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I've been thinking about my family, and I feel flawed. I feel a gloominess so thick it permeates to my core, obscuring my defenition of self. I can say that and mean it, but I still have to say bah, what a bunch of melodramatic nonsense. What I'm about to say here is pessimistic, and induced by a good amount of alcohol, but completely true all the same.

I talked to my Uncle a few weeks ago, and the conversation is still fresh in my mind. Sometimes I think of him as my only real family. Everybody else is just relatives. My uncle told me that he was recently seeing a therapist, and the therapist told him "It's time you accepted the fact that your father is never going to accept you." Those words blew his mind, he said. His father is my mother's father, the man who I blame for instilling in my mother all of the neurotic tendencies that I'm sure I'll be telling therapists about for another 40 years. My father is a man who I don't recall ever seeking acceptance from. He was just the guy who did paperwork while watching the Tonight Show (when he was in town), and told me to do my homework, even though he had no idea what I was studying. I must be really lucky to have my uncle, otherwise I might be spending the rest of my life wishing I could receive acceptance from a male role model in my life.

My uncle is a really neat guy. My mother tells me stories about him to try to make him sound like a shady character, but she only manages to make him sound more mysterious. I guess at some poit in his youth, he was hitchhiking through Europe, and got hit by a car. He married a woman in the hospital who I've never heard anything else about. He also went to Vegas to marry a woman he had known for two weeks. They've adopted a son and are doing wonderful ten years later. His split with my grandfather stems mostly from the time of the Vietnam war. My grandfather wanted him to drop out of school and enlist, but my uncle decided that his time would be better spent with the peace movement at UC Berkeley. My grandfather holds a grudge to this day. Needless to say, my uncle put himself through school, something I hope to be doing in the future.

I was getting a free ride from my parents for awhile. After four years of supporting myself, I had finally convinced them that I was serious about getting a college education, which began in 2001. But when my dad got laid off, and in early 2003 they said there wasn't any money left after their round-the-country vacation to pay for my tuition. They stopped talking to me, and I was left to move out of the dorms and into the library and various couches around town. I couldn't help but notice how close their decision to stop paying my tuition came to my brother's deployment to Iraq. My last act as a college student was to get arrested for failure to disperse at a peace rally the day the war started, a rally I tried my hardest to recruit students to come to.

When I finally went to my parent's new gated-community home to visit, I found that their new coffee table cost twice as much as my tuition. I guess they still believe what they used to tell me in high school while I was trying to do my homework for my advanced placement classes, spending money on a college education for me is just not a good investment for them. I wish they would have instead told me "you can put your books away, we picked out a really nice coffee table instead."

I'm pretty sure that some of my relatives check this weblog from time to time. I guess this time they won't find anything new.