Revolting Door

I caught myself thinking a lot these days about home and my parents, mostly dad. These imaginary scenarios of having arguments with my dad keep circulating around my brain.

Last night I thought about Christmas back home and how I really, really don’t want to go. My family gets together with this other family every year on Christmas Eve. Don’t get me wrong - it’s fantastic! They are cheerful and outgoing people (unlike my family), we eat and talk (no TV or very little), we sing and play the piano and dance around the Christmas tree, and then we open our presents. You can’t get your present unless you perform something. Then we eat and talk some more. I used to love these get-togethers when I was little but the older I got the more I started dreading them. When I was very little I recited poetry and later after the 3rd grade I started playing the piano. I had performance anxiety weeks before the event. The evening of, I couldn’t think about anything else until it was over. On top of that, I felt embarrassed by my parents because they neither sing nor play the piano, and they always do this awkward dance that’s supposedly a ballroom dance but they’re dissynchronized and just eager for it all to be over as well. So many times when I was little I’d wish my parents were more like their friends, but immediately I’d feel guilty about wishing something like that.

So I’ve managed to avoid the above described situation for seven consecutive Christmases. But now I have a plane ticket. A one way plane ticket to get there and no other ticket to get out of there.

I have loans, no home and no job.

USA: When you go out, you don’t have to inform your roommates about your destination intentions.

EECC: When you go out, you absolutely H.A.V.E to inform your roommates (read “your parents”) about where you’re headed, who you’re going with, what you’re going to do and when you’ll be back, even when you’re 29, O.R  E.L.S.E! You better also inform any neighbor you run into on your way out, or you’ll be stigmatized as the Uptight American (Bitch).

2 suitcases, 50 pounds each. My artwork alone, plus the very few books I decided to take, add up to 50+. So that’s 1 suitcase right there. The rest… shoes & clothes, I suppose.

I had a fight with one of my best friends back home. It reminded me how much it sucks and hurts to have a fight with someone close to you. It’s nothing like having a fight with someone you don’t really care about that much. It’s having a fight with your past, with an older part of yourself.

I told her that sometimes she makes me not want to call her when I get back home, which makes going home an even more undesirable process. She totally went off on me and played all the dirty cards including “you’re not a real friend if you’re offending me like that” and so on and so forth.

I know I’ll call her when I go back and it’s all going to be fine again. But even though we did keep in touch over the past seven years, we couldn’t stop something major from changing. Being so close to someone is emotionally draining. I am not looking forward to long hours of conversation about mundane things. I am not looking forward to long hours of sitting on the couch with her wasting time watching sleazy pop-folk videos on TV. I am not looking forward to the back scratching she and her mom and her sister shower me with, leaving me feeling drained on the couch, with a mixture of embarrassment and undeserved sense of accomplishment.

We crave close relationships but when we get them we want to run away. Sometimes it’s just easier to live with people who are just not that into you. If it doesn’t get you depressed, it boosts your determination somehow. Another paraphrase of the old cliché “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  

I baked fudge brownies tonight and they turned out disturbingly awesome. Instead of only white sugar I put half white and half brown, as someone suggested in their baking blog, to achieve the best of both worlds.