Alone and So Crowded

I've waited days for my chance to sit and write. The urge is still here, but no words are forthcoming. No thoughts willing to bare themselves on paper -- on screen, rather.

Maybe that's my reluctance to say anything at all if I can't say something nice. I do feel that I've nothing nice to say. I'm full of heartsickness, impatience, discouragement and loneliness. I feel doomed to aloneness, and simultaneously crowded beyond my limits.

I'm alone for lack of a soul mate, and I'm crowded simply for lack of space, and by the extremely present presence of my family. Particularly my father. He hovers over me. He crunches even the softest food. He's always breathing hard. He sings tenor. He is not a tenor. He must have the TV on. He must watch what HE wants to watch. He smacks when he eats. He eats and eats and eats. He is constantly stymied by whatever he's not motivated to do. He just can't think of a way to fix it, whatever it is, because really, he doesn't want to fix it. He is less able to use a PC than my 4 year old nephew, and he's convinced that the computer is out to get him. I have taught him at least 10 times how to scan a document and email it as an attachment, and he still can't do it. I feel like I'm going to explode, really explode. Bits of me searing on the woodstove, bloody chunks all over dad's precious carpet. That'll be quite the clean-up job.

I put a space heater in my room, so at last I have a little place to go. I turn it on even when I'm not too cold, because is blocks out the sounds from the rest of the house, so I can feel alone. The right kind of alone. The kind of alone where I can wallow in my aloneness. The other kind-- the lacking-a-soul-mate kind.

Really the space heater is there so that I can be warm enough to study in my room, where I can concentrate and not have my dad reading the Costco ad out loud to me. Yesterday I was sitting in front of the woodstove studying and my dad started reading the Costco ad. Out Loud. He read all about the printer you could buy that does all the things our printer does. 30 pages per minute black, 24 pages per minute color. I asked him why he was reading it to me. He said, "Because it's only $79.99 and you don't even need a computer to print your digital pictures." I said "Is that relevant to us?" and he said "No." So..... why? Why does he do that stuff? Sometimes from the moment he enters the house he doesn't stop just making NOISE. Talking, eating, banging things around, eating, talking. Turning on the freaking TV. He doesn't seem to notice that I'm surrounded by books and papers and that I'm really not particularly responsive to things like his reading of the cartoon pages. I don't get it. I really don't. I'm studying! What is hard to understand about that? Don't talk to me about the Costco ad and the funny papers while I am studying! My GOSH!

I know it is not reasonable to move out but I SO BADLY want to move out right now. Just to have a small quiet space where I can watch Emma and not have my dad barge in for the most romantic 2 minutes of the movie and make obnoxious, obvious remarks about it.