Oy...
Been a while since the last update. A lot's happened, and at the same time, nothing much has happened.
I've been offered a job, but I'm sitting and twiddling my thumbs waiting for my Criminal Records check to come back and my references to come through before I can start. That would have taken a lot less time if the place offering me a job hadn't posted the requests for them in the midst of postal strikes. I'm on to my second week of thumb twiddling, now.
I started the therapy sessions. They're... yeah. Exhausting, mostly, and intensely awkward. Conversation keeps getting stuck on the university thing which is a bit frustrating. "Why didn't anyone at the university notice?" How am I supposed to answer that? Because the truth is that I was an asocial git that didn't speak to anyone or want anything to do with them anyway so there was no one to notice. The quiet one you've never spoken to face to face is not going to stand out in a class of two hundred, you know? I think this is all based on the idea that I'm halfway normal and actually know people irl who don't live a hundred miles away.
In an effort to give me something to do that isn't sitting around twiddling my thumbs and to stop me getting bored, my parents bought me a crapload of baking supplies. I've made a buttload of cookies so far, which have all been delicious, and two cakes. The chocolate cake was okay, but the sponge was a bit dry. I made a blueberry streusel cake today which was gorgeous, really light and moist with a crunchy topping over the blueberries. I have enough blueberries left to make another one, fortunately. The difference may lie in the fact that I bought a whisk for the blueberry cake whereas before I was just using a wooden spoon, which was really hard work.
I'm kind of enjoying it, as you might be able to tell. I get to indulge my sweet tooth and avoid watching the horrible soap operas my parents are obsessed with, so it's win-win.
On the lose-lose and FAIL ON ALL SIDES front, the sibling is back in England, and it's already causing drama. He hasn't even set foot through the door yet. He's been in Afghanistan for six months, and the poor bastard is going to come back to another warzone. It's one of those six of one, half a dozen of the other situations, though.
See, a while ago, he and his girlfriend split up. Messily. On facebook. And his girlfriend posted all sorts of things there about him, except the clever girl happens to have all his family friended on it, too. Including my mother, aunt, and grandmother. They act like family do and my grandmother has a go for her effing and jeffing which is desperately unladylike, and my mother, of course, white knights for her darling son who is off fighting for this country in a terrible war and how dare you say these things about one of our majesty's soldiers and blah blah my mother is a melodramatic nutter blah.
Naturally, the ex-girlfriend doesn't take kindly to having her ex's family rally around and have a go at her on facebook and it basically develops into a big wanky flamewar between them complete with defriendings, and it would be HILARIOUS if it wasn't for the fact that it is now all coming offline and into the living room.
You see, she had a go saying that my mother was never supportive of my brother (half true), that he isn't the angel she paints him as (entirely true), and that she was going to get her mother/friends to come round here and sort my mother out (lol).
The sibling has now got back with her. Family have made it perfectly clear that she is not welcome to darken their doorsteps. It would be a situation where everyone would get along fine if they just never mentioned each other and never saw each other again, which isn't that hard to affect, really.
But the sibling landed back in this country today, and he got turfed out of barracks at quarter to four this afternoon, and he'd promised he'd phone mother as soon as he was ready to come home, as soon as they let him go.
At quarter past nine tonight, after still no phone call, mother phones him to make sure he's okay.
It turns out, he was less than an hour away. He hadn't bothered to phone his mother, but he had phoned his girlfriend, and he was going to drop all his kit at our house and then go round to hers for the night.
Perhaps understandably this did not go over well. It was my turn to get a phone call then, and my mother was drunk, and rambling, and explained the story twice, and you could tell how cut up she was about it. On account of the fact that even though I'm the bugger on pills and in therapy I still feel like the only sane and rational one in this family, I then tried to get hold of my brother to warn him not to come home because the poor sod just got back from Afghanistan and what he does not need the moment he steps through the door is to get yelled at by mother and stepdad for calling his girlfriend instead of his mum.
I ended up having to send a text message and basically lined it out for him that mother'd been drinking and was upset, and if I were him, I'd either go to his girlfriend's or come here, but I wouldn't attempt both tonight.
Perhaps wisely, he seems to have opted to head to his girlfriend's. Unfortunately, this has resulted in mother's mood getting worse, but it would have got worse anyway if he'd come here because even if he hadn't gone on to his girlfriend's afterwards he'd have still ended up with a guilt trip and an earful, and probably storming out feeling unwelcome in his own home.
It's self inflicted, because he could have saved himself all of it with one phone call. But at the same time, the fact of mother exacerbates the situation because she can never ever calm down and act rationally. If he came home she wouldn't smile and hug him, and thank him for not being a dickweed and then talk it through in the morning after everyone's slept, instead she'd take the huff with him, have a go, have a temper tantrum, and have stepdad backing her up the whole way. He made a mistake, through sheer thoughtlessness - or more specifically, thinking with his cock instead of his brain - but mother is the type who can't accept trying to fix it after the fact.
And I can understand, I really can. You worry about your son for six months knowing he's being shot at, and out scouting for explosives planted by people that are trying to kill him, and when he lands back on home soil he doesn't even bother to give you a phone call? It's pretty fucking low, man. But if the issue wasn't him getting back with his girlfriend and the fact that mother is competing with her for his affections, and that's something she's brought on herself because of the way she reacted to a bitter teenage just-broke-up rant on a social networking site, then I doubt she'd have taken it quite this badly.
So like I said, six of one and half a dozen of the other. And I get to be stuck in the middle. JOY.
On an unrelated note, my computer is a bum and keeps farting its innards out. Twice this week it's gone kaput for no apparent reason. Once my wireless aerial turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again, and once half of my antivirus software got disabled and wouldn't enable. I had to uninstall-reinstall my antivirus, but for the wireless I had to restore my computer to a previous setting. It was like it just... didn't exist. The manual on/off button didn't work, and there was no trace whatsoever of there ever having been a wireless connection on this computer.
But I can't find any viruses on it. The error message it comes up with when it farts so spectacularly is the same as the one I was getting way back in November last year when the computer just went kaput completely.
I'm kinda worried.
Long entry is long. Sorry flist. P.S. You all just lost the game.
I've been offered a job, but I'm sitting and twiddling my thumbs waiting for my Criminal Records check to come back and my references to come through before I can start. That would have taken a lot less time if the place offering me a job hadn't posted the requests for them in the midst of postal strikes. I'm on to my second week of thumb twiddling, now.
I started the therapy sessions. They're... yeah. Exhausting, mostly, and intensely awkward. Conversation keeps getting stuck on the university thing which is a bit frustrating. "Why didn't anyone at the university notice?" How am I supposed to answer that? Because the truth is that I was an asocial git that didn't speak to anyone or want anything to do with them anyway so there was no one to notice. The quiet one you've never spoken to face to face is not going to stand out in a class of two hundred, you know? I think this is all based on the idea that I'm halfway normal and actually know people irl who don't live a hundred miles away.
In an effort to give me something to do that isn't sitting around twiddling my thumbs and to stop me getting bored, my parents bought me a crapload of baking supplies. I've made a buttload of cookies so far, which have all been delicious, and two cakes. The chocolate cake was okay, but the sponge was a bit dry. I made a blueberry streusel cake today which was gorgeous, really light and moist with a crunchy topping over the blueberries. I have enough blueberries left to make another one, fortunately. The difference may lie in the fact that I bought a whisk for the blueberry cake whereas before I was just using a wooden spoon, which was really hard work.
I'm kind of enjoying it, as you might be able to tell. I get to indulge my sweet tooth and avoid watching the horrible soap operas my parents are obsessed with, so it's win-win.
On the lose-lose and FAIL ON ALL SIDES front, the sibling is back in England, and it's already causing drama. He hasn't even set foot through the door yet. He's been in Afghanistan for six months, and the poor bastard is going to come back to another warzone. It's one of those six of one, half a dozen of the other situations, though.
See, a while ago, he and his girlfriend split up. Messily. On facebook. And his girlfriend posted all sorts of things there about him, except the clever girl happens to have all his family friended on it, too. Including my mother, aunt, and grandmother. They act like family do and my grandmother has a go for her effing and jeffing which is desperately unladylike, and my mother, of course, white knights for her darling son who is off fighting for this country in a terrible war and how dare you say these things about one of our majesty's soldiers and blah blah my mother is a melodramatic nutter blah.
Naturally, the ex-girlfriend doesn't take kindly to having her ex's family rally around and have a go at her on facebook and it basically develops into a big wanky flamewar between them complete with defriendings, and it would be HILARIOUS if it wasn't for the fact that it is now all coming offline and into the living room.
You see, she had a go saying that my mother was never supportive of my brother (half true), that he isn't the angel she paints him as (entirely true), and that she was going to get her mother/friends to come round here and sort my mother out (lol).
The sibling has now got back with her. Family have made it perfectly clear that she is not welcome to darken their doorsteps. It would be a situation where everyone would get along fine if they just never mentioned each other and never saw each other again, which isn't that hard to affect, really.
But the sibling landed back in this country today, and he got turfed out of barracks at quarter to four this afternoon, and he'd promised he'd phone mother as soon as he was ready to come home, as soon as they let him go.
At quarter past nine tonight, after still no phone call, mother phones him to make sure he's okay.
It turns out, he was less than an hour away. He hadn't bothered to phone his mother, but he had phoned his girlfriend, and he was going to drop all his kit at our house and then go round to hers for the night.
Perhaps understandably this did not go over well. It was my turn to get a phone call then, and my mother was drunk, and rambling, and explained the story twice, and you could tell how cut up she was about it. On account of the fact that even though I'm the bugger on pills and in therapy I still feel like the only sane and rational one in this family, I then tried to get hold of my brother to warn him not to come home because the poor sod just got back from Afghanistan and what he does not need the moment he steps through the door is to get yelled at by mother and stepdad for calling his girlfriend instead of his mum.
I ended up having to send a text message and basically lined it out for him that mother'd been drinking and was upset, and if I were him, I'd either go to his girlfriend's or come here, but I wouldn't attempt both tonight.
Perhaps wisely, he seems to have opted to head to his girlfriend's. Unfortunately, this has resulted in mother's mood getting worse, but it would have got worse anyway if he'd come here because even if he hadn't gone on to his girlfriend's afterwards he'd have still ended up with a guilt trip and an earful, and probably storming out feeling unwelcome in his own home.
It's self inflicted, because he could have saved himself all of it with one phone call. But at the same time, the fact of mother exacerbates the situation because she can never ever calm down and act rationally. If he came home she wouldn't smile and hug him, and thank him for not being a dickweed and then talk it through in the morning after everyone's slept, instead she'd take the huff with him, have a go, have a temper tantrum, and have stepdad backing her up the whole way. He made a mistake, through sheer thoughtlessness - or more specifically, thinking with his cock instead of his brain - but mother is the type who can't accept trying to fix it after the fact.
And I can understand, I really can. You worry about your son for six months knowing he's being shot at, and out scouting for explosives planted by people that are trying to kill him, and when he lands back on home soil he doesn't even bother to give you a phone call? It's pretty fucking low, man. But if the issue wasn't him getting back with his girlfriend and the fact that mother is competing with her for his affections, and that's something she's brought on herself because of the way she reacted to a bitter teenage just-broke-up rant on a social networking site, then I doubt she'd have taken it quite this badly.
So like I said, six of one and half a dozen of the other. And I get to be stuck in the middle. JOY.
On an unrelated note, my computer is a bum and keeps farting its innards out. Twice this week it's gone kaput for no apparent reason. Once my wireless aerial turned itself off and wouldn't turn on again, and once half of my antivirus software got disabled and wouldn't enable. I had to uninstall-reinstall my antivirus, but for the wireless I had to restore my computer to a previous setting. It was like it just... didn't exist. The manual on/off button didn't work, and there was no trace whatsoever of there ever having been a wireless connection on this computer.
But I can't find any viruses on it. The error message it comes up with when it farts so spectacularly is the same as the one I was getting way back in November last year when the computer just went kaput completely.
I'm kinda worried.
Long entry is long. Sorry flist. P.S. You all just lost the game.