Are you pissed off? I'm pissed off. Vent Thread.

[rokken like dokken]

Good luck with whatever you decide, threat.

+1

[r00]

++

I believe in a middle ground for almost any situation like this.

[Aaron]

Ya. Good luck. I hope it works out well.

[Naylzie]

Am learning a bit about why visits from the in-laws are so often painted as horrorshow affairs that should be dreaded and avoided as much as possible.  Love the Beloved's Dad and step-Mom, but apparently in smaller doses than all day every day for two and a half days (and this is just the beginning ).  They're here til Saturday.  Ish.

As any resident (or ranked list of drivers by state) will tell you, New England drivers, specifically RI/MA ones, are among the absolute worst in the country.  This is often difficult for outsiders to adjust to.  The Beloved has offered to drive, to no avail, and Beloved's dad just cannot stop stressing about the roads, the drivers, the people...

Then factor in the fact that the Beloved's kid is my STEP kid and that he lives with his idiot mother and abusive step father most of the time (come to find out AFTER FUCKING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ALREADY INTERVENED BECAUSE OF SUSPICIOUS INJURY) that abusive idiot step father has taken to hitting the kid with a belt.  How the FUCK he has not been removed to either state care, our care, or the care of one of his sets of paternal grandparental types is absolutely goddamned beyond me, but this is, believe it or not, beside the point right now.  Another rant for another time.  No, the trouble is that, despite the whipping bullshit, "discipline" with the mother is completely lacking, as is nutrition, self-accountability, responsibility, and basically anything you could possibly imagine that would be relevant to a healthy atmosphere for child-rearing, and when he comes up here, we deal with the repercussions of that.  He gets told not to do something, and when he does it anyway, or again, or whatever, he then has to go on for an hour justifying his behavior with some bullshit and absolutely will not stop going on about his excuse until someone buys it.  Well, when he's here with Beloved and I, it doesn't get bought. 

Talking about this in the hypothetical is getting confusing to try to tell, so let me just use a concrete example.  On the way home, we stopped for food at a Chinese place.  Stepson is fidgety.  Beloved repeatedly tells him to settle down.  He does, more or less, but needs to be reprimanded several times to keep all four legs of his chair on the floor.  A little later, he is standing and bouncing next to the chair, repeatedly rocking it back on its rear legs, as he had been admonished not to do.  Upon being called on this, he immediately launches into an explanation about how he was just standing next to it and his arm had a twitch (trying to use his words approximately) and it just rocked back from that.  Beloved stops him short, he keeps on plowing through his excuse.  Beloved tries to stop him again with equally little success.  He finishes, Beloved attempts to explain that he (meaning Stepson) is not in trouble, but that we had already told him multiple times to keep four on the floor, and that that was all we were saying now.  Stepson fires off the arm twitch excuse yet again.  Beloved, once again, tries to explain that he does not need, nor want, the explanation, he just wants the behavior to stop.  Stepson argues.  Beloved becomes annoyed and says that Stepson is not YET in trouble, but if he does not start listening, he will be.  Beloved's dad breaks in with tenuously related and seriously undermining story of learning to be accountable for his actions and also learning that people rarely want to hear why something happened and just want to place blame (which, again, was not the issue here; it wasn't about BLAME, it was about not rocking the fucking chair back anymore).  COMPLETELY undermined any semblance of parental authority either of us have (me OBVIOUSLY having VERY LITTLE by nature of being a non-custodial step-parent) and sort of made everyone tense and mildly annoyed.

Then we get home and he wants to unload the pictures from his camera.  No big, his wife packed the appropriate cables, so we hook it up to the computer and go.  He's a mac user.  I'm sure everyone can see where this is going.  The OSes don't work PRECISELY the same goddamn way, nor at the same speed (apparently Mac processes EVERYTHING at the speed of fucking lightx2), so all he does is complain about how bad windows is, how much better his computer does everything, how much he hates using our computers.  It's like, dude, seriously, you want to use the system you're used to on the road?  Get a laptop.  Shit, at this point, get a tablet.  Otherwise, you keep your outdated, elitist brand superiority to yourself, you do what you need to do, and you appreciate the access to the machine.

  I was less wound up before the shouting match about the computers, but when you attack my knowledge or understanding of a computer because you don't like my OS?  Yeah, I'm going to get a little fucking uppity.  I've been using computers almost since I was in diapers.  I could kick up Windows 3.1 from DOS by 5 or 6 years old (not that command prompts are HARD, but for a 5 or 6 year old, I think that's pretty impressive).  I was programming websites in straight HTML by the time I started posting here (around 14).  My graphic arts teacher in high school would have me preview assignments to judge if my classmates were capable of the work, and would give me assignments from his more advanced classes to do in my spare time just to see what I'd do with them.  I've managed to teach tricks about a smart board to two teachers who've had them for YEARS after spending just one college semester with one in my classroom.  I built both my own and the Beloved's computer from the component parts by myself.  No, I'm not a hacker.  There are things I could learn about computers still.  Goose, among others here, very definitely knows more about computers than I do.  However, being that Beloved's dad isn't much of a tech-head, I really think it's pretty safe to say that, when I know more about computers than my father the software engineer from Raytheon who deals with computers as part of his livelihood, that I PROBABLY do know more about them than he does.

/ego
/rage

tl;dr - I like my in-laws, but GODDAMN do they do things that make me seethe with rage sometimes.   

[TPD]

guh

[r00]

what he said.  8(  That sounds like an awful situation.

[luna]

That is why I'm glad to have to only see B's parents a few times a year for only a few hours at a time. Any more and I might kill either myself or them

[chimera]

Have no in-laws now save Keith's siblings but we (or should I say I) rarely see them (but we've always gotten along for the most part).  When Keith's mother was alive we didn't see her that much because she and her youngest son always had a bad relationship (and all which that implies).

[Stariki]

The heart wants what the heart wants Don't delay Rae...

[sin]

My brother just found out that the 16 year old girl who rear-ended him a month ago and caused a 4 car wreck finally admitted, after being pressured by police, that she didn't have insurance.  Now he's also been informed from the tow-yard that's been holding his wrecked car that he has 2 weeks to fork over $1200 for the tow and storage (since it took the girl a month to admit that her insurance wouldn't pay for it) or they'll legally possess the car and sue him for recovery of funds.

He's left a message with the girls parents saying basically "Hey... fucking PAY THIS SHIT," and his wife, since she works for the county and actually gets a small amount of free legal advice every year as part of her benefits, has consulted a lawyer who basically said they can go to the police and demand restitution or take the family to small claims court, but the odds are slim that they'll ever see any actual money.

[chimera]

Oh I just love being referred to as a liar by an online bully. 

[rokken like dokken]

Oh I just love being referred to as a liar by an online bully. 

If this is fandom-related, for the life of me I can't figure out why you put up with some of that stuff - it seems to attract some really weird people. 

My bitch for the day: my (our) client doesn't want to accept that the process conditions outlined for this meter will not allow it to work, and their sole source vendor has told us repeatedly they can't make it work.  WHY GOD WHY. 

[chimera]

Eh, I'm a masochist.   But speaking of crazy, I had to endure another entitlement rant which ended with We're the reason he's rich and successful.

IDEK how to deal with that...I cannot process the arrogance of someone who honestly believes that any artist is nothing without fans and therefore owes them everything.

[rokken like dokken]

Eh, I'm a masochist.   But speaking of crazy, I had to endure another entitlement rant which ended with We're the reason he's rich and successful.

IDEK how to deal with that...I cannot process the arrogance of someone who honestly believes that any artist is nothing without fans and therefore owes them everything.

I couldn't deal with fans like that, but that could be because I think the best art trolls its own fanbase.  I may never be a success. 

[Static]

Eh, I'm a masochist.   But speaking of crazy, I had to endure another entitlement rant which ended with We're the reason he's rich and successful.

IDEK how to deal with that...I cannot process the arrogance of someone who honestly believes that any artist is nothing without fans and therefore owes them everything.

Aren't these usually the kinds of people who don't actually pay for anything the artist ever did anyway?  Just a high sense of elitism because they downloaded every picture and loaned books instead of buying them.