nojomo#2: subtitled, grrrrrrrrrr

I am tempted to skip today already, but surely I can manage more than ONE NoJoMo entry. It is, of course, getting late and I am, of course, tired, and what I want to write about is, of course, complicated and lengthy. Maybe I can condense it. Hahhahahhaha!

So. I am very very angry. I have been very very angry for most of the day, thanks to one of our professors. Who is a fucking rattily-peabrained eejit a tad bit needy and, ummmm, clueless.

You know what I was just thinking about, though? And this has a connection with my very long weekend spent toting my dad around and listening to him chatter. A whole lot of Daddy’s chatter tends to involve things from his past which he has been, shall we say, dwelling on for oh, EIGHTY YEARS OR SO. There are quite a few stories that he tells over and over and over involving one of his sisters, his father, people he grew up with, his brother, etc etc, and the common denominator is that they have done something/said something that made him mad/upset him, and he is STILL not over it. For example, his oldest sister was apparently a chronic liar. In recent years I have heard innumerable stories about the lies this sister would tell. Oddly, and very commendably on my parents’ part, I had NO idea of this until I was an adult myself, and I in fact was very fond of this aunt. They never even hinted to me that she was anything other than a sterling and admirable person when I was growing up. But just get him started on this sister’s behavior now. You will never ever hear the end of it, as I have not and never will hear the end of it. BUT my point is, Daddy’s chatter can be heavy on the memories of people who have done things to make him mad. Or done things that are not fair, or done things that are not honest. 

While hauling him around the airports this weekend I suddenly had a flash of memory, back to a realization I’d had as a teenager. It was something that just hit me out of the blue way back then, and at the time I was all struck with the profound nature of my realization. Now I’m just thinking, YEAH. Duuuude. That is SO TRUE. What a brilliant deduction, Teenage Me!

Way back then I realized that my mom and my brother were just alike, and me and my dad were just alike. Mama and my brother would both get really really mad about things, and they would let you know that they were really really mad, and they would spend a few minutes being really really mad,  but then… they were over it. It was out of their system, it was gone, they were perfectly fine and everything was good. Daddy and I, however, were just the opposite. We both tend to try and hide the fact that we are really really mad. We will act like we are not mad at all and everything is just fine. But boy do we NOT forget that we are mad, and boy do we never EVER get over it. Daddy and I don’t just hold a grudge- we cling to that grudge with all our might and squeeze it till it shrieks and we never let it go. There is no such thing as getting over it with us. Never ever EVER.

So, yeah, it was just a little funny to realize, as I sat there listening to the umteenth retelling of the story about how his Oldest Sister told everyone she’d moved back to NC to take care of their OTHER sister (not the Cousin E’s Mom sister, but their next-to-youngest sister) and that Oldest Sister had been the one paying for everything and that the next-to-youngest sister had to depend on her financially when it was kind of totally just the opposite and she was pretty mean to the next-to-youngest sister who Daddy was very partial to and yeah, he has not forgiven or forgotten that and doubtless never will – or the ten gazillion other things Oldest Sister did and said. Never mind that she died of colon cancer six or seven years ago. He is still mad and he is not letting it go, EVER.

Where was I? OH, funny to realize that, aggravating as I find the perpetual looping re-telling of all these Grudge Tales…. I, ummmmm….. do the same thing. Although I do it more in my head than telling other people. Of course, when I’m 84, I may be telling my poor great nieces my own neverending loop of Grudge Tales from fifty years prior. God forbid.   

Well. It has taken me so long to write this that I am out of time. I stayed up too late last night and skipped my Morning Workout, and I can not do that again tomorrow. So for the sake of getting to bed at a reasonable hour, I will leave my own Grudge Tale for tomorrows NoJoMo entry. That will ensure that I have THREE entries, at least, because I am clinging to that grudge and it has not even started whimpering yet.