Current location:	at my desk
Current mood:	disturbed

Just because you forgot to be paranoid this morning...
...doesn't mean they're still not out to get you.

Disturbing things are happening, and they're making me seriously fucking anxious.

It's the Thanksgiving weekend, which means I'm more or less obligated to do some kind of family stuff, but as you all have observed before, I don't get along very well with the rest of my family. I won't go into the gory details, but we have pretty much diametrically-opposed personalities and politics.

Things around home have also been really stressful lately, because my paternal grandfather has just had to go into a nursing home. He has what seems to be Alzheimer's, and, although he hasn't been quite right for about ten years or so, in the past couple of months, he's just been going down like a submarine with a screen-door retrofit. Apparently he's been giving the staff at the nursing home a hard time, because he doesn't know where he is and doesn't believe they're allowed to help him, and doesn't understand why they're trying to do stuff to/for him. Also, apparently he's been calling my dad and demanding of him, "Who am I? What did I do to deserve this?" That hits me like a sucker-punch to the solar plexus; I can only imagine what it's doing to my dad.

My dad has a long-standing and well-practiced habit of taking out his frustrations on everyone around him.

That fact probably means my mom is feeling like she's gone a hard 15 rounds with Mike Tyson, and my sister's likely more out of sorts than an explosion at a typesetter's. Fortunately, I've been staying out of the way.

I know that in my family, I'm the Designated Bad Seed-slash-Weirdo, which means that by the logic of the kind of people my family are (they're people who gave me a really gut-level understanding of the saying The nail that stands too high will be hammered down), everyone dumps on me all the time for everything, and no matter what, it's always my fault.

Further, I have direct evidence that it could be really twitchy for me this weekend, since when I called my mom to ask her about Thanksgiving plans, she very nearly opened the phone conversation with something along the lines of, "Everyone around here is mad at me, so I thought I'd call you so you could be mad at me too." (?!?!) I said, "I'm not mad at you. Why would I be mad at you?" Then, later on, during the same conversation, my dad piped up in the background and mom said, "He says, 'Tell her she can come, but she's not allowed to bring her attitude.'"

I was so literally torn between "The fuck?!" and "Fuck you!" that I just sort of hung there on the other end of the phone until Mom thought I'd hung up on her and said, "Hello?"

I should probably point out that nothing contentious has happened between me and my family in months. However, if anything does happen at all this weekend (and given everything, the odds are good), see the above about assignation of blame...


Not only that, but I've seen two guys just randomly walking around recently wearing overtly misogynistic t-shirts. On the one hand, it's nice of them to advertise, so I know to stay the fuck clear of them. On the other hand, what the fuck?! *shudder shudder*