I need to know my limits.

Disclaimer: MY THOUGHTS, MY LIFE

I need to stop having dinner with my parents when the brother and the girlfriend are over. It totally exhausts me emotionally and leaves me feeling like shit. My father doesn't realize he does this, but he totally cuts me off mid-sentence to talk about what he wants to talk about, and then will listen to ramblings from the girlfriend of the brother about something as silly as the dog. I don't know why this bothers me so much, but half of me thinks its because both my brother and his girlfriend did WHAT HE DID and FOLLOWED THAT PATH and they just have forgotten how to communicate with me all together because I'm not researching someone's brain at some hoity-toity grad program. I may be jealous, or I may just entirely be an outsider in my own family.

I find it really hard to talk to someone that has not been outside her own country, and has not had to have a real job waiting tables or lifting bricks or doing some kind of manual labor and got into the first grad program she applied to RIGHT AFTER UNDERGRAD. It strikes me that I may be a little bitter, but it also strikes me that I may just be a little beyond all of that. Grow up, and stop seeing only what you want to see. Stop treating me like shit because I followed the path less taken and am better off for it.

My parents don't know what to do with a daughter that was a shut in high school, went to school to be an elementary teacher, dropped that to make $800/month shoveling gravel for the Gulf Coast and then go to Minnesota to make less than that babysitting other people's kids. I didn't use my brain in a way that they wanted to, therefore I'm not worth listening to at the dinner table? They don't know what to do with a daughter that met her boyfriend on the internet and not at an academic institution. So I quit. I quit my family for a while. They always say that you don't choose your family and they choose you.

I choose to be with people that make me happy for once. I choose to be with folks that make me feel good about what I'm doing and don't question it. I don't need to own a home and 2.5 kids and have a job I hate because that is simply what you did and that is what makes one an adult. Let's grow up people. This fall can't come soon enough.

Amen to that!

Too many people (myself included) can identify with this post on postsecret this morning:

It's been a while since I've written anything of substance

And today isn't the day for it. It feels like I should do a fresh start post for the beginning of spring. But the pollen and my job are just making it too difficult to focus on anything right now. I am in a wonderful relationship for the first time in a while and am really just working hard and having fun. It's hard to settle into anything knowing I'm leaving for OK in the fall but it will also be good practice with living life in the moment and just enjoying each day as it comes. I'm so glad I'm going somewhere in the fall; this CNA home healthcare bullshit is getting old and quite frankly wearing on my very last nerve.

It's not like I don't enjoy my clients; I'm just very resentful of a system that doesn't work and a society that doesn't value what I value. I tried to explain this to my father today and got very emotional. Why should money be the marker of success? Why should we place a dollar value on care that doesn't work? Why should the higher ups who quite frankly don't give a shit about anything except taking care of themselves be the ones who make the decisions for others? And why do these jobs pay so little and expect so much? It's not like I can change any of this, and if I could I would but it seems like we have a systemic bigger picture problem at hand here.

I don't like the fact that I am judged by what my parents do, or what I do for that matter. I don't like the fact that to a lot of these people (clients included) I am no more than a blip in their day filled with ingratitude and thanklessness. And why should I be judged for what I care to do because I don't make above the poverty line. Why is money the measure of success and why do people become more racist and classist as they age? And why was I told I'd be able to work in a hospital with a CNA certificate when that is clearly a LIE.

Maybe I had a hard day and maybe I'm a bit bitter. My time is limited here, and for that I am thankful. Thankful for the fact that I am out of here in three months, max. I don't think I'm quite a socialist, but I do think that certain things should be universal. Like healthcare for example. I do think that we should start treating our employees the way they treat us, and place more value on human resources than dollar value resources. Money isn't everything and we are not incomplete people without it. My brother pisses me off sometimes because he takes for granted how good he has it being at the premiere research grad school in the southeast and earns a salary similar to my first year teaching salary doing research and going to class. Why aren't there more universities out there that place a value on people that want to make a difference in other's lives and not just their own. Maybe I sound judgmental tonight, but that's only because I myself am sick of being judged.