well, I'm home from Victoria now, and a bit on the tired and stressed side of the tracks because I have loads to do, and my family has already driven me into sullen, brooding retreat, what with having to deal with them all for Kat's birthday dinner, and V playing the "edge S out and make sure you're the coolest and best-loved big sister game" and it's not like I really care, because I figure that both our little sisters look to us for different things, but then she starts being patronizing, and it all goes downhill from there.

Sometimes I think maybe she actaully does do it deliberately. Whenever she can tell that I'm starting to get irritated, and I'm less talkative and a bit more distant, she knows it's time to attack. And she does it so subtly and yet it is all so calculated, and she has it down to an art. She starts giving me advice about things I'm stressed about, even though they're none of her business, and generally things that she should be the last person giving advice about, like money, school, etc. And I get like, yah, okay thanks, hoping she'll back off her making me look like a fuckwad who can't keep her shit together campaign, but she never does, oh no. No rest for the wicked. She goes on giving pithy advice and trivializing anything I say until she find an excuse to mention our dad. FUCK!!

Now see, my "father" (certainly not a title he has earned, more like "sperm donor and cheif asshole" but anyways) is not exactly a nice person. He is an extremely smart person and an alarmingly stubborn person, but then I start running out of even reasonably nice things to say about him. He breaks my heart systematically every time I let him anywhere near me, since I was a little, little girl. I would decide to try to open up to him, send him a letter, whetever, and then every few years I'd see him (few = 4 to 5) and he'd say he was so happy to see me, and that he'd always loved me and thought about me, etc. etc. and that he wanted a chance to start again with me, and so on. And then I'd get home, and it would fall apart, and I'd realize he lied, and had been full of shit all along.

The most recent incidences of this include the time I went and had dinner with him when I was about 13 or so, and we hung out all eveing, blah blah blah, and at one piont he was "leveling with me" on his back porch and said "well, at least I always did what I could, I always paid child support." I didn't say anything, but that certainly wasn't what I knew to be reality. When I got home from Calgary I found out mom was finally preparing to file through the courts and force him to pay, for the first time since the half-assed attempt he made at it for two months when I was in grade 2. Fuck.

and the fast forward a few years, to when Cam and I went to visit him, when I was 16 I think. And we turned over a fresh leaf, and I forgave him again, and same blah blah blah. And then I got home. And then some time passed where we actually talked on the phone on and off and were alright for a bit. ANd then I got some thing in the mail. Seems V had mentioned to him (because they're all buddy-buddy for the first time) that I was working, so he wanted to have my income assesed to see if he could get out of paying. Working part time to save up for school, he's only paid for like three bloody years, and he already wants out. Right after our latest new leaf.

But we had been trying to get along, right? So I called him and said "hey, I got these papers, what's that all about" and he said "I wouldn't know, nothing to do with me, maybe you're just getting older." And it sounded like a load of crap to me, but I didn't say anything. But then he called me back a few days later, while I had a bunch of people over, and started saying how dare I accuse him of trying to get out of paying child support, and what an ungrateful selfish child I am, and am I trying to say he's a bad person, and so on. And I said that I had people over (this was during game in my old basement, in case anyone remembers the "S spontaniously cries" game) and would he call me back in about an hour. But he never did.

And time passed, and we didn't talk, because I didn't fell like I had anything to apologize for, but I knew that was all he'd hear. And then V let slip, not once, not twice, but three times. First, that he'd told her where the papers had come from, that is a legal group he'd joined of dads who didn't think they should be paying child support and wanted to get out of it. Fuck, so you had nothing to do with it, eh? Second, he's paying for her to go out and visit for a week, not nearly as bad as third: comes to town, sees her not me, and she promises not to tell me. Very betrayed by them both. She tells me only months later, when she figures him and I will never speak again, so maybe it's safe. And even then she only accidentally let it slip.

And so whenever she wants to hurt me, she brings him up, just in passing, like hey, he loves me but not you. And he sends her money, even though he doesn't legally have to, while every couple of months I get a new set of forms in the mail, the results of his latest attempt to weasle his miserable way out of having to support his child. And he does still have to, so long as I'm living with mom, at school and under 23, which I am. This batch of forms even required a letter from my school and notarization. Fucker.

And did I mention the him and his wife own a nice big house and several vehicles, while we struggle endlessly to make ends meet. I hope he chokes on something and V finds a way to make herself happy without squashing me so that she looks better. Who needs enemies?