RANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANTRANT.... I'll gladly continue with the Family Is Hell theme or Why Denethor Won't Be Posting This Coming Weekend.
So, my dad and his
harridan associate wife have planned a get together to which we are all cordially invited. I hope the implied threat of a firing squad at dawn for non-attendance is clear in that statement.
I get to spend the whole weekend in the company of the woman who, upon hearing the house was for sale last year, asked me...get this...
"So, did you ask the Realtors for any fashion advice?"
Whups...did I ask the
who for any
what?... Lady, do you even remember offhand what a Realtor
does? Yeah, drowning in gay friends as I am
, I still dress in a way of which you do not approve primarily because I need to
ask someone who's on the clock for personal advice that has nothing to do with his job.
In front of his clients. Next time I get a toe fungus, I'll be sure to ask this guy about that too. In front of his clients. And help me remember when I next go to the dentist that I have to look into buying a house. We can see if you can fit said house into your big mouth.
Oh, and I was supposed to move to a cheaper apartment right away, and if it's a depressing one, get back on enough psychotropic medications that I no longer feel dissatisfied with it! Because that's the answer to everything, if you're a l-o-s-e-r. Don't try to improve your life. Just take enough happy pills that you're satisfied with it the way it is. Happy now without pills?
Wreck your life, and get on the pills! (Lady, I highly doubt that there's a medication out there specific for the disorder of
not living the way you have in mind.) I simply cannot think of a single encounter with her in which a topic of this nature has not somehow come up.
She tells my sister all kinds of child rearing advice. Lately, my niece, with the genetics she's got, has been getting a little chunky. So this woman goes in for the rescue! - Because as we all know, no chunky child ever hears enough that they need to eat less. "And I didn't want to give the impression that it was all about beauty, I wanted it to be about health, so I told her that eating healthy - like
me - would give her beautiful
skin." Um - that's still about beauty. How about, eating right will help you not get out of breath during recess, a problem about which said niece had been complaining? And how about - oh I don't know -
coordinating with the child's parents? Oh wait, child's parents are by definition incompetent. My bad.
How did I hear about this? From the woman herself boasting about her "sage advice". Advice, see, is just "something to consider", so it's always ok if your conversation consists almost entirely of unrequested advice. I'd still be happier if she'd
consider not giving any. Especially if it consists of tearing down my kid sister when she's 400 miles away and can't hear.
Oh and you know, the college funds haven't been completely saved up yet, and the children are obliged to - gasp! -
share a room. The horrors - but wait, no problem! If my sister just buys fewer lattes and shoes, they can easily feed five on the East Coast on 30-some thou a year, save for college, get a McMansion like all respectable people, and, and... Never mind that, fact is, sis never drinks latte and if she bought fewer shoes, one foot would always be bare. Never mind that the fact that they can manage on their own with that much money and the cost of living where it is is
admirable. My point being, this woman has gotten through several husbands and a long enough life that it is really startling how utterly clueless she is about money. You read that right about the number of husbands.
Hm...when I want relationship advice, I think instead I'll ask the Realtor.
The upshot of the deal: my sister is unqualified to have procreated, and should spend more on luxuries in order to keep up appearances. And I should give up my decent job and my decent housing and go bag groceries and beg the government for money for medication that it turned out was making me
sicker, not better - being of course a waste of oxygen because I did
not procreate. (That Realtor fashion advice doubtless had something to do with that master objective. Something about nice partners and dates.) What in the world do we think we are doing, managing our own lives and earning our keep? There's no winning.
We all get to go to this event, in another town, most of us at our own expense. That's important. It is after all your
moral obligation to have enough money to get to anywhere the least pleasant members of your family want you to go, and to forego all pleasures in life if necessary to accomplish this objective. The objective being this time, a
cadet review friendly gathering where we all get critiqued on our ability to conform to some set of arcane rules that most of us will never feel we have to care about - keeping up with the Joneses has always struck most of us as a species of paranoia - revolving, of course, around a fancy dinner ("don't worry, dress is not formal, only the meal" -
Tr. "I dreamed about black ties and ball gowns, but we had to set it up to include you on your appalling budget and your unwillingness to spend money on clothing that
others would like to see you in".) My own transportation costs are paid, not because they think I can't afford it but because they know perfectly well it is not worth several hundred dollars to me to go get criticized for two days. Hence they know if I was paying my own way I'd somehow end up with the Swine Flu that weekend. Hey, one can still hope.
So we are all going to have to go get reviewed on our "etiquette". I'm not talking about the important kind of etiquette, the kind one adopts to communicate consideration for others. I'm talking about the byzantine set of rules involving forks, napkins, glasses, chairs, coats,
bon mots, &c. that one adopts to show that one is of the proper social class. Growing up as I did, I had
those rules crammed down my throat enough to learn to resent them all, and come out the other side. Unfortunately, I also have a severe case of the other kind of etiquette, the important kind, and am hence congenitally unable to drink from the finger bowl out of simple spite. An "accidental" tablecloth fire will have to do.
Our performance reviews, of course, will arrive via the family grapevine, having been, natch, delivered to someone else.
And I'll have to teetotal, because as folks around here know I have enough of a tendency to blurt the truth even when stone sober. Bleah. But in this case the truth is definitely out there, and will have to remain
out there. I'll have to rely on some of my favorite phrases, of the "with all due respect" and "I'll give that all the consideration it deserves" ilk. I'm sure you guys all know what they really mean and also why I don't often use them here, among friends.
Unfortunately large swaths of the family have turned in their excuses. Dogs & Guns Realty Inc. will not be attending. Neither will the Mad Architect. Neither will my cousins, whom I was really hoping to see. No one is able to bring the Older Than Dirt contingent. The person whose job it originally was to tear down my and sis's self-worths, who earned that privilege by pushing us through her loins, will of course not be there.
(The fact that that last is likely what is really pissing me off, doesn't escape me...)This
has to go better than I'm thinking. It could hardly go worse.
(Hugz to Shannon - in my case I've solved the Facebook problem for the present. As in, I'm not on Facebook. Given its ubiquity, however, I may not have that option forever. It appears we can agree for the present, family is hell. Maybe we should start a special thread just for that topic. Just in time for the Hellidays!
).
Ya know, when I was younger, there was this friend of my mother's who dropped a cinderblock on his foot to get out of going to Vietnam. I keep thinking of him lately, and am somewhat saddened, perhaps by the fact that the Army simply waited for him to get better and drafted him anyway.
Sorry for the wall-o-text, everyone. Sigh. I think I'll watch some
LotR - just not
RotK this time, methinks.