ARG! My family is driving me crazy! I haven't even been home for 24 hours and already I don't want to be here. Usually it takes a few days before I start to go a little twitchy from everything, but not this time, oh no. Everyone taking out their frustrations on the closest person - me - for not good reason and without provocation. The only person who hasn't joined in on this little pest fest is my mom, and the only reason she hasn't joined in is because I have yet to actually see her since I've gotten home.
One of the reasons I'm so upset is because while my dad was reading the ads in the Sunday paper, he came across an ad for a hunting store and he suddenly came to the conclusions that I need to get a permit to carry a hand gun. Now, he knows that I hate guns, especially hand guns. He came to this conclusion that because I'm going to be living in Seattle for another month and a half I need a gun. Don't ask me why, I have no idea. I told him flat out, "no." That right there should have been the end of the discussion. My dad usually knows better then to get into an argument with me when it comes to something like this because he knows that if I don't win, I always leave with the upper hand. Anyways, my grandfather jumps in and says how that I am real likely to get kidnapped walking down the streets of my Queen Anne neighborhood (which has a lower crime rate than Bellingham.) Once I inform him of this fact, he goes on to say how that's not true because the police always lie about what the true crime rates are and how you can never trust the police about anything and how they are just as likely to kidnap me off the streets and rape me in the back of some cruiser. And people don't believe me that he's senile. That was it for me, that was the last straw. I got up to leave when he got all uppity on me and was like "come back here young lady! You need to know the truth!" I turned around and started ranting and raving about how he had no idea what the police were like because he had had no dealings with them in any form in the last 20 years. To which he responded that things like that never change. ARG!!!! I cannot live with these crazy people! I have no idea how I am going to survive these two weeks, let alone the time after my surgery while I'm getting a job and an apartment.
My grandfather is a crotchety old man who likes to listen to himself talk about what a great person he is and all the great things he has done and how good he is at making things. He talks so much that people at church avoid him like the plague because they don't want to be stuck in a conversation with a man who will not leave them alone and who smells because he doesn't believe in spending money to buy actual soap or shampoo. People who get Chuck in small doses think he's a hoot, but they don't live with him and know what he's really like. Like the fact that he likes to control and manipulate people into doing what he wants. For example he had a fight with my dad a few years ago over some stupid thing like how to fix some electrical thing in a lamp, it quickly escalated into other things and my grandfather - who used to hold the mortgage to my parents house - tried to hold that over my dad's head as leverage to get what he wanted. My mom and I were in the next room, trying to ignore the row that they were having. At that my mom got up grabbed her check book and wrote Chuck a check for the amount that was left on the mortgage and said, "Here. Now you can never hold it over our heads again" and walked away. I was not surprised that my mother wrote him a check, but what I was surprised by was the fact that this wasn't the first time he threatened my parents in such a manner. That is how Chuck does things, how he has always done things, my cousin Carrie (cousin on my dad's side) always theorized that the reason most of our family is so messed up, especially our aunt Shan is because they were raises by such a man. He just makes me so angry, so upset. Sometimes I just hate living in the same house that he does. He's is a dirty old man, (by dirty I am referring to the fact that he is usually covered in dirt, grease and smells really bad, not that he is a pervert) who would rather ruin people's lives then give up his feeling of power and control over other people. I thank my mother ever day for the fact that I am just as obstinate and loud as her Italian family who has absolutely no qualms about telling people to go fuck themselves.
