Full-on head and chest cold. Ugh. Spent most of my day off bringing up Christmas decorations from downstairs and getting them set up. Looks pretty good.
I went to my company Christmas party last night, which I hadn't originally planned on attending. However, I have fit into this job like a round peg in a round hole. Plus the food looked soooo good, and it was also free wine, so how could I say no? I ended up staying and socializing for about an hour, which I feel very proud of myself for. Having grown up with my mom - the Queen of social anxiety - I very often likened myself to her when in social situations. But I've discovered that I have a bit of a knack for meeting new people and making inane conversation with them to avoid awkwardness. In fact, I think I quite enjoy meeting new people and asking questions, but my mom does not. I think I really like that I am not the same as her in that aspect, because I know that is something that she's battled her entire life, and it's something I don't particularly like about her. My older sister thinks that she is the least socially inept of our whole family, and in some ways she is - she can walk into a room of people and just start talking to God and everyone there, but she also seems to think that people like that she is like that, and I think she makes many people uncomfortable.
Speaking of Crazy, we had a minor meltdown today when she tried to leave with the truck to "buy cigarettes," (which we knew was not true), she had told us that she wanted to go "for a drive" to go smoke pot so that she wasn't doing it in the open garage for the whole world to see. I said no, she was not allowed to take the truck, and she flipped shit. She called my mom at work, and walked around for a good five minutes bitching about how stupid and ugly and fat I am, and how I'll die alone, and how I have no friends and no one likes me, and that at least she knows how to go out and have fun...blah, blah, blah. I can tune her out, because I know that she's just on autopilot at that point and I refuse to engage her. My little sister, however, got really mad and started yelling at her, which caused my older sister to spit in her face from a distance of about 10 inches. When that happened, my little sister slapped my older sister across the face and walked away.
This was a minor meltdown in comparison to the other ones we've had, for sure. It most definitely had the potential to become a major one, but I think my ability to completely disengage was really helpful. However, my little sister was very upset, and called my mom at work to yell at her for giving in to our older sister's demands. She has a really good point - when my sister goes nuts, they have two options: 1.) Give in to whatever she's demanding just to avoid hours of seemingly endless arguing, or 2.) Argue for hours. More often than not, they give her what she wants so that they don't have to go through the whole song and dance of screaming and yelling and everything, and that's really bad. They're just enabling her and reinforcing her belief that she can get what she wants by throwing a temper tantrum. It's as though she's three years old. When my mom was yelling at her the other night, she asked her to go to her room and she wouldn't. So my mom said that if my sister were faced with this kind of behavior from one of her kids, she'd tell them to go to time-out or go to their room, and that would be it, and that it's not fair that my sister won't go to her room when my mom tells her to. I think that was the first thing that got through to my sister the other day. Interesting.
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