On a motherfuckin' boat.
I leave for Korea in right about 2 weeks, and it couldn't come soon enough.
My father hasn't spoken to me for about two days now. Friday afternoon, we were yapping back and forth about benign stuff, and mentioned South Korea (which shouldn't surprise anyone). I mentioned something Colin Powell said some years ago - that is the North invaded the South, there are only two places they could invade from that are wide enough passes through the mountains, and that once in those passes, they would be annihilated. It was a benign quote, but my father had to preach. He looked at me and said (paraphrased) we could do it, sure, militarily, but there isn't the political will. Obama would never do it.
This flipped a switch in me. He has this incredibly amazing ability to belittle the person he's talking to through what seems like benign speech. He didn't just say what he said, he also added with this special ability an obnoxious "don't be stupid and think otherwise." Not said, but clearly and insultingly implied.
So I flipped out. Granted, I didn't yell, and my words were a jumble of adjectives splashed together, but they were true and relatively to the point. I'm not interested in your ridiculously dishonest, pundit-driven, ridiculous tripe. Everything you say about these things is crap, and I won't listen to it. There, I finally said it.
Re-reading it, it doesn't sound terribly harsh, but to someone like my father, it's a stick in the heart. But it's been stabbing at me for months now. He's half-subtle about it (much like his insipid, insidious racism and alcoholism), but a penknife can kill you just as readily as a sword - it just takes a whole lot more stabbing. I've been stabbed enough. I'm not a child, and this was just another example of him trying to "teach" me something I'm too young or stupid to know.
He hasn't spoken to me since, and in fact he hasn't even seen me since, as I've made sure I'm not terribly near him. He spoke briefly to my mother about it tonight, telling her I said things and that I don't respect him. That's fine, and understandable. There are in fact many things I respect about him, not the least of which is being successful and raising a family. But there's a whole bunch more I don't respect, and I'm not going to enable such things, nor will I sit idly by and tolerate it.
I think it's because out of all of the kids, I was always closest to him relative to the rest of my family (which, honestly, isn't really saying much). So, to have this lack of respect shown to him in any manner by his anointed savior of the family, it's a good bit more devastating than it would be if one of the others did it. But then, that's hardly fair to me. If I apologize, he'll win. And not because there's some competition, but because that's how he'll think of it, and it will just be enabling the garbage that he thinks he can not only do but get away with.
Much of this sounds like me being incredibly mean, but it's not what I'm trying to be, not in the least. I love my father, no matter how self-destructive he happens to be (his idea of a diet is to lower what he eats drastically so he can still drink as much as he wants). I have simply never been one to suffer foolishness or fools well, and over the past six months, his subtle racism and lack of respect for most of what I believe in (as well as a huge helping of respect for a large number of things I loathe) just wasn't worth taking any longer. I was tired of feeling uncomfortable, so I had to put a stop to it.
And so it is.
And so it goes.
My father hasn't spoken to me for about two days now. Friday afternoon, we were yapping back and forth about benign stuff, and mentioned South Korea (which shouldn't surprise anyone). I mentioned something Colin Powell said some years ago - that is the North invaded the South, there are only two places they could invade from that are wide enough passes through the mountains, and that once in those passes, they would be annihilated. It was a benign quote, but my father had to preach. He looked at me and said (paraphrased) we could do it, sure, militarily, but there isn't the political will. Obama would never do it.
This flipped a switch in me. He has this incredibly amazing ability to belittle the person he's talking to through what seems like benign speech. He didn't just say what he said, he also added with this special ability an obnoxious "don't be stupid and think otherwise." Not said, but clearly and insultingly implied.
So I flipped out. Granted, I didn't yell, and my words were a jumble of adjectives splashed together, but they were true and relatively to the point. I'm not interested in your ridiculously dishonest, pundit-driven, ridiculous tripe. Everything you say about these things is crap, and I won't listen to it. There, I finally said it.
Re-reading it, it doesn't sound terribly harsh, but to someone like my father, it's a stick in the heart. But it's been stabbing at me for months now. He's half-subtle about it (much like his insipid, insidious racism and alcoholism), but a penknife can kill you just as readily as a sword - it just takes a whole lot more stabbing. I've been stabbed enough. I'm not a child, and this was just another example of him trying to "teach" me something I'm too young or stupid to know.
He hasn't spoken to me since, and in fact he hasn't even seen me since, as I've made sure I'm not terribly near him. He spoke briefly to my mother about it tonight, telling her I said things and that I don't respect him. That's fine, and understandable. There are in fact many things I respect about him, not the least of which is being successful and raising a family. But there's a whole bunch more I don't respect, and I'm not going to enable such things, nor will I sit idly by and tolerate it.
I think it's because out of all of the kids, I was always closest to him relative to the rest of my family (which, honestly, isn't really saying much). So, to have this lack of respect shown to him in any manner by his anointed savior of the family, it's a good bit more devastating than it would be if one of the others did it. But then, that's hardly fair to me. If I apologize, he'll win. And not because there's some competition, but because that's how he'll think of it, and it will just be enabling the garbage that he thinks he can not only do but get away with.
Much of this sounds like me being incredibly mean, but it's not what I'm trying to be, not in the least. I love my father, no matter how self-destructive he happens to be (his idea of a diet is to lower what he eats drastically so he can still drink as much as he wants). I have simply never been one to suffer foolishness or fools well, and over the past six months, his subtle racism and lack of respect for most of what I believe in (as well as a huge helping of respect for a large number of things I loathe) just wasn't worth taking any longer. I was tired of feeling uncomfortable, so I had to put a stop to it.
And so it is.
And so it goes.