captain’s log, stardate blah blah

i have no idea how to parody star trek. i’m sure this is obvious.

saturday 7/24:

– spicy ramen (nugoori)

– spicy pork w/ lettuce wrap

sunday 7/25:

– spicy ramen (shin)

– bulgogi burger @ mcdonald’s

– jjajjangmyun

oh yes, i believe round four also happened yesterday. damn, is that four rounds in one day? that’s pretty good, even for my father. heh. there was a comical bit with round four, as my dad had called my mom into his room and had a closed-door meeting with her, probably about rounds two and three with me and my sister. my sister was worried that he was gonna hit her while we weren’t looking, so i snuck over to her porch, which has a window out from my dad’s room, to eavesdrop, pretending that i was going to the refrigerator, which is also by the porch area. i was creeping along the floor and sticking my head out the door when my niece came running up to me and asked me (at pretty much top volume) if i was playing hide and seek in the porch. hee. i guess you can’t ask for tact at the age of 3 and half. 😀

rounds two and three were due to my dad asking my sister to find his copy of his arrest warrant. when my sister asked him what he wanted her to do with it (like, make a copy? translate? fax it to someone? just bring it over? etc.), he freaked out on her immediately and screamed at her that she better listen to what he says. so she was brought it over and he told her to find the things that work in his favor and translate those parts from his arrest warrant. surely, it is obvious why my sister felt that she needed to protest. they write up your warrant by making a convincing case for your arrest, and it is not a fair and accurate representation of your case, nor is it a comprehensive, detailed account of the trial. so she tried to tell him this and he proceeded to freak out even further, screaming that she’s useless and that she treats him like he’s an idiot because he has no money (he’s obsessed with money as a bartering tool for respect, but no one else in my immediate family is afflicted with this particular disease), that she won’t ever do a single thing to help him, that my mom is a shitty mother for raising such a bad daughter, that she constantly raises her voice at her elders, that no one could possibly want to put up with her, ad infinitum. seriously, she was very calmly and helpfully trying to tell him that there is nothing useful for him in his arrest warrant, and that if he wanted something like that, it will have to come from his recollection of the events or from the full trial transcript, which is entirely true. and my sister is tireless about helping him and putting up with his nonsense. my father has not laid a hand on me since i was about 12? 14? but he’s hit my sister pretty badly several times in her adult years, and she has not yet cut things off with him, as i would.

after going on for some length, he called me into his room to tell me to read over the papers. not having a real idea of why my sister and dad had been fighting (well, i don’t know if you can call it fighting when one person is trying to help the other person, and the other one is throwing a temper tantrum), i asked him what it was for, and he explained it was to find something to help him when he talks to the korean police because they might have to re-try him. i believe that his assertion that they may re-try him in Korea is sheer and utter nonsense, but once he gets an idea in his head, he can’t be talked out of it, so i didn’t bother. i just said ok. of course, when i looked over the papers later, it’s only the circumstances that sound bad for him that are written down on the warrant. duh. double duh on a stick, for goodness sakes. i mean, does it take two brain cells to put two and two together? and does it take two brain cells to realize that after all the time and money and effort that my sister invested in helping him without complaint, that she wasn’t suddenly trying to be an asshole by not helping him? wouldn’t it make sense that she was still trying to help him? anyway, while i was playing dumb and agreeing to every piece of nonsense he was spewing, my sister came by and said that she was just trying to say the same thing to him, and that she didn’t understand why he was jumping to these conclusions. that led to round three of yelling and spewing vileness that led to my sister telling him not to ask for her help in anything anymore because he doesn’t want her to help in ways that will really help. he was like, fine, i’ll leave.

at this point, i threw a little party in my head.

but, of course, as he had been threatening to leave since time immortal but not really leaving, he stayed. he threw his clothes at my mom and yelled at her to wash them, so he can leave, but washing and drying them took a while. oh well.

my father’s song has a refrain, and it goes something like this:

i am so old, i can’t work (15 years ago, it was, i am so old, soon i will not be able to work)

i am so old, i don’t know how long i have to live

your mom raised you to hate me

your mom raised you badly

your mom is lazy

where is my food?

if i had money, you wouldn’t treat me this way

i have the saddest life of all humanity

the refrain seems to have added some new stuff:

your sister is hateful and selfish

little does my dad know, i am the one that cares the least for him in the entire family. luckily, i have no good memories of him, so i can have a sort of unmitigated sense of hatred and disgust for him, other than the usual inner child longings to have a good relationship with my progenitor. my older brother, whom my dad curses as being a failure and useless at every opportunity, still admonishes me to mind the fact that he’s my dad and to give him respect. my mom constantly tells me that i should respect him and feel sympathy for what he has been through (which i do). my sister is always feeling sorry for him and has some memories of him being good to her when she was small, and she only gets into fights with him because it breaks her heart to hear him say such patently unjust things to her. i mean, imagine how it feels, doing your best despite bad financial circumstances to make your father comfortable, making sure you take care of all his paperwork to settle in, finding out all the minute details of what happens to people in his circumstance, working for years writing letters and crap, just to have him tell her what a selfish person she is and how she can’t do a single thing for him, and that she would be nicer to him if he had money. what kind of crap is that. anyway, she still tries to get through to him, which is why he freaks out at her. i just nod and agree with all of his idiocy, because there is no point. i agree, then assess what he asked me to do, then i either do it or don’t and tell him some lie, because there is nothing between him and me that makes me care about any integrity in my interaction with him. for instance, he asked me to write to the montel williams show, based on some friend he made while in jail. i told him i wrote him. yeah, whatever.

bah. i hate it when he makes my mom upset or my sister upset. and my little brother is so confused. he’s spent the last 3.5 years thinking that he’s got this ideal dad tucked away somewhere, and if he came back, it’d be all “Growing Pains” or “Family Ties” or maybe since it’s not the 80s anymore, something like “Everybody Loves Raymond”. i don’t want to outright tell him that he’s got a shitty dad and not to expect anything from him but heartache, but a the same time, i don’t want him to believe the shit that my dad spews about my mom or my sister.

the little brother had a fever of about 101 yesterday, so we gave him some tylenol cold syrup, and it was going down, when the pops freaked out and yelled at us for being cheap and not taking my little brother to the hospital, just like we were too cheap to take him. wow. ok. yeah, the little brother that i helped to birth is so unimportant to me that i am going to let him die because i’m too cheap to take him to the hospital. we were cooling him down, but he made the bro go in his (dad’s) room where it’s less cool, and covered him up with a blanket and applied cold compresses to his head. ok, either cool him down or heat him up. what’s up with doing both? it’s not like he even has the remotest clue how to take care of a kid. anyway, we let him because we knew the drug was kicking in and the fever was going down. suddenly, dad decided that my bro had a fever because he has indigestion. so i had to find some stupid “digestive aid” (i looked to make sure that all the ingredients were just folk herbal medicine and it wouldn’t be bad for his fever or interact with his medicine in anyway) and make him drink it. later, i told my dad that the bro’s fever went down, and he’s like, i told you it was the indigestion.

sigh. that’s why i don’t argue with him. why would i want to give myself an ulcer? like the child that he is, dad decided not to eat dinner to punish us. oh yeah, i forgot to say that he freaked out to my mom about food a few days ago. we wanted to go grocery shopping, so my mom was about to tell him that we were gonna go, but that she will give him lunch early if he wanted, when he cut her off too early and went on a yelling binge about how dare she leave without giving him his proper meal. *rolls eyes so hard they plop out onto hands*

today, sunday, we went to ASEM Tower and COEX mall. they were filming a tv show for an MBC-owned game channel at this “x-box zone” place. they had this huge arcade-y type place dedicated to free x-box stations hooked up to live. weird. so we played in there for a long time. i bought a korean novel for myself and the da vinci code for my sister and a magazine for my mom. my niece got a block set from me. 🙂