I've been meaning to do this blog for a while, but I've been periodically battling stress attacks with Midol and chocolate, and trying to come up with a strategy to gently break up with my boyfriend.

Anyway, I've been thinking about why kids always say they don't want to be like their parents. They don't want to end up in some lame-ass corporate job working nine-to-five hours while their wife (or husband) raises two children they barely know.

I dunno. I think it's more of a "My dad is an alcoholic and my mom is a dumb bitch" kind of situation, for some of my friends, but I've never really felt that there was something wrong with my parents until I sat in our front yard last week.

Our lawn mower broke, and the grass had been growing to about knee-high (don't worry, we finally cut it all yesterday with a new mower), and there are blackberry bushes dominating our rock wall (which I thoroughly poisoned and am getting ready to hack to pieces), and our house that's... in general kind of falling apart. We've lived here since I was in preschool, and my brother and I were always (still are, I guess) pretty rough and tumble. There's a big hole in my bedroom door from a fight, there are scratches on the wood floors, there's some kind of irrepressible mold growing on the ceiling of my mother's bathroom, the place is generally pretty untidy (though it's nowhere NEAR as bad and horribly creepy as those sickos on Hoarders), and I learned yesterday that the roof probably needs to be redone. We just don't have a whole lot of money and we look like white trash. My family is intelligent- the four of us are probably some of the smartest people around, if I may say so, but I wonder how it must feel to my parents to live in this condition. I know that all my life, I've dreamed of living in a sprawling two-story estate that takes up half of Hollywood Hills and has an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the backyard. I want servants and a butler and a chef and a housekeeper and I never, ever want to lift a finger for myself if I can help it. I'm sure everybody wants to live on easy street, and I know that's got to be the same for my parents.

So do they feel like they've failed, living here in this crummy little suburban lot while their lives wile away? Their children are almost grown and they haven't paid the debt on either of the cars or the house. I know they put extra stress on me, because their one son is autistic and his only ambitions are to catch all four hundred-something pokemon.

I would never want to be in their situation; and I'd never want to have to fight for every little thing that I get, like they have to. So I think I can safely say that while I love my parents, and I would be just fine being like them, I'd never want to live their life.

/mopey, existential post