Observation #1:On Family Life Essay, Research Paper

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 bread).

Come to think of it, it is like a luxury prison of some sort isn’t it? I’d be bitter if I said

this, but well, I can not deny the fact: I like being in this luxury prison, absolutely

secluded from social disruptions, nursing that misanthropic mind of mine, enjoying the

languid decay of solitude. Every time I open the door to go outside, which is like once a

day, I was told that a vapid and usually stale odor emanates from my niche like the

suppressed soul of some long dead orphan child rotting away. How descriptive eh?!