Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new "disease." Meet "IED" or "Intermittent Explosive Disorder."

The clinical description isn't all that complicated, but let me put it in layman's terms for you anyhow. "Sometimes people lose their temper and you're not always sure what triggered it."

I am passive-aggressive with mild obsessive-compulsive disorder. When I was growing up, I grew up in a family and an environment that instilled a certain amount of discipline in me. Consequently, in spite of "suffering" from these two "mental disorders" I am a fully functional member of society who expects no special treatment for my "conditions." (My procrastination and laziness are quite unrelated, and would be quite under my control if I wanted.)

Seriously. We need less self-help and a little more discipline in this country.

Not that long ago, I heard someone excusing her friend (or an acquaintance?) for having been intolerably rude by saying that she "had trouble with social boundaries." And you know what? That's crap. No 30ish person not having been locked away from society for their entire life has any reason not to have learned social behavior the way way we, the other monkeys, and the whales learned it. By familial training, observation, and interaction.

The fact is that Ms No Social Boundaries was a wallower in self-pity who thought she was mistreated by nearly everyone she met, so she felt free to lash out at the merest implication of criticism. And her "friends" were only making things worse, chasing after her and trying to get everyone to play into her fantasy.

Ahem. But that's beside the point.

It's not that I don't have sympathy for people who suffer from serious disorders, or from seemingly benign disorders to an extent that makes their condition serious, but I have trouble taking medical research seriously when they're so desperate to name everything.*

I'm still looking forward to the day when medical researchers find a completely normal person and have to come up with a label for that condition.

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* I've been rolling my eyes about this ever since I heard about the doctor who was bitterly disappointed to have his suggestion ("Name the 'condition' after me!" he said.) rejected in favor of the more generic "shopping bag arm" (for those red marks a heavy bag makes on your forearm).

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I had a sudden cranky moment. I don't know why.