Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

I'm going through some bad moods again. Nothing serious, they're not very heavy mood swings, I just keep flipping from one to the other. The cause of these moods are my family. (Also I've read that lack of exercise and poor diet can cause depression. Couple that with being a lazy *** and not doing anything and it's pretty clear that my bad moods are all my own doing.) Anyway, I'm kind of sliding between cheerful (but not overly happy), depression (only a light depression, it doesn't hang around for very long and it's not that deep) and anger (mainly hatred but again it's only light hatred.) I kind of keep sliding between these three feelings at the moment. I was fine until Tuesday. Pretty normal. I've been watching Metalocalypse again. It's fun. I'm building up to watching season 3, haven't seen that yet. I find it funny that I like Metalocalypse but I don't like death metal. It's hard to categorize what type of music I like because it shifts constantly and just because I like a song by one band doesn't mean I like any of their other songs or any other bands in that category. Most recently I've been listening to Vocaloid songs, before that Seether and before that Skillet and before that Nickleback with a few anime songs and vocaloid songs dotted inbetween all of them. I'm not exactly sure if these groups have anything specific in common other than the fact that I've been listening to them. Incidentally my favourite song from Metalocalypse is Murmaider, mainly because it's funny. Why would mermaids have laser beams? (Not exactly sure why I put this music segment in here, maybe to show you a little more of my personality I guess.)
I attribute my not getting too angry or depressed to watching Metalocalypse, because I find it fun. A little gory at times but still fun. I was watching it on the Tuesday when these mood swing started. Not long after 7pm I get a phone call. I assume it's one of two things, Napoleon arranging to collect his post (I texted him earlier in the day because his AA card came and that's post worthy of reporting.). So it would either be Napoleon or one of these damned automated messages we keep getting. Surprisingly it was neither. It was actually my uncle (my mother's brother).
I need to digress again to give a little back story on this.
Every year my mother's family have a little gathering. A gathering which I've always attended as far as I can remember. We go to my aunt's at Christmas (the one who didn't die of cancer (my mother had 2 older sisters, the second oldest died during my first year at Uni.)) We go to my uncle's (My mother only has one brother. The uncle who died of cancer during my second year at Uni was Napoleon's older brother, he still has one younger brother) for a barbeque at some unspecified time in Summer. Sometimes It's my cousin's instead of my uncle's (this cousin is the living aunt's first son). Every couple of years or so we also meet at my Aunt's for Easter.
The date that we meet at my uncle's (because it is usually the uncle and not the cousin) has steadily been moving further and further backwards and is now in mid September. Needless to say, it won't be a barbeque. What kind of idiot tries to hold a barbeque in mid September? Last year it was too cold so we stayed inside. Looks like it'll be the same this year. It had better be. If it's warm enough to go outside I'll be seriously pissed (We can't take the dog with us because of space issues, but if we were out in the garden it would be fine). I've been waiting for a call telling us it's going on.
I always try to predict the worst outcome so I'm at least a little prepared for the worst. I've been joking about us hearing nothing until the day when my uncle will call us and demand to know where we are and then realising that he never told us about it. I predicted it but I didn't really think it would happen. Well, it's not as bad as all that but I was pretty close.
On Tuesday my uncle calls us and says he forgot to tell us sooner but they're holding the gathering this Sunday. Like I said, pretty close, I was only five days out. I say okay and hang up then tell mum. She asks if I asked about the dog. Crap. I forgot the dog. So I had to phone him back and ask if we could take the dog. He gave it some thought but his tone instantly said nope, not happening. He wonders if my aunt will bring her dog (it's pretty safe to say she will, she had for the past 3 or so years) and we'll be inside so it'll be a bit of a squeeze and besides, he has a cat. (My aunt's dog is small so she's unlikely to be able to kill it, Yuki could kill it in an instant) I said well, at the end of the day it's your house, we can leave the dog at home. I don't want to leave her at home. He doesn't live that far away so we should be okay to leave her but I might stay home with her.
This whole thing annoyed me. We're not the kind of people who go out and do anything so we never have plans but what if we did? What then. I also hate that we're always the last to know anything. It's almost as if everyone else is more important than us, more specifically me. This always makes me angry. One of the main reasons I get depressed and angry during these things is my relationship with the rest of my family.
If the layout of my family is a little confusing I'll outline it now.
I'll do Napoleon first since it's easier.
Napoleons is very simple. He has an older half brother (The one who died) and a younger brother. As far as we know Napoleon was the only one to have children. Me.
Now for my mother's side the starting point should be my grandparents.
Grandparents had 4 children. 2 girls (Aunt#1 and Aunt#2. I'm not sure of their age difference but they're quite close) and one boy and that was perceived as the end of it. The last child (my mother) was completely unplanned and unexpected and came along 10 years after my uncle. They'd been saving up for wall to wall carpeting and had to put it on hold for another 10 or so years.
Aunt#1 had a baby boy 10 years after my mother was born So I shall call him cousin#1. Later on she had another 3 children (I'm unsure of their age difference) cousin #2 male, cousin#3 female, cousin#4female.
Aunt#2 (the one who is dead) had 3 daughters and they have their own families. Because I didn't see Aunt#2 as often and we barely have contact with her part of the family now (Christmas cards, that's about it) I will not be assigning these cousins with numbers, it'll get too confusing, I haven't seen them since the funeral and I'd only seen them before at their respective weddings and such.
My uncle has no children that we know of. He's hitting 70 now so he's unlikely to reproduce.
My first cousin, cousin#1 who must be hitting 50 now, has 3 children. 2 boys and a girl. The oldest boy is about 2 or so years older than me. The second boy was born in the same year as me but at the opposite end (I was born in March and he was born in November) and the girl is about 2 or so years younger than me. Last year she had a baby boy. I call him Chi or Chi-chan because that's the word I had in my head when I got to meet him this time last year. I was wondering what to call him, since we didn't know his name and I'd been looking up small on google translator a couple of months in advance. So it's actually Chi as in Chīsa (Apparently it's not pronounced with a chi sound but I didn't know that at the time.) This was also shortly after I'd watched Ichigo Mashimaro (Strawberry Marshmallow) where one of the characters is called Chika or Chi for short. (Chi is also the name of the lead female in Chobits, an anime I watched in my first year at Uni.) When I first met the baby in my mind I kept calling him Chi-chan so now he is Chi. And besides, chi has a much wider meaning than mentioned above so no one needs to know that it's because I mispronounced Chīsa.
I'm quite detached from my family. My aunts and uncle are so much older than my mother that they're rather out of touch with her, let alone me. My cousins are similar, just not quite in my generation and my second cousins? Sure we're the same kind of age but I only see them 2-3 times a year and they're siblings, so they're a pretty tight group while I'm an only child with poor social skills due to shyness, lack of interaction with others and victim of bullying during my early-mid teens. Also I developed a very different personality to most of my peers. All of Aunt#1's family are so much closer because they're all part of the same branch of the family tree, and they live nearby to each other. It takes us so long to drive up to see them (Aunt#2's family is a similar story but they live much further away and take a couple of hours to get to which is why we never see them.) As for my uncle? HA!. For starters he's a man secondly he was 45 when I was born, he took early retirement so has been retired for almost or possibly as long as I've known him so he spends his days doing a variety of old people's activities that I find boring. What doesn't help is that either he and his wife or cousin#1 and his wife are always going on cruises somewhere so it's hard to get the family together. It depresses me. And, because mum's sense of direction is bad. Very bad. Once she got lost driving back from my aunt's and was driving all round London while I slept in the back of the car (I could have only been about 5-6 at the time) and just when she got to an area she recognised the car broke down so she had to call the AA. It was well past midnight before we got home. I remember that because I thought, this is the latest I've ever been up until. So this is what really really early morning looks like. Because of that terrible sense of direction, in fact since that very incident, we've had to rely on my uncle to take us up to my aunts for these gatherings. We drive to his house, park the car. Then get into his car and he drives. The journey there and back has always been so boring and depressing. I didn't notice it so much at first but as I got older I noticed. Sometimes when we were going a long I get a smell as if someone had farted, seems I wasn't alone, mum noticed too. The seatbelt always cut into my neck (Since I've grown it doesn't do that anymore). They'd ask how we were as a courtesy then just go on about whatever they were doing then we'd just have silence. Whenever I spoke I'd get interrupted by either my uncle or his wife so I stopped speaking. His wife is actually deaf in one ear but I didn't know that back then and I have always talked very quietly. When I was little and met someone from school in the street or out shopping they'd say hi and I said hi back but I said it too quietly so my child minder (yes, that evil old woman, because I was out and about with her at these times (my school was in her neighbourhood, not mine, hence some of my problems)) she would say to me did you say hello? and I said yes with indignation. What I didn't realise until a few years later was that just because I could hear what I said didn't mean that others could. Another reason I talk quietly is that whenever I raised my voice, like if I was having an argument with another child at the childminders, she would always tell me to stop screeching. My god you've no idea how much I hated that. Every time. EVERY DAMNED TIME!!!!!!!!!!! Barely any attempt to resolve the conflict. She'd normally side with someone else anyway. I was the only one she told off for raising my voice. It's not even like she told me off, she just said stop screeching. Stop screeching. Funny thing is when I raise my voice I don't actually sound screechy at all. So she was using completely the wrong word to describe me. You have no idea how much that one sentence knocked my self esteem. Threw it down into the dirt and kicked it when it tried to get up. I will admit that I didn't understand that my voice is actually higher than I think it is. No one ever explained that to me. If they had perhaps I would have understood. A person's voice sounds completely different to them than it does to the rest of the world. This is because part of the ear went down to create the jaw or part of the jaw went up to create the ear. I can't remember which. I think it's the latter. Never mind. The point is there's a link between the jawbone and the ear. That's why when you crunch something (mouth closed of course) you can hear every crunch but someone else can't.
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