Troubled Thursday

All Thursdays are troubled at our place: my lack of sleep tends to accumulate, the kids start to get tired of the week's classes too, and every week we have to convince them again to go to tennis training, not so much because they do not like tennis, but because they cannot be bothered to leave the other things they are doing and get ready for the training. The funniest part is that, when they come back, they regularly admit that have had a great time!

Today Trevor has not had piano lessons in the early afternoon because his teacher is out of town, and that has alleviated part of the problem, but instead I had to drive to pick him up after school because it was raining and Karen was cooking lunch. Luckily, by the time Jason was done the rain had stopped, so he came home walking. However, the respite did not last much and about a half hour later I had to drive Karen to her book club because it was raining again and it was raining a lot. In summary, it has been a lot of driving today.

But the thing that has troubled my mind most of the day was the conversation with my mother and brothers yesterday evening. My mother mentioned that a nephew of her sister-in-law had a very aggressive type of cancer called Ewing sarcoma at age 29, that he had already lost one leg from the knee down and now had metastasis on the hip, so the outlook is very grim. Although I do not know him personally, the news are obviously disturbing, particularly due to the young age. But the most disturbing part of the conversation was Jack's response: he said that, considering the pandemic together with this piece of news, he had decided to release the brakes and live a fully "hedonistic" life. This comment is preposterous coming from a DINK who, as I mentioned before, spends out of the house almost every minute of free time that he has. To top it off, he said: "I have never cared much about what people thought of me, but now I am going to care even less". And I am sorry, but that is a bit too much for me. I understand that he works very hard, bears a lot of responsibility and (probably) deserves every paycheck he gets, but depicting himself as a circumspect or restrained person is a blatant lie. He is and has always been one of the most boisterous person I have ever known, to the point of being disrespectful to the gloomy feelings of anyone around him. Anything that is any less than "astounding", "extraordinary" or "breathtaking" does not interest him and he does not want to hear about it. I am sure that at work he is regularly forced to deal with this kind of "lesser" situations, but he never speaks about them (at least with us), so his conversation ends up being an almost endless soliloquy of daisy-chained rosy to golden moments.

Photo: pikrepo.com

I have nothing to say about the way he lives his life, it is his own and he has every right to choose what to do with it. But I think that everybody owes a minimum level of respect for the hardships and (low) feelings of those around them. And showing that level of disdain for the rest of us can only be labelled as egotistic and frivolous. 

This episode has haunted me through the day and will probably take me still some time to process, because that is not the kind of people I am ready to deal with. I understand that you do not get to pick your family, and indeed I regularly put up with a number of behaviors that I would normally run away from, because in the end they are my family, they are they way they are and you cannot expect to change them. However, yesterday's call has left me seriously ruffled and I am considering not to join the call next week just to avoid Jack. Let's see how the situation evolves over the course of the week.

Otherwise, data processing went smooth in the morning, I run into a small software problem that needed a contribution from someone in the team, and I did manage to make progress with my course, so not all was bad today. I will catch up with you tomorrow again. Cheers!