wasting the Detective's time and not some secretary's.

Knowing me, after recieving the second copy I never copied it because it was so much hassle to get it I just wanted to get rid of it. Since I didn't return to Kinko's, I didn't have another copy of the letter requesting the affadavit either.

So after cussing up a storm about how irresponsible and lazy I was for not going to Kinkos like I had originally planned, I called Morgan and asked him for yet another copy of the affadavit, apologizing profusely and promising to go to Kinko's immediately after. He was wonderfully understanding and I got another copy of it.

Meanwhile last week, I took a trip to the lube place to get my car tuned up and to the bank to cash a paycheck. When I left the lube place, the check was missing from my car. Knowing me, I reasoned, I left it at the apartment. When I got to the apartment, it wasn't there. Knowing me, I reasoned, I either threw it away when I cleaned out my car. I can never, ever, ever clean out anything without throwing away something of importance.

So I wrote our HR guy at work and asked him to cancel the other check and reissue a new one. He wonderfully obliged and said that he would go ahead and give me the reissue with the next paycheck that was due to come out. I thanked him a million times while cursing myself for losing yet another thing, as I seem to lose anything of even vague importance.

The check turned a couple of days later. I stashed it away in my CD case so that I wouldn't throw it away when I cleaned out my car. By then the new one had been reissued.

I got the checks on Friday and went to the bank on Saturday, two hours after it closed. Unfortunately, I don't have a mechanism to deposit checks after hours right now (I lack the slips, envelopes, etc.)

Monday morning I was driving to work and I noticed two envelopes on the front seat instead of three (the three: the nigh empty SIBOC envelope with Detective Morgan's card, the original paycheck that was now void, and the new paycheck and reissued one in a single envelope). Naturally, it was the one with the two paychecks missing. Knowing me, I must have put it in my pocket after seeing that the bank was closed and it probably fell out of my pocket when I sat down in the slacks I was wearing (which happen to be slacks where things fall out of the pocket when you sit down). For fifteen minutes I hurled one cuss word after another at me for losing three paychecks in two weeks. I searched my car while driving 75 mph (the Idaho speed limit) down the freeway.

The check was in the envelope with the voided check. I put it there so that I wouldn't have to worry about keeping track of three envelopes and instead only keep track of two.

Meanwhile, when I got my stuff together to send to SIBOC, I decided to put it in my job-hunting folder since that was where I kept pertinent documents on the road.

That's where I found ten copies of the affadavit and ten copies of the letter requesting the affadavit. I'd gone to Kinko's after all and apparently safely stored them there so that I wouldn't lose them.

Probably the most prominant trait I got from my mother is her temper. Most people don't associate me with an explosive temper, but when I get my guard down it happens. Usually with inanimate objects or things that I know I can cuss out without it doing any damage socially. Inanimate objects and, of course, myself.

Over the past week, I found myself saying countless things to myself. Accusations of incompetence, laziness, stupidity. If anyone else were to say half the things to me that I've said over the past couple of weeks, there's a solid chance that I would never speak to them again.

"When we're upset with ourselves, we will talk about ourselves in ways we would never dare talk about anyone else."

It's no secret that organization is not my strong suit. I go to extreme measures to keep from losing things and then forget the measures that I go to and lose them anyway. If there's a solution to this problem, I really don't know what it is.

Yet apparently I did just about everything right. I put the first check in a safe place, placed the second check so that I wouldn't have to worry about keeping track of so much, and made all the copies of the documents for SIBOC that I needed to.

The only thing that I didn't do was sit back and stop to think about whether or not I had actually done these things to begin with.

Every throught that began with "Knowing me..." ended with something that I didn't do.

So maybe I don't know myself like I think I do. Or, if I gain a little more faith in myself about these matters and keep improving, I don't have to be the person I've always known myself to be.