mood: >:[ angry
music: Place for My Head – Linkin Park

If there’s one thing I hate about the world other than war and prejudice, it’s how much our lives are shaped by money.

Just had an argument with my parents about the furniture for my new apartment. You’d think most parents would be proud of their kids learning to be frugal and finding good deals and trying to save money. Especially if it’s the parents’ money. Not my parents; they get mad at me for being too thrifty. It seriously infuriates me.

I’d figured out a plan for my bedroom furniture: a bed, mattress, and desk from Ikea along with some stackable drawers from Target. Simple. Cheap. Practical. Even cute. Would probably be under $500. Pretty good, considering that all the rest of the furniture is already accounted for (my housemate Katie’s mom has a friend who left the country and gave them all of his stuff), right? Yeah, no, apparently not. My dad flipped a bitch about having to assemble the furniture. I was like, “DAD. You see my desk here in my room at home? And my bedside table? And my bookcase? Yeah, um, I ASSEMBLED THAT ALL BY MYSELF. WHEN I WAS NINE.” What the fuck is the big deal? He was like, “What if you assemble it wrong? No.” And I was like, “Are you serious? THEN YOU TEAR IT APART AND FIX THE MISTAKE.” What the hell? And then he tells me to look up furniture stores in Berkeley. No, that is freaking ridiculous! I’ll have to pay a gazillion dollars for the furniture, pay a ton for delivery, and then not be able to lift it myself. And it probably won’t be as cute as Ikea furniture anyway. GOD. And Ikea furniture is GREAT. I don’t care how shitty the make is, it lasts years upon years. And it’s SO CHEAP. It’s not like I’m moving into a fucking house with a family or some bullshit! It’s just a freaking college apartment. I am SO pissed. Can you tell?

My father is such a fucking snob. He wouldn’t even believe me when I said that my friends were taking secondhand beds up.

Who the fuck do you think you are? Believe me, I am more than grateful for how much bank he makes, but it gives him NO RIGHT to be ridiculous like this. It makes me so fucking angry. And of course my mother just sees it as him having the right to make the decisions regarding this kind of thing because the money that he wants us to splurge with is the money that he makes.

And all of this just makes me look like this stupid, cheapass, stingy bitch.

Jesus, sorry if there are things I’d much rather spend my money on. Like, um, FOOD. Or like, ELECTRONICS. Or BOOKS. Not fucking FURNITURE.

And trust me, this is not a one-time thing.

GAHHHHH SO MUCH RAGE

mood: thoughtful
music: Let Me Be – Britney Spears

The weekend of the 20th, I flew home at last. I have to return every month or so for orthodontic work.

My teeth have a long history of causing me trouble. When I was three years old, I got excited during a meal at a restaurant and fell off of my booster seat. This resulted int he loss of one-and-a-half teeth. THe other half had a cavity (my only cavity ever) and was taken out. When my permanent teeth came in , my two front teeth did not grow out. They had to cut into my gums in order to let them grow out. Unfortunately, they grew out about a centimeter apart. So, at age seven, I got braces (but only on the front two teeth). Later, they found that four of my teeth had no room to grow out and needed to be extracted, so I got that done. Then, they changed to braces to work for my top four teeth. I wore them until sixth grade (age 11).

I was to do Phase II, but we realized how silly it was to drive to Glendale (~2 hours depending on traffic) and decided that we’d look for a local orthodontist. We put it off for a long time, and by the time high school rolled around, I was wary both of the appearance factor and the insane price (I had never known that it cost thousands before). Despite my dad’s insistence, I said no to Phase II.

Seems like the guys in my life just really do not like my teeth. Mark bothered me like fuck about it, and I was very offended and annoyed. And then he started talking to his mother about it and telling me how they both thought that I should get braces and speech therapy and shit (’cause I can afford to, so why the fuck wouldn’t I want to, right? HAH.) I decided that I was NEVER going to, and I essentially told him so. I’m still annoyed and offended whenever he brings it up, but that’s Mark for you. It’s one thing to make fun of a friend about something like the way she talks; it’s another to actually encourage her to get it fixed.

Anyway, what got me to get braces was the health of my teeth, not my appearance. Luckily, the orthodontist we decided to go to specializes in Invisalign, the invisible braces. It’s a helluva lot more expensive than I’d like, but I blame that on my dad’s shittyass insurance that gives us like no coverage for anything (but of course when he goes to see Asian doctors, it’s all free, pfft). Kelly made me feel better, though, in that by skipping fall semester, I got to save my parents a ton of money, and the price of my braces is still less than half of college tuition for a semester.

They’re really cool, though. I thought that it would be a pain in the ass to have to take them out to eat all the time, but you get used to it pretty quickly. I hope that it’ll be done w/i a year, but my luck in the area of teeth is very minuscule.

Why am I talking about teeth again? Oh, yeah.

So I went back home. At the Oakland Airport, I got Starbucks (Passion Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade FTW) and a CPK “The Works” pizza. Mmm, so good. My mom picked me up at the airport and brought me a Thai tea, my favorite. How nice of her. That night, I had salmon teriyaki, yum! It was wonderful being home again. Everything felt right again. I felt truly, completely happy again. It felt like the world had been tipped over during my time at Berkeley, and it was suddenly tilted upright again. It felt good.

On Saturday, I slept in and chilled for a while before going to Yen Sushi with my mom, yum. Then I drove to CVS to spend $50 with a coupon my mom gave me and got to get a bunch of stuff I needed for Cal. That was fun, except that I kept trying tow ork the weird razor drawer they had…and failing miserably, LOL. Ah, well. Later that night, I went with my parents to eat Thanh. My dad asked me a lot of questions about Berkeley, which was kinda nice. There were some tense moments throughout the night, though, as my parents argued and my ddad kept telling my mom that she didn’t understand anything. I feel really bad for her; it made her really mad. She even went to sleep with the door closed.

A big point of contention throughout the weekend was the Cintiq Wacom tablet thing. My sister decided last year that she wanted it, and she finally got up the courage to ask for it. My dad, of course, said yes (he has a bad history of succumbing to her ridiculous desires). The catch? The tablet costs a whopping $1000. His reasoning? She got straight A’s, and it was supposed to be her motivation for getting more.

Okay, dude, I’ve gotten straight A’s a billion of times. Where the fuck is my $1000 gift? Gifts, I should say. The last time my sister got straight A’s (in middle school) she got a fucking LCD TV. So yeah, I got my pimpass Lexus, right? And I’m damn grateful for it. But you know, they’ve already promised her a BMV if she gets into UCLA. Say what?! Why does she get all these rewards for doing less work? I don’t understand.

The fucked up part is that they don’t’ even like her more. It’s not an issue of favoritism. I know I’m a better kid. Nobody doubts that. The difference is that she’s wiling to ask for her impractical desires to be fulfilled while I don’t indulge in my wishes like that and actually respect the money that my parents work really hard to make. God, that pisses me off, her making them spend unnecessary money on expensive things that she loses interest in within a year. Ugh. My mom told Jess to wait a month because she didn’t have enough money, but my dad dismissed her and just told Jess to order it. I have to admit that I was pretty tired of my family by my second day there.

The next day, I slept in again and then took Jess to lunch at BJ’s, which was delicious, of course. Then, at night, we (as a family) went to eat Korean barbecue, which was also good.

On Monday, I drove myself to the orthodontist in the wee hours of the morning (8:30). It was very uncool to learn that I’d paid for a $200 flight home just for my orthodontist to peer at my teeth for 5 min, give me my next 2 sets of braces, and schedule my next appointment.

Anyway, the last thing I did back home was eat Stewed Veggie @ the Bakery, yum. Then it was back to Berkeley… Sigh.

mood: cold
music: Leave – Matchbox Twenty

Tonight, I drove home from class, blasting my favorite song and singing at the top of my lungs, and thinking hard.

I got in a fight with Mark last night. It wasn’t the usual. Far from it.

For the first time, I haven’t told a single one of my friends about it, other than mentioning it briefly to Diana. There is nobody ‘right’ to tell this to, which is unfortunate. But at least I have you, you who won’t judge me, who won’t speak back with an opinion. At least I have you, who never pretends to understand me, who never disparages the way I think, who just takes my opinion and lives with it. You live in my heart, anyway.

I was checking out Cyber Monday deals yesterday for sweaters and other warm clothes for Berkeley when I realized how ridiculous it all was. How messed up is it that I have to spend money buying winter clothes just because I’m going to Berkeley, which happens to be in Northern California? If I were going to UCLA or UCSD, I would save like…a bunch of money. Which makes me feel shitty and also slightly bewildered.

I shared this thought with Mark, and he assured me that I would probably stay inside a lot anyway, which Jayne had mentioned earlier, so I decided that this was a good point and I should stop buying sweaters. The End, right? No, of course not. He randomly brought it up again (I’m assuming because he read my blog, but who knows) and asked me what I hate hearing most: Why am I stressing out about spending money if my mom is paying for the warm clothes for Berkeley?

Everyone used to always say that when it came to things like Winter Formal and limos and tickets, and it pissed me off. The other day, Mark’s mom said the same thing to me, and then Mark did yesterday. I’m tired of hearing it. I’m tired of trying to explain to people that just because it’s not money that I earned doesn’t mean that I can use it without feeling guilty. I’m tired of trying to explain to people that maybe I don’t just care about my own money but also about my family’s, too. Mark said that my mom is “supposed to” pay for this stuff so I shouldn’t feel bad about spending the money (and kept reiterating as he tends to, of course). I tried to explain that I’m aware that she’s perfectly willing to spend the money (she’s actually really obsessed — and has always been — with buying jackets) but that didn’t assuage my guilt about it. I tried to explain that I just don’t like that she has to spend that money, that I just don’t like that I have to be responsible for that money being spent. And then he tried to put me in my mom’s shoes to prove to me that she just wanted me to be warm and safe. Okay… I told him it had nothing to do with whether or not she wanted to buy it; I was hardly going to demand that she not buy me any jackets (I just demand that she doesn’t buy me ridiculous things like $200 boots), all I was saying was that it bugged me that she had to.

He still kept trying to prove to me that if I were the parent, I would want to keep my child warm. I told him I was perfectly aware of that but that it wasn’t really relevant. I repeated that all I’d meant was that I didn’t like being responsible for that money being spent. And he wouldn’t stop trying to fucking prove his point that I had already fucking agreed with about five times. At this point, I was already in tears, so I kept begging him to stop. I asked him repeatedly to just drop the topic.

He actually said no.

So I left the computer.

Mark always complains that I don’t tell him when I’m upset with him; I just remain silent and then put up an away message and stew about it for hours. He always begs me to tell him when he’s upsetting me. I always say that I will try. So I tried. I told him to stop and that I would prefer if we stopped talking about it. Even though I just wanted to say “oh” and nothing else like I usually do (or yell, “Fuck you; shut the hell up and leave me alone”, like I never do), I let him know that I was upset, and I expected him to stop. But instead of stopping, he told me that no, he wasn’t going to stop, and that I was pissing him off.

And then he called me ungrateful.

Sorry doesn’t cut it here; it won’t, and it didn’t. Because he actually had the nerve to tell me that I was unappreciative of how my parents have money, and that it pissed him off whenever I “complained” about “the fact that [I'm] able to receive ['basic things']“.

How dare you.

Unappreciative? Complain? No. You don’t get away with saying these things to me.

It always comes back to money in the end, doesn’t it? It’s always these walls, these labels that people put on each other, because of money. It’s always the way people act, because of their money or lack thereof. It’s always money that brings people together or tears them apart, or both.

I hate it when people create these walls. It’s always the same. We are different because you cannot understand my financial situation. He is different, she is different, because they are on a different economic level. And then I try to break them down, these damn walls; I try to surpass them, I try to ignore them — and I get called spoiled, I get called unappreciative, I get called stupid. This isn’t the first time. And I’m sure it won’t be the last. People are idiots.

I learned in high school that I couldn’t talk to my other friends about money, because none of them thought the same way that I did, and none of them could understand how I thought about it — and none of them appreciated the way I thought about it. Diana always thought that I should take advantage of when my parents offered to pay for things, Maggie and Erin and Amanda never got why I would feel guilty about using my parents’ money if they’d offered, and Kelly has always been insistent that it’s my parents “duty” to pay for my expenses/things/costs. Jayne always got touchy when I would mention anything to do with money and get bitter about not being as well off. Mark always told me about how proud and glad he was that I was so “down-to-earth” about money, and how proud he was to have a friend, a girlfriend who didn’t squander money despite having the ability to. But then he turned around and called me ungrateful of my financial status.

There is nobody left. I thought he understood, I really did. How stupid; nobody will ever understand, will they? Is it so fucking difficult to, though, really? Even my mom doesn’t understand, and she’s the one I often try to save money for. Mark said he doesn’t like it when I talk about worrying about spending money because I don’t have to worry about it the way his family does. What, so it’s wrong for me to care?

I don’t understand what he wants to me to be, what he thinks is “right” for me. To me, it seems like he wants me to be what I hate most: people who act differently because they’re well-off. He said to me that I try to “play poor” and that that’s only a little better than acting rich and rolling around in it.

I cannot forgive him for that.

Oh, and then he told me that I always just shut him out.

Yesterday, I didn’t. For the first time, I just told him flat out to stop, to drop the topic because it was obviously upsetting me. So I told him so, and I asked him, “How do you expect me to want to stand up to you when I do it and you don’t listen to me anyway?” Then, he expressed his worry about the fact that whenever he tells me that he gets angry when he hears something, I stop telling him about it, and that I would probably stop talking to him about money, just as I’ve stopped talking to him about Jayne.

Can you really blame me?

I hardly like being anybody’s target and source of anger, much less Mark. Mark, who doesn’t need to just prove his point. Mark, who always has some kind of fucked up need to hammer his point — and how correct it is — into your skull. Relentlessly. Oh no, it doesn’t matter if you concede your argument and agree with him. It really doesn’t matter if you tell him twenty times that he’s right. He’ll just tell you that you’re “just saying that” so he’ll stop. NO, WHEN I TELL YOU YOU’RE RIGHT, I AM FUCKING CONCEDING MY ARGUMENT AND ACKNOWLEDGING THAT YOU ARE RIGHT. I FUCKING HATE BEING WRONG, AND I’M NOT GOING TO PRETEND TO THINK THAT I AM JUST SO YOU’LL SHUT UP.

He always tells me to tell him everything, and I do my fucking best. I really do. But every time that I tell him everything, it just ends up hurting me in the end, and I just end up crying, and we end up arguing, and THERE IS ALMOST NOTHING I HATE MORE THAN ARGUING.

So I don’t know. I’ll try to suppress my urge to stop talking to him about money. It’ll be hard and it feels wrong (…haha, random double entendre), but like I told him… I once gave up a relationship because both parties refused to compromise, and I don’t want things to be like that for us. I’ll try to be better for him, because he is always trying to be better for me. I know that, at least. I guess it’s just not always that successful.

I’m not over it. I don’t think this is one of those things that I can get over. It’s hard for me to forgive and forget, although eventually one is accomplished, and the other occurs as a result. Then again, I may forget things easily, but I don’t forget names and labels. Spoiled, pussy, weak, needy, hypocrite, greedy, arrogant, stupid, weird, and now ungrateful. I don’t forget. Hurt that cuts that deep never really goes away.

But I’ll try not to let it become a problem. Because I am stronger than this –

Whether anybody believes so or not.

In a story, she’d be my foil. Would she please you more?

There is literally nobody left to talk about this anymore.

Looks like I’ve depleted my resources.