Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 38

I feel low-energy and sulky now.
Just crept up on me as the day went by. Maybe I should've eaten a bigger breakfast before leaving the apartment. Maybe I'm unsettled because Mom is coming to visit tonight.

You know what messes with me?
My lady co-workers asking me about Dave. Innocently enough, true.
Just simple questions about our current situation, but I hate their reactions. Their perfectly innocent reactions.
Like I ought to be embarrassed. Like I'm an idiot.
What the fuck am I supposed to say? I feel helpless. Things are going well, dammit, just slowly. I can't impart a timeline, can't give other people the weight of times passed to explain what is and what isn't reasonable. I can't be like, "Look, I don't see it like that for the following reasons." Because that won't help their opinion of either of us at all.

You know what? WE are the happiest couple I know. Lady boss and main boss are the only other actual couple here--and they are either too polite or too focused on their own issues to ask much about ours. These other ladies are single or very recently single and maybe their unwillingness to put up with one situation or another is why. Or maybe they'd picked crappy mates before. I dunno. I'm just mad that I can't explain and mad in a different way that I feel like I have to.

Me and Dave talked about this for awhile last night. So I'm not going to say anything else about it here because if we need to talk about it, we'll do it in person.

I'm also mad about Mom and Amber and Pearl. Not, you notice, mad at them. I haven't talked to Amber and Pearl much lately. Amber seems to be radically shifting her melant'i and I don't know where it leaves me. I don't know what's going on with Pearl at all. And Mom can't make up her damn mind about me. Which is fair, because I can't make up my damn mind about her. Are we going to be friends? Enemies? Continue this weird dance of let's-not-talk-about-it till the end of time?

We're not going to have the problem we had when I was younger. I'd tell her something she didn't like, she'd start out not believing me, then asking me to conform to the version of reality she did like, then going back to pretending none of it happened. We haven't so much been having that problem the past five or six years or so because when there's something she won't like, I don't tell her. Saves a lot of steps, you see. We'd get back to the point of both pretending an important aspect of reality doesn't exist anyway, so why experience needless pain and waste needless effort?

Pearl has had good results with being upfront with Mom and telling her the truth about stuff, however. Mom had moderated her stance on books, movies--all sorts of things that ease social polity but don't require an actual shift in worldview. The fact of the matter is that my problems with Mom are things that I don't have the language to explain to her.

Maybe if I get her drunk we can have an honest, heart-to-heart, Mom and daughter discussion about the facts of morality and truth. And how where morality and truth are concerned (especially in the area of family) facts have only the faintest relationship to what any of the parties involved are willing to accept as reality. And how the definition of reality is mostly in the hands of those a particular social group chooses to designate as its gatekeepers.

But she won't be staying the night after all, and was never much of a drinker in the first place. Only an idiot would want to let themselves be made vulnerable by a chemical, y'know. One is made vulnerable enough by the definitions of reality within which one is forced to operate.