Too lazy to write it out again but this was earlier today
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Got up later than I wanted, too close to 10am, though I’d been awake for at least an hour. Had heard Dad going to his bed for a nap. Got up and did cooking sorts of things and made him the breakfast he ordered last night.
When I got done I debated with myself, because he usually wakes and wanders out when he smells cooking, but he didn’t this time.
I should wake him, I thought. But he hasn’t been asleep long, I also thought. If he’s sleepy then he needs it, he’s grumpy when he’s tired, and he’s unbearable when he’s grumpy. I don’t want to fucking hear it. I finally compromised with myself that I would wake him when I was done with mine. If it wasn’t warm enough, thirty seconds in the nuker would set it to rights without cooking the egg yolks all the way.
Right when I was finishing, he walked out. His plate was by his chair. He smushed his fingers into the food and snapped, “I’m not hungry. Next time wake me so it’s not ice cold.”
And into the trash he dumped it.
Well, good luck to him. I’m going to get stuff together and go somewhere else for a few hours. If he winds up feeling like shit (well… more shitty) because he’s too good to use a microwave, he did that to himself.
…
I don’t talk about even half his weird shit here because it’d be just like someone local to see it and go tattle to him. I am never safe from this shit. Never. Everyone wants me to be the good little victim because fluffing the egos of assholes (and not just male ones) is more important than me being sane and happy. I don’t know why *I* have to be the scapegoat EVERY FUCKING TIME. They can take care of these jerks themselves.
Well, good thing it’s not up to them whether I let this really get to me. I have already looked Really Bad in the face. I could still wind up meeting it again if he kicks me out of here but I will cope until that happens because none of this shit comes close.
But yeah, Dad has a really weird relationship with food. Kind of tired of it. He was pissy like this the other day at Wendy’s, too, and at the hospital before that, a couple weeks ago. When he cooked his own, it didn’t matter. It’s hard for him to cook now. I should buy him a bunch of Glucerna and stay gone except for bedtime, and serve him right.
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Of course, I remembered afterwards that the last time we were at Walmart, he bought one of those dozen-count boxes of breakfast-sausage-and-pancake “corn dogs.” As in it is not really a corn dog but looks like one from the outside. They’re okay but too carby. But they’re also very easy to heat up. If he wants to be an asshole about food all the fucking time, he can heat up his own, at least at breakfast. He compensates for the carb thing anyway by the simple expedient of nearly starving himself. His kidney doctor thinks he has stomach neuropathy now (lack of appetite, among other issues), so he’d probably do that anyway.
So he probably had food today. I am not fussed.
Yesterday I guess you could say there were already signs of weirdness coming on. I’m in my bedroom right now, right? He came in here yesterday, sat on the bed — I think this was about 3pm, not sure — and suggested that I go ahead and set a steak out to thaw if I wanted one for supper instead of waiting until the last minute. I have never in my life complained to this man about how long it takes to thaw a ribeye. That’s because the way I do it takes no more than half an hour. At any rate, he wasn’t done; next it was instructing me on how to prepare it so I wouldn’t have to eat that fatty bit on the small end. The only reason I wouldn’t want to eat the fatty bit on the small end is that the fatty bit on the small end of the thick-cut boneless ribeyes from Lyon’s tastes weird. I like animal fat. Animal fat likes me. I don’t know why this man continues to believe I should be exactly like him. Like, look, I’m clearly his daughter, and I’m weird in some of the ways he’s weird. No problem there, but if he wanted a clone, he went about it entirely the wrong way. I’m not male either, Dad. Guess whose fault that is, Dad. It’s not MY fault, Dad. Not Mom’s either.
P.S. I had said nothing about wanting a steak for supper. Ended up having half the leftover spaghetti. Had the rest of it tonight, too.
I did go to Carrie’s. I was overdue for a visit. I suppose I intended to be something resembling productive but it just did not turn out that way other than getting some Substack essays uploaded. Carrie doesn’t seem to give a toss one way or the other. I suppose she thinks I spend some of that time job-hunting. Sometimes I do put in an application but y’know, there’s just something about ALMOST NEVER GETTING A FUCKING REPLY, not even a “sorry, we have gone with another candidate, thank you for applying.” I got that twice that I can recall, and neither was a local company. The rest of the time? Silence. It’s not the trans thing. Local people might be delighted to know I don’t buy into that shit considering I spent so much time living in Ohio. You know them Yankees and that. I swear it’s the goddamn phone number. I keep meaning to change my service and my number and I never get around to it. Might help if I ever had money. That’s not a common thing anymore.
When I go to Carrie’s I try to ensure that I’m gone before her husband Stanford (nickname: Lala) gets home. Or soon after he arrives. He’s been nice to me, to my face. Important distinction. If he and I are the only ones in the room, he will start trashing someone, and it is usually Brenda, another lady who lives in Dad’s trailer park and who’s known Carrie forever and is always over there because she’s been on supplemental/portable oxygen since she got COVID and now she’s afraid to be alone. Mind you, she pays them a certain amount per month for the use of their food and so on. He still bitches. I’m sure Lala talks shit about me too if he can find the right audience. I’d rather give him as little material as possible. Less selfishly, I don’t want to be all up in his bidness taking his spot on the sofa when he’s had a long day at work, and I just about never go over there on Friday when he’s off work (I think I’ve done that once) because he’s entitled to want some time with his wife, y’know? Up to her what sort of time she wants to spend with him but at least I give them that shot.
I keep feeling like at some point Carrie will expect something from me and I have no idea what it is. I hate situations like this. I get to feeling I’m doing something wrong but that no one will tell me what it is. Nothing keeps happening and I start to relax. Then BAM. I fucked up and didn’t read people’s minds and fix it on my own and now I’m in trouble. It’s not even normal things like throw your trash away if you eat, which I do anyway. It’s they tell you that you are welcome to come over any time and snack on their snacks and not a fucking word about pitching in with money but three months from now it’ll be you are drinking us out of house and home with the Diet Dr. Pepper supply. Or hey can you fork over some of the electric bill. Or hey your dad wants to know why you haven’t found a job yet. Something may be on the way in that vein. I have no idea what. I don’t like not knowing. Thank fuck I found the Jennings library. Their setup is better anyway. Carrie’s one advantage besides (so far) being a friendly face is she’s a lot closer to the house.
Speaking of things on the way. Tax Day has come and gone. I did file in ’22 for the 2021 year, and I got a nice fat little refund for that, but I didn’t file FOR 2022, and now not for last year. I INTEND to. It is a thing that will happen when I can make the thing happen. I am dreading the late fees or whatever they’re called. Nothing for it. It’s like when I used to get calls from creditors after leaving Mike and losing basically everything. Fellas, if I had it, you wouldn’t be calling me. (Or writing to me, if the IRS, which hasn’t happened yet but that’s how they contact you.) I’m fucking tapped. You’d have better luck trying to get blood out of a stone. At least an iron-containing one. At least some semblance of blood, therefore.
Going back to Carrie. I didn’t tell her about Dad’s breakfast grump, or any of his other recent food grumps. I get an idea from the little bit she’s said here and there in response to something I’ve said at the time that there are aspects of his personality she finds upsetting or aggravating, but not enough to write him off as a friend. But I have a feeling that if I did start venting to her, it might fuck things up a lot. That has happened to me before with other people, Matt for instance. People really do get angrier at their friend’s or relative’s being outed for shitty behavior than they are at the friend or relative’s shitty behavior. I do not even want to stir that fucking hornet’s nest. If she ever finds this, that’s on her; I’m not going to bring it into her house and say it to her face. I’m on thin enough ice. If she starts a tirade about him at some point, maybe I’ll chime in with additional info, but not unless. I can’t see her doing that, anyway.
It’s not that I want a trashathon about Dad. It’s that I’m fucking alone and face it, he’s emotionally abusing me and I’ve got nowhere to go and I need to talk about it somewhere. GOD why didn’t I vacate that fucking apartment at the end of November. I should have done. I’d be squeaky clean now and probably not here. I could have gone back to the Delaware shelter, maybe. I certainly could have asked. But here I be. And I can’t even argue with him because he’s a half-deaf jackass. Even when he hears my words properly, it doesn’t mean he groks my point of view. It’s more like most of the time he refuses to grok my point of view, because he thinks I am slow and stupid.
And God, the fucking catch-22s, which are why I got caught up this morning and why now I’m contemplating washing the dishes since he’s now gone to bed but I am probably not going to do it because next thing I know, the asshole will complain about me having a light on or making noise. So I’ll wait til tomorrow, at which point he will bitch at me because I didn’t do them tonight. [screams]
Someone, not me, probably should tell him soon that I’m only here because I had nowhere else to go and if the car hadn’t developed a fault, I wouldn’t have cared about whether I had anywhere to go. I’m not going to tell him. I’m just going to stay the fuck out of his way.
Sigh.
P.S. My foot itches like a motherfucker. I kept forgetting to get antifungal cream when I ran out of mine. I don’t get this very often but when it does, holy shit, and it’s always at night when it’ll keep me awake.
[screams again] FML