Observation #1:On Family Life

It was just like Vancouver, everything is so unstable! For five days straight there
were golden mornings and glowing afternoons. Then when Saturday crept up on the
celestial planner, the sky’s face lifted to gray and drizzling. If this weather change could
be viewed with thought maybe it would seem almost shocking.

It was not really cold, but it looked like it. Mom occupied herself in the kitchen,
doing what really was not necessary. Oddly enough, she was always standing there doing
all the “somethings”, but the place managed to still look like a mess. No one in this
house wanted to cook anymore either, so we just scrounged around, digging whatever
there was to fill our stomach. It does not matter anyway, everything, even good things,
tastes like cardboard these days. My father blamed my mother for her poor cooking, I
just blamed the weather.

I sat, dull-eyed, at the “dining” table, staring at some dried carnation that hung so
peculiarly from that wall lamp that vainly attempted to impersonate an old fashioned
streetlight (too bad streetlights were not that synthetic, bleached white). I shrugged it off
as I knew Mom had a strange preference for decoration. I mean, the powder pink that
stained nearly every wall of this house was her idea. Sometimes, it came to a point
where I just want to scratch relentlessly at those colors, or take a permanent marker and
scribble curse words all over it, or draw grotesque bleeding figures on it.

Not this morning, I sat there idly…Food brought to my mouth like a robotic
twitch. In fact, I hardly knew what it was that I ate. Dad came through the door from
his errands, and also took a seat beside me without a word. He started to scoop food into
his mouth, eyes glazed over and troubled with wrinkles of worry. I could scarcely feel
his presence if not for his physical form sitting next to me, reflecting my own action of
shoveling feed into a muzzle. I continued to daze disapprovingly into that hideous, died
carnation, and he continued to glaze over into his troubles.
At length, Mom came in, settled down a bowl of some sort of leftovers from last
night. It struck me that food did not look like food anymore, of course not, it was Mom’s
cooking! That thought did not linger. Mom stuffed a spoonful in her mouth and glanced
at Dad. She asked him about his errands casually, almost callously. Dad did not look at
her, but he answered her in monosyllabic words. She seemed annoyed and proceeded to
yell at him, something that we were all accustomed to by now. Dad merely blinked,
didn’t even bother to retaliate this time around, and let the silence respond to her.

He finished eating, and pushed his bowl aside nonchalantly. I could see him
looking at me, then at my book. “What’s that trash you are reading?”
“It’s just a book Dad.” I replied, an imitation of boredom.

“What, you can’t even tell me that much now? How many times do you actually
speak to your family in a week? You’ve changed you know?”
(Gee Dad, you mean people change?). I rolled my eyes like I always do when he
went off like that; a mad ejaculation of rhetorical questions. Whatever I say really is just
going to be used against me in the near future, or in my mother’s case, the distant too. It’s
like a freaking courthouse, and he blames me for not talking to him. Whoever invented
the term “catch twenty-two” must know what I am thinking right now.
“There had better be educational value in that.” He grunted at last, bulging his
blood-shot eyes at an invisible spot across the room.

“Okay then…” I remarked ever so snidely, and took note to never read anything of
“value” again.

So this is what the world’s nuclear families are supposed to be like? Or is that just
mine that feels like a slow devolution? Every cursed day, the pink gets to me a little
more, the carnations a little dryer. I usually lock myself up in my room and hope no one
will come in, or try to make conversation outside the shut piece of rotted bark. Like I
always said, all I need in here is a toilet and maybe a little hole through which food
maybe passed through in a versatile plastic package (and later a knife inside the