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Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Good and Bad in everything (or, my life sucks, but it's sometimes good before it reaches that point)

Somewhere in Seaquest DSV, season two I'd guess, Dagwood asks someone for clarification on what's going on because he thought the aliens were their friends.  Whoever he asked explained, "I guess there's good and bad in everything."  Which leads to the memorable exchange later on:

"What that a bad in everything?"
"Yeah, definitely a bad in everything."
Or something like that.

Anyway.

We had pizza, that was good.  Opened presents, that was good.  Got an unexpected announcement in an extremely roundabout way.

Some months down the road I'll have a nephew.  That seems like good news, but I worry about finances.  My family teeters on the brink constantly as is, with no evidence of improvement in sight.  Still, good news.

At that point I was fully ready to leave.  Everything had gone well, and that is when you should get out.

Not to be.  First we we forced to stick around to watch Blink.  Good episode, missed it originally.  (I think it was the only Martha Era one we missed.)  I was ready to leave then.  Everything had gone reasonably well, good time to get out.

Hours later my sister offered to take me with her, even though I was supposed to leave with my mother, I told her to leave me behind, even though staying was painful.

It was well after she left that I was promised it would just be one more thing before I was allowed to leave.  It wasn't one more thing.  Or two more things.  Or three.  Or four.  Or... you get the idea.  What it was was enough lies to make me so angry I couldn't stop shaking coming from the abusive parent who raised me by constantly yelling at anyone he perceived to be lying.  What counted as lying?
-Forgetting something
-Making an incorrect prediction.
-Reminding him of something you said which he'd forgotten
-Reminding him of something he'd said which he'd forgotten
-Changing your mind, for example the whole family deciding what to get for ice cream before approaching the window and then, when it was her turn, my sister, then a child, saying that she'd reconsidered and wanted a different type (not standing there being indecisive, it took no longer than sticking with her original choice would have.)  That brought on a yelling fit about how she was a liar remembered to this day.
-Misspeaking
-Correcting him when he made a factual mistake.
-Remembering something in a way that didn't precisely match his own memory.
-Being late.
-Being early.
-Being on time when he was late or early.
-Making a mistake of any kind.
-Speaking
-Refusing to speak
-I'm just going to put in a wild card here because I'll never cover everything in a list.

I'm not good at being lied to in general, I think I'm fairly average when it comes to differences of opinion and people being mistaken (or me thinking they're mistaken when in actuality I am), but when you're saying false things to me which I already know that you know to be false, which is to say when I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're lying (saying something even you believe to be false) instead of misinformed or better informed than me, that can get me very pissed off very fast.  When it comes from the person who spent a lifetime yelling at me for lying when I wasn't, that gets me shaking with rage and, eventually, shouting at the top of my lungs.

And then after that I went to my sister's and moved furniture.  A piano counts a furniture, right?  If it doesn't then a piano and furniture.  Remember how I talked about pain in my back?  Hasn't gone away.  Things are pretty good so long as I don't bend or, you know, move furniture.  Actually, with the moving furniture that was only problematic because there was bending involved.  Need to remember not to bend.

So now, in addition to pain in my back, I've run my throat ragged with shouting.

High point, or low point, probably being when my dad said two things were exactly the same, I corrected him for the Nth time, he finally admitted that they were the opposite of the same, and then went right back to saying they were exactly the same the very next sentence.  He, of course, used this for the basis of his entirely highly flawed argument, not that that was the only lie employed.  Not even close.

So, family gatherings, good and bad.  My strategy would be to leave before the bad sets in, since it generally comes at the end (though yesterday it came at the start and then quickly switched over to good) and the end generally stretches out to take more time than the rest of the gathering combined, and do so by a wide margin, once the bad has set it.

Trouble is, I'm a pedestrian, I can only leave when my transportation does.  There's an argument to be made that I should have left when my sister offered to become my transportation, that would have saved me from the worst of it, but there are reasons that I try to minimize the amount of time my sister has the absolute control over my life that her being my transportation entails.

As a pedestrian, if you're my transportation I am your slave for as long as we are out of walking distance of my house, because if you won't take me home, I'm not getting home.  Which means that if I ever want to get home, I have to keep you happy.  Maybe not comply with your every whim, but comply with enough of them that you'll take me home.  Hopefully sooner rather than later.

My sister's offer was to get out of there, but not to get me home.  It would have entailed slave time.  I'm not a big fan of slave time.  Unpaid manual labor I'm actually ok with, when my back isn't a problem which until recently it never was, but slave time not so much.  If there were a way to do the first without it becoming the second, I'd probably help my sister a lot more, but what I have found is that when she controls the transportation you can't just lend a hand via whatever unpaid manual labor you're up for, you become a slave.

2 comments:

  1. I'm a pedestrian too, but I'm lucky enough that I'm healthy enough and live in a small enough town that I actually can walk everywhere.

    Not sure what to say about the other stuff. That ice-cream story is just horrifying.

    TRiG.

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  2. I'm a pedestrian, and was estranged from my family for some years. For years I had nightmares about being stuck with my family in Gippsland and having no way to get back to Melbourne. I still have dreams about setting out to walk the 150 kilometres home.

    All of which is to say, I hear you. I'm not sure there's anything else I *can* say.

    Stay well.

    Catherine

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