I need to get out of my parents' house as often as possible. My dad's need for attention is making me sick. When someone tells you "You be a good boy" without a hint of irony, you know that it's time to leave the house. And hell, I've only been there a month.

It's kind of sad, the feeble ways he tries to bridge the massive gap between us. He tried to get me to read the San Jose Mercury article on E3, because he thought "it was something I needed to know about".

My sister and I had this conversation today:

ve: i hate dad
ve: i think he's insane
ga: agreed. What'd he do this time?
ve: he keeps swearing i tell him these things that have never even crossed my mind
ga: last night he yelled at me for not cancelling the second phone line after I called the number on the billing statement and got Vietnamese
ve: if its in veitnamese, he can call
ga: that's what I said
ve: makes more sense for him to call
ga: he's like "I ask you to do ONE thing and you can't do it!"
ve: well, he said "how come you didn't come home last weekend?" i thought you were coming home for mother's day
ve: ???
ga: "Well, yeah, I can't really call during work hours, and when I'm at home they're out"
ga: yeah, I heard about that too. I have no idea where he pulled that from after we had to cancel last week
ve: mom said it didn't matter to her. and she seems too tired for a production anyway
ve: and he's always yelling at her to not work so hard, where its him that makes her even more stressed out
ve: which he doesn't understand
ve: i pointed that out to him two weeks ago and he didn't talk to mom for a few days because he said "she put me up to it."
ga: she keeps making me tiptoe around him when I'd rather just not talk to him
ga: "I'm not letting you leave this house until you say goodbye to your father" and stuff
ve: that's the other thing. i don't want to make her life difficult, but i'm also not going to tiptoe around him
ve: maybe you can frame me as the bad one and just let me do all the talking since i don't live there.
ve: might make your life easier
ga: maybe. I might try that
ga: I really hope I get one of the Gamepro openings, gives me an excuse to move back out of the house
ve: he's getting more and more unmanageable
ve: i think we've hit an all-time high in how much i hate him
ve: even moreso than when i lived with him
ve: i find his behavior unacceptable and intolerable
ga: yeah, he's reminding me why I stayed in Berkeley even though I didn't have a job. It's getting really hard to find reasons to stay at home, even with Mom the way she is
ve: sorry you gotta deal with it
ve: bac hanh is the only one who really recognizes what is happening
ve: i'd come home more if he weren't such an ass
ga: Bac Hanh? really?
ve: yeah, she's mentioned it to me a few times
ve: how she understands why we don't come home much and that his behavior is driving the family apart
ve: she's a good ally
ve: because dad actually listens to her
ve: two people he responds to: ba and bac hanh
ga: It's kind of sad how Dad makes feeble efforts to connect with me and fails
ga: like he tried to force me to read the Mercury article on E3
ve: i find him sad, overall
ve: he's more unmanageable these days cuz he doesn't get the attention he needs from mom

I think it's funny that, given how much my sister and I used to fight, what brought us closer together was my dad's behavior starting to tear the family apart. Family is weird.