Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-10-22 03:30 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2009-10-22 03:30 pm
Shinies and host families.
I am weak and I bought the shiny. For €22 including shipping. I really need to get a job or something so I can continue to buy shinies--it doesn't help that I've developed a sudden lust for coffin purses, very expensive stompyboots, floor-length black trenchcoats, and all the other things I've had the good sense not to drop too much money on while doing Goth On The Cheap. I have not so far given in to this urge, but it's only a matter of time.
Host mother situation hasn't improved much. A lecture about how I'm going to get colon cancer if I don't eat more vegetables (wtf?!); manipulative leading questions about (paraphrasing here) whether I'm a picky eater because my parents raised me wrong or whether I was just a terror at the dinner table when I was little; a comment in very bad taste about replacing my mother, followed by five minutes of "it was just a joke, why do you think I'm trying to be mean?" when I told her it wasn't a very nice thing to say; an extended argument this morning about her constant nagging to clean my room, although that was thankfully free of needling personal comments or "I'm right so STFU." I know it's petty and vaguely whiny to list these things out, but I feel like I need to write them down to convince myself I'm not crazy, I haven't just up and decided she's an intolerable bitch for no reason, and I have good reason to want to change families.
She has this tendency to not LISTEN to a word I say. When it's just dinner-table conversation, it's kind of amusing that her idea of conversation is getting up on a soapbox about whatever the topic is and How Right She Is about it, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise, and getting annoyed if you offer your own opinion because you're "not listening to what [she's] saying." However, when the subject is "You are making me uncomfortable please cut it out" or even "Can you please not leave my laundry in a damp heap on the bed," it is creepy and unacceptable that her standard reaction is not "Oh wait, really? I'm sorry," but a five-minute lecture denying and refuting whatever I just said. I don't know what's weirder, that she refused to believe a straight-up fact like "my laundry was damp and wrinkled" (and subsequently tried to blame me for the fact that she'd been in a hurry), or that her reaction to "You're making me uncomfortable" is "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, therefore you should stop being uncomfortable. STOP BEING UNCOMFORTABLE DAMMIT." And it's just... she has all these weird tendencies. Like her tendency to take self-deprecating humor literally, as an admission of a defect, which I always feel like she's storing away in her head to use in some mental estimation of my worth. Or the fact that if I do something (cooking, washing dishes, whatever) differently from the way she does it, she assumes I don't know how to do it at all.
Basically I think her biggest obsessions in life are being right, telling others how right she is, and giving advice. Everyone else just doesn't understand and has to have everything explained to them like a six-year-old. Along the way she seems to have lost any notion that other people can be right, that other people can do things differently from her and not be wrong, and that other people have feelings and can get pissed off, upset, or hurt when she's being an intolerable harridan.
A couple possibilities for a new host family have come up, but none of them worked out. There was a family of journalists with a six-year-old son, they had a separate maid's room I could've stayed in and were allegedly quite cool, but it turns out they've hired an au pair through the springtime who's going to be in that room. And my voice teacher had actually offered to be a host mother earlier in the year, but she has a student staying with her now. So my options are to move into an apartment with some French students (which is apparently an insurance and liability nightmare for the college), or wait until January. We'll see.
Host mother situation hasn't improved much. A lecture about how I'm going to get colon cancer if I don't eat more vegetables (wtf?!); manipulative leading questions about (paraphrasing here) whether I'm a picky eater because my parents raised me wrong or whether I was just a terror at the dinner table when I was little; a comment in very bad taste about replacing my mother, followed by five minutes of "it was just a joke, why do you think I'm trying to be mean?" when I told her it wasn't a very nice thing to say; an extended argument this morning about her constant nagging to clean my room, although that was thankfully free of needling personal comments or "I'm right so STFU." I know it's petty and vaguely whiny to list these things out, but I feel like I need to write them down to convince myself I'm not crazy, I haven't just up and decided she's an intolerable bitch for no reason, and I have good reason to want to change families.
She has this tendency to not LISTEN to a word I say. When it's just dinner-table conversation, it's kind of amusing that her idea of conversation is getting up on a soapbox about whatever the topic is and How Right She Is about it, not letting anyone get a word in edgewise, and getting annoyed if you offer your own opinion because you're "not listening to what [she's] saying." However, when the subject is "You are making me uncomfortable please cut it out" or even "Can you please not leave my laundry in a damp heap on the bed," it is creepy and unacceptable that her standard reaction is not "Oh wait, really? I'm sorry," but a five-minute lecture denying and refuting whatever I just said. I don't know what's weirder, that she refused to believe a straight-up fact like "my laundry was damp and wrinkled" (and subsequently tried to blame me for the fact that she'd been in a hurry), or that her reaction to "You're making me uncomfortable" is "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable, therefore you should stop being uncomfortable. STOP BEING UNCOMFORTABLE DAMMIT." And it's just... she has all these weird tendencies. Like her tendency to take self-deprecating humor literally, as an admission of a defect, which I always feel like she's storing away in her head to use in some mental estimation of my worth. Or the fact that if I do something (cooking, washing dishes, whatever) differently from the way she does it, she assumes I don't know how to do it at all.
Basically I think her biggest obsessions in life are being right, telling others how right she is, and giving advice. Everyone else just doesn't understand and has to have everything explained to them like a six-year-old. Along the way she seems to have lost any notion that other people can be right, that other people can do things differently from her and not be wrong, and that other people have feelings and can get pissed off, upset, or hurt when she's being an intolerable harridan.
A couple possibilities for a new host family have come up, but none of them worked out. There was a family of journalists with a six-year-old son, they had a separate maid's room I could've stayed in and were allegedly quite cool, but it turns out they've hired an au pair through the springtime who's going to be in that room. And my voice teacher had actually offered to be a host mother earlier in the year, but she has a student staying with her now. So my options are to move into an apartment with some French students (which is apparently an insurance and liability nightmare for the college), or wait until January. We'll see.