General venting-slash-family stuff...

[IamLEAM1983]

The last couple months were hard on me, my mother and grandma. Not in terms of unfortunate events or anything, but in how living at four is causing some of our respective traits to be amplified.

Let's start with me. I'm subsisting on contract work and I'm having a hard time finding what would fall within my parents purview of a Respectable Position. I'm setting money aside, but I won't be ready or able to leave the nest anytime soon. It's a fact that's pressing on everyone. I'm thirty years old, I don't even have a hundred dollars to my name outside of my Imaginary Condo Savings and my government-subsidized pension plan (yay disabilities and spending my twilight years on the poverty line!). I'm single and I'm a literal basement dweller as of a year ago, now. I don't personally mind being single - I've never minded solitude - but that clashes against Grandma's values. Life as of 2013 feels like this Kafkaesque setting of which she can't grasp heads or tails, stuck as she is trying to stick a Norman Rockwell-esque Leave it to Beaver outlook on family life.

My thesis being what it is, my social life has dwindled to the halls of academia and my two good IRL friends. I'm not buddies with anyone in my promotion; I just haven't found any sort of kindred spirits in there. Considering how I'm lucky if I see the insides of a bar or a pub once a year, most of my conversation fodder comes from news coverage and various bits and pieces of Internet and gamer trivia. I've reached a point where I've vulgarized all I can vulgarize about Lovecraft, so I've just stopped talking about it all. The consequence of that is that I'm oftentimes stuck using small talk as a bridge. I can acutely feel how... inane an average day has become for me, conversation-wise, so I try and direct my curiosity where I can. On family stuff, mostly. It annoys the heck out of Mom. We snap at each other on occasion, now. There's underlying factors behind it, so stick around for a couple paragraphs...

Then, Grandma. Like I said, she's stuck in this Betty Davis Stepford Wife bullshit scenario where every tiff the family goes through is somehow implicitly her fault. The router dies, I have to reset it, the pin-in-the-little-hole technique doesn't work and I have to call the ISP to get it fixed that she thinks it's her fault! She's passive to a degree I didn't know could exist! At the same time, being of that 1950s mindset, the house is her kingdom - and by God does she fucking hate her kingdom.

See, we've always been a pretty average family. We're busy, people go in and out of the house all the time and at all hours of the day (and sometimes night), and we rarely if ever dedicate big spans of time to giving the house one big clean-a-thon. I clean up the basement on a weekly basis, but coffee spills happen. My parents clean up the living areas and kitchen almost as often, but we have a dog. The floors are therefore stained. Fact of life. My parents and I hardly notice it. We just go on with our daily stuff and our chores and maybe mop it up every two weeks. Grandma, though, agonizes over bits and flecks of filth that have refused to come out, the kind of stuff you need to kneel down and squint to spot.

Not a day goes by where she doesn't repeat the fact that she'd like to pull all of our furniture aside, move all the appliances, and give the entire freaking place a huge freaking wax job. She keeps repeating stuff about the nice glossy gleam the floors could have and about how we absolutely need to find the right wax and about how, for some strange reason in her weird set of convictions, I somehow won't break my neck once the main hallway is turned into an ice skating rink. Grandma does remember that any sort of wax job makes me jig like Daniel Stern on Monster Slime in Home Alone 2, but she's somehow convinced that a substance that's designed to reduce friction will somehow not influence my gait. The way she talks about it, the entire house's flooring having a kind of mirror-like sheen is the only thing that will sate her Household Borg Queen aspirations.

As to why she'd like to ideologically assimilate us, it's largely because she's from a culture where if you had a problem with your husband or your older kids, you sucked it up. You didn't talk about it. You did what you were told, and that's that. Consequently, some of the exchanges I have with my parents - honest tiffs aside - are misconstrued as problematic by her. When dinnertime turns into Let's Fix the World's Problems in an Hour as it usually does in House LEAM, she steps off as soon as we raise our voice to illustrate a point or to express a divergence of opinion. Just - why?! We're a family, we're allowed not to always see eye-to-eye, and my parents raised me so that I could discuss like an adult from very early on. At thirty fucking years old, I certainly am an adult, and certainly have opinions of my own - which obviously diverge from Grandma's borderline Apologetic Colonist doctrine. As soon as empirical disagreements show up, she out of the room and saying that she's the one who's tearing the family apart!

Just - augh. I'm not ranting because I'm afraid there might be some sort of fracture between us, I'm ranting because there are niggles I just can't fucking stand any longer. If you want a more obvious example, imagine trying to explain the inadequacies of copyright law to someone who's been brought up to think that these laws directly benefit the artist. In 2013, copyright is Big Business' best buddy and a flawed system artists have no choice but to stick with, if they want to have any chance at subsisting from their talents. I don't have answers or replacement systems to offer, but I can observe the current problems. Because I can't offer a replacement, however, I'm dismissed at the table. That's more or less what's going on when we tackle other issues at home. Yes, I'm lacking in life experiences, but I have the news, the Internet and my few friends as a net that's served me pretty well, thus far. I can at least attempt to grasp the world around me, and I sure as fuck am not going to wait until I reach Grandma's illusory Wisdom Threshold to speak my mind.

Plus, she's got her own fucked-up little habits, too. She buys a full set of ceramic knives for one of her daughters and forces my parents to spend two hours trying to open and cut the things' common blister pack, because she's afraid the gift's recipient might somehow look at a formless package wrapped in Crimbo paper and go "Ooooh, ceramic knives!" without opening it. So that means fighting it out with said blister pack and, what really perplexes me - keeping the wee little paring knife for Grandma because she wants to peel tomatoes with it.

I mean - this is a gift for someone else! How insensitive do you have to be to unpack the whole thing Scorched Earth style and then keep one of its components for yourself? It's like if I gave you guys boxes of chocolates but figured it'd be fine if I took my favourite ones out before wrapping the things! So now the whole set is unpacked and got thrown into a shoe box because ooooh, no, my aunt can't be allowed to guess what her gift is and Grandma is having the gall to boast about her new favourite cutting implement! I mentioned that since she bought the things at fucking Wal-Mart, she might as well just go back and have Dad buy us a new set for twenty bucks - but my over-protective mother immediately told me to stop harassing her!

With this, we come to my mother. She projects on Grandma, White Knights her way around any sort of debate that might involve her own mother, and persists in treating her like she's completely fucking defenceless. Yes, I know, she's worked in a nursing home and she still does and it's in her nature to take care of elderly persons who have a few physical or psychological problems - but if she could stop infantilizing her own damn mother, I'd be really fucking happy. Grandma has no physical or cognitive disabilities, she's autonomous and lucid - her only faults are to consider that inane banter about cousins twice removed that I've never met is of interest to me, or that the Facebook posts of some great-aunt I haven't seen since the fucking crib will be of any interest to me.

Mom has a drinking problem. Mom smokes like a chimney. Mom rots her brain with Mahjong Titans or Angry Birds and she's usually too soaked with fucking wino to be even hungry enough to have supper. Her diet largely consists of breakfast, lunch, two full bottles of wine and a slice of bread. Getting her to stay awake long enough to pretend to eat something in the evening is a chore, and we can't do fucking shit on the weekends because all she wants is to sit on her ass and disconnect. Her one argument is that her job is hard on the nerves - which it is, with shit and puke and old people dying and orderlies landing her workplace in a government investigation after beating a patient - and that she can't disconnect in any other way.

It's bullshit. It's obviously bullshit. If she could be less invested in her work, if she could leave all that shit aside when she comes home, she wouldn't have to zonk herself out to get some sleep. She wouldn't have to make us put up with the fact that going fucking anywhere with her is hard, because we're not halfway through the main course that she's kicking my father and I in the shins to have us just QQ our rare meetings with other family members. Abort, abort, abort - the missus wants her bed! Sorry, Aunt Isabelle, I'll talk to you via email, I guess!

Add to that the fact that in one of her uninhibited soliloquies, Mom has pretty much admitted she's depressive to me. I told her to get help, which she said she'd work on.

That was two weeks ago. Has she done anything? Fuck no.

In normal circumstances, I should be looking forward to tomorrow and the 25th. Christmas is fun, right? Tomorrow's going to be the usual Get Your Clothes Soaked with Cigarette Smoke Day and Listen to Everyone Else's Commiserations About Your Own Fucking Life Day. Every fucking year it's the same thing. Why don't you have a girlfriend? Why don't you have an actual job? Are you still job-hunting? How's the career going? You still a gamer, right? You know you're getting too old for this, right? Come with me, cousin o' mine, we'll go and bar-hop and find yourself a stripper, drop that virginity a couple notches down, huh?

I wanna fucking scream, honestly.

Then there's the 25th. In which, nominally, nothing bad will happen. It's just that after a year of being poked and prodded and putting up with Grandma's fucking stupid TV shows - if I have to see another episode of Road to Avonlea, I'll fucking kill myself - and her recriminations and Mom's and trying to escape in my work or in games, I really want a couple hours I could call my own.

No dog, as much as I love Romeo. No parents. No grandmother. No questions, no inane bullshit, no litanies about waxing the floor or about how the house is never clean enough for Locutus of Stepford. No fucking heartless mooching of bits and pieces of individual gifts because the gift-giver is a fucking cheapskate.

Just an empty house with me in it. Me and loud music, probably me and the computer - just me blowing off steam like I've been aching to do for the past six months. I have Polk Audio speakers, goddamnit, and my computer is plugged to a Hi-Fi system. Fuck if I'm not going to use it once a year to fucking play some Death Metal. Which, of course, I never get to do, because it gets on the nerves of the two local females. Earphones all the time, here.

If anything, I think it's a sign. I have to start looking for a way out. This place has just turned too narrow for me. I can't think for myself or otherwise enjoy myself before 10 PM because prior to that, I sometimes almost want to climb up there, stare at Grandma with a spastic smile and start wrecking shit if she so much as mentions Aunt Rita or Marco Ouellet from New Brunswick who just had another epîleptic seizure.

So yeah. That was my yearly Mental Pimple-Popping session.

[TennyoCeres84]

*hugs* I'd say this is a pretty common situation with a lot of Millennials: wanting to leave the nest, gain financial and social independence and really get life started. Hang in there, Leam. You can vent to us whenever you feel the need.

[Weirdlet]

*hugs*