honestly i was one of those people who Never Did Anything so hard that i could never be grounded. like yeah on occasion i would have SOMETHING coming up and even though it was super rare it still usually was used as a threat which is why i learned pretty fast to keep it a secret if i ever really cared about / was invested in something. plus, in my experience, having friends over wasnt even completely enjoyable and less and less so as time went on. like just a couple years ago my parents got me tickets to a show at the kennedy center to something i was like kind of vaguely interested in, partly as a joke but it was fine but the problem was there was two tickets and they were like you can take a friend with you and i was like ??? the only friends i have around here are one person and her sister who i met at work and im pretty sure youve never seen them. and it was before she invited me over to her graduation party so i wasnt even sure we were on the Invitation friend tier yet. so i took my brother who was also half-interested part-as-a-joke but still he was my only option anyway and we had an okay time. its just wild like, of course it doesnt surprise me that my parents had almost no clue about like anything about me because i had been 24/7 concealing anything that mattered from them for years (except for times when in highly strategic maneuvering i would give them a small glimpse of something that happened to be true) but its kind of weird that like they didnt ever seem to notice how much they had No Clue about anything about me. like, they noticed i never did anything b/c they sometimes tried to make me go out with her sisters and her friends, which i never did except to see fury road b/c i'd kind of wanted to do anyways and which was a stellar decision. but i guess they had some concept that i ever had friends i hung out with outside of school like, on what planet? smh. like for sure, im glad none of them was ever trying to find out anything about me and getting the least attention from them was the best case scenario, its just bizarre they had Any interest at all and yet that interest didnt translate into any awareness about how Completely Nothing they knew about me as a person. but then again! im fairly sure that they both had their own (totally inaccurate) concept of who i was, which couldve given them the idea that they knew stuff about me. like how my dad and i thought we were super similar, which was one of the most insulting things anyone else could say to me, but in his case it was just the usual kind of frustrating, totally non self-aware ignorant shit he said about everything. and my mom just thought whatever she wanted about whatever, all the time. and they both ignored it if i told them stuff that was actually true but was inconvenient / not what they wanted to hear or whatever. like when i had a job for five months that was so bad that from the very first week i thought about dying like literally on avg every minute and when the days were like usually 10+ hrs; they would ask me sometimes how the job was and i would say it was terrible and i hated it, and they would say something dismissive. like, then dont ask! but i was pretty far from caring about anything at that point and had started saying things like cutting in when my mom was getting on my brother about something, if only to disperse her focus on him, or informing my dad that this is why i hated them whenever he did something particularly draining. like, the wild thing is that when my mom was in a reasonable mood, she could be tolerable as a person. like the month before i left she was updating the webpage she had for her kindergarten class and i helped her pick out some halloween art for a banner and came up with some joke for text that cracked us both up. whereas my dad wasnt exactly abusive, he managed to be even worse as a person and in his personality to the point that i really eventually couldn't stand to see him or speak to him or be in the same room as him and not spit. one actual interest i did tell my mom about was owl city, because it was obvious since i had like eight owl city shirts and it was strategic because me and my brother were planning to go to one of his shows and it was harmless because it just involved me listening to music and b/c my mom couldn't possibly object to it even if she had a lot better idea of what it was than she did. but she didn't exactly pay a lot of attention even to the Real Stuff so...she at least never seemed to bother with investigating or stuff like that. i think she had a vague notion of the existence of marble hornets even if she knew zero stuff about it including the name or what it was, but she was probably worried it was like a cult or whatever what with my TO symbol shirt. but im telling you like, even when me and the sibs had a tv show we'd watch together she wouldnt like make a mental note of it or anything. like we'd say "hey can we have the tv tonight at 9" or whatever and she'd be like ok and then at 9 she'd still be watching something and we wouldnt bother saying anything. or if she saw us watching something she'd like see 10 seconds from the next room over and insult it in a way she acted like was like light and fun or something b/c she never seemed to realize when what she seemed to think was teasing / casual joking was actually really pointed and meanspirited. we had a great family who was friends with ours and im pretty sure they stopped hanging out with us and inviting us over b/c my mom didnt get the distinction between unnecessary insults and lighthearted jest. couldve told her so if she could ever been told anything. its too bad i didnt go for any parting shots in my final months there like confirming the horrors of not being cishet or whatever, but that was still probably sort of dangerous, but it would be funny if they knew none of their kids is straight. oh well. plus, i hate them but they should get divorced. it would lessen the impact of their awfulness on the world and each other and thats the only thing thats technically "good" that they deserve. even if they both think its bad since theyre somehow both like catholic but hopefully someday they realize that no matter how "bad" they think divorce is, their marriage is even worse. or maybe they'll stick it out for the sake of having been together so long in such a bad marriage already, and the sake of not having to deal with such a total life change, who knows. tfw: the 'rents suck as hell