Dan Hagen

I don’t think living with two family members should be that bad. My establishment is somewhat large as well, but in spite of this,  it’s actually easy to tell if someone else is home. The walls and the floors reverberate with various sounds and noises that are undeniably caused by loud family members. I can even distinguish both individuals apart from each other simply by the way they walk; on the Richter scale, my brother’s footsteps are about a 3.9, and my mother’s are a 4.3.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the same people who are loud weren’t also early-birds with a reckless disregard for people who are still sleeping.

I try not to watch movies in the main living room in order to avoid this pitfall. My basement movie-watching environment is much more ideal, with better seating, lighting, and sound arrangements. Unfortunately my Wii is actually hooked up to the living room TV rather than the basement TV. What this means is that every time I want to watch a Netflix instant-play movie via the Wii, I must put up with some of the disagreeable and distracting stimuli created by my family.

Not only is it obnoxious, but it becomes embarrassing as well when I have friends over. There is some strange phenomena that prompts my mother to go to the kitchen and do the dishes every time I watch a movie with my friends in the living room. Again, this shouldn’t be so bad; unfortunately the sound of loading the dishwasher with dirty dishes stands out at a higher volume level than what the old TV set is capable of. As a result I am unable to hear any of the crucial dialog in the movie, as well as anything else for that matter.

I don’t feel too bad for myself. I worry about my cats. I wish I could get into their minds, understand how they feel, and understand how they interpret things. I can’t imagine that they are on good terms with some of the stressful commotion and disturbances that occur throughout the house. I’d even go so far as to say that these same disturbances are an explanation as to why they’ve behaviorally regressed in some ways, a prominent example being that they don’t properly use the litter box as they used to when we first got them (to be blunt, I think it started happening not long after my brother came home from his religious mission). My resident family members don’t care much about the cats either way and would just as soon get rid of them. I’m not sure what’s necessary to make my mom and my brother develop an emotional attachment to these animals – the same kind they had with our old dog – I suppose they just aren’t fit to coexist in the same environment sometimes, which depresses me. My family claims the cats are in the wrong, even though my family itself could very well be the source of the problem.

I can’t help thinking that I would be happier if I moved away from my family.

Work is nice in that way.

Posted on Thursday, August 5th, 2010 at 1:28 am in Life | rss feed for comments| Leave a response, or trackback