You're Hopeless

Most people I know are a mixed bag. Lots of good qualities, a few bad ones. Some of the people I feel the worst for are the ones who could be doing so much better but sabotage themselves for one reason or another. I recently reconnected with an old friend who is doing much better than he used to, but found his soulmate through a psychic experience and continues to creep her out while waiting for their big chance to get together. He even knows that it creeps her out but he is convinced he just has to be patient.

Some people are just full of these sorts of things to the point of being complete trainwrecks.

FOCUS: who is the biggest trainwreck you know? Tell funny stories about how they sabotage everyone around them.

 

Everyone knows weed isn't really that bad of a drug. Not much worse than alcohol if it is worse at all. At the same time, we all know someone for whom weed was the worst thing that could ever happen to them. That guy is my buddy Donny. He's actually a pretty talented artist and happens to have a keen eye for business. He used to have some pretty good ideas about using his art to get a pretty awesome t-shirt business with a very interesting business model off the ground. Until he discovered the green. Sure his taste in music improved....but all the motivation he had dissapeared slowly like the 5-6 blunts he now smokes every day.

He claims that it helped improve his art, and to be honest he makes some prtety fucking interesting things while he's stoned (always), but he never does a god damn thing anymore. Now he is 22 and working part-time at a liquor store living in his aunt's basement because his parents got tired of his ass and thye were the only ones who would take him in. That's right, the dude went past living in his parents basement.

Now he is trying to become a rapper. Yeah....

 

As soon as I read the opening sentence, I knew exactly who I would post about. The most worthless person I know has got to be my roommate from college, we'll call him Phil. Now Phil is an intelligent person, and he shows it in his ability to fix simple problems around the house with logic and intuition. However, Phil lives in an absolutely fantasy world. He is a student at Virginia Tech majoring in Building Construction, which is a pretty difficult major. Phil has spent his first four years in the program skipping class, getting high, and playing FIFA manager mode. While doing this, he has proceeded to fail so many of his BC classes that he still has a minimum of 2 years left (so he's taking at least 6 years to complete a 4 year program).

Now I understand that failing classes is just a minor setback that may lead to people improving themselves and eventually achieving their goal, but Phil has shown absolutely no change in attitude. One semester, he decided to drop all of his classes and "take a semester off." During this semester off, he didn't have a job, and what's worse, he didn't even party/socialize! He spent so much time in his room sleeping or in the den getting high and playing FIFA. I couldn't understand what would make someone want to literally waste their life.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this was that Phil still considered himself smarter than my roommate and I (who both graduated on time). He felt that he could achieve the grades anytime he wanted, he just "didn't care." What's worse is that his parents enabled him to think this, by continuing to pay for school and his living while he just continued to fail classes.

The unfortunate part of the whole situation is, as I stated above, the kid is actually pretty intelligent. He's just become so disillusioned that I'm not sure he fully comprehends how to succeed in life anymore. Pretty sad.

 

The biggest train-wreck in my life has a heart of gold, but is a notorious fuck-up.

An old high-school classmate of mine just doesn't seem to get it. Since I've known him he has:

- Stopped driving his car on the highway due to the fear of getting into an accident.
- Declared bankruptcy due to over $40,000 of debt.
- Flunked out of two different colleges.
- Received one D.U.I. and one warning.

The last time I hung out with him, he got us kicked out of a bar for bringing his own booze inside. He would have gotten away with it had he not bragged incessantly to everyone around him that he was drinking his own Jack Daniels.

Currently he works part-time at a shoe-store. Every time we speak, the story is always the same: "I can't get any hours because of the economy."

In most cases, that's entirely valid - Except I'm certain he's not getting hours because he's often late, has terrible hygiene and is the walking, talking definition of lazy. Oh, and women (for the most part) are utterly repulsed by him both physically and mentally.

I feel bad because I haven't exactly gone out of my way to keep in touch with him. But my Dad has a saying:

"You need to fill your life with winners if you want to be a winner."

He's a great guy with a good heart, but the harsh truth is that his presence rarely contributes positively to a situation.

 

For a while, one of my best friends was that guy. He's the only person I still talk to that I went to high school with and I consider him family pretty much. He's like a few people that have already been mentioned--incredibly intelligent, but wasted his talents. He was one of those guys that got a 1400 on the SAT and didn't go to college because he didn't feel like it. He held jobs--which ranged from metal finishing, to welding, to HVAC, to locksmithing, to retail, etc.--for no longer than 6 months at a clip. For a while, he lived in a dozen different places, including couches and basements, depending on when he was working and if he had money for rent.

There was this one time not too long ago when he was set to become the manager of a cell phone store in a very wealthy area of southern CT. Like, "Hey, can you configure the Bluetooth in my Bentley, and then my wife's when I bring hers later" kind of rich. He would've been making some seriously good money and finally have a stable job. He was good at it, too--the kind of guy who could sell a frozen ketchup cell phone, in the dead of summer, to Helen Keller wearing white gloves. I wished so hard for it to work out for him--he really needed that. Then, one day when I saw him and asked him about work, he was fired. He got into a fight with his girlfriend and just left the store to go deal with her. Dumbest fucking move possible.

Now, though, he's gotten rid of the shitty girlfriend (which was a lot of the problem, I think), is with a much better girl, and has a stable job that has some tough hours, but he's sticking with it and is in another position to move up quickly and start making good money. History is a bitch, and does repeat itself, but I really hope he's moving on into a new phase and doesn't permanently become that hopeless, intelligent, talented guy who everyone says could've done great things.

 

Chapter 1
This is long, but I am trying to make it interesting. There are two chapters to it, and I am putting them as separate posts.

My family on my father's side has big issues with drugs and alcoholism. I have an uncle who fried himself out on various drugs that it actually destroyed his brain, and he is now a ward of the state. I also have had to take my sister to the emergency room multiple times due to drug over doses, attempted suicides while high, and interactions with her anti-depressants.

These are the reasons I have never tried any drug. Not even weed, because I can tell by the way I used to drink, it wouldn't take much for me to end up like people on my dad's side of the family.

So the biggest train wreck I know is my sister, as mentioned above. She started out as a normal, intelligent child. She won a bunch of state awards for writing, and other academic achievements. She had always had a slightly sociopathic side to her though, evidenced by her trying to suffocate me when she was 12.

Spoiler

We ended up moving to California when she was 15 because my parents got divorced. Now this was her second year of high school, and she was giving up all her friends, except for her friend that she would hang out with while visiting my grandparents, who would be going to the same high school.

Now my grandparents lived in a pretty affluent neighborhood. They had the dean of UCLA Law School on one side, and unmitigated white trash on the only rental on the street. The girl was already running with the wrong crowd, and since she was the only girl my sister knew, my sister only hung out with their crowd. This spelled trouble.

She started using drugs right away. Within a couple of months she had already been suspended for a week because of possession. She started sneaking out at night once or twice a week. She eventually needed money so she started selling my ritalin that I had to take. But she wouldn't take just a couple off the top, she would empty out the whole bottle. I am fairly sure she sold herself on more than one occasion.

As mentioned above she ended up in the hospital on more than one occasion due to overdose but I really don't want to go into details over that.

So a lot of these people that overall were decent people, but then become massive train wrecks usually have an enabler, and my sister met hers at the end of her junior year. Up until then, she had actually managed to do Ok in school, until she met Deena. Deena was a fat disgusting slob of a girl, the kinda gothy type. She had my sister out of school all the time, and was getting her into harder drugs. Deena and her mother also roped my sister into an insurance scam.

My mother decided to use some savings to send my sister on a guided European tour to get her out of the house, and meet some new people. Unfortunately this was a really bad idea. While she was in Ireland she met a guy named Neil. She fell for this Neil fellow, a nice Catholic boy from Northern Ireland. Oh, and by nice boy I mean IRA member.

So she got back all starry-eyed for this fellow, and started calling him every day. Multiple times a day. Long Distance, when we didn't have a long distance plan. As you can imagine, this really added up. You would have thought that when my mother got the first phone bill of 400 dollars, and took it out of my sister's savings account, my sister would have gotten the message. But she didn't. She kept calling, not even thinking to use a calling card. We were getting phone bills up into the thousands of dollars, and my mother didn't even have enough to pay for it.

Finally, one day my mother called this guy in Ireland, who was mortified that my sister was spending all this money. Of course my mother called the guy with my sister in the house. This set my sister off like nothing else. She started screaming at the top of her lungs at my mom. (My mom had barricaded herself in her room, leaving me to fend for myself). My sister grabbed a knife from the kitchen, and tried to stab me, then went and started stabbing the door to my mother's room. The neighbors heard her screaming, but silence from my mother, and figured my sister had finally killed my mom, and called the cops, who burst in, thankfully after my sister had put down the knife after trying fruitlessly to cut her wrists with it. The cops hauled her away to the psych ward, and she was put on suicide watch.

After she was released she was heavily medicated, and the Irish guy stopped taking her calls. Things were getting back to somewhat normal, but she and my mom would still fight. She got suspended again because of possession, and she was still hanging out with this Deena girl. Finally, one day, when I was at the end of 8th grade, (she was 19 at this time) she and my mom got into a huge fight. Then she started in on me. So I moved closer to her, and punched her as hard as I could in the face. Seeing as how I was 3 inches and 35lbs on her, coming from a 12 year old, it was quite a punch. She fell down crying, got up, ran into her room, grabbed some stuff, and left saying she was moving out. True to her word, she did move out. She came back, got most of her stuff, and moved in with Deena, to go be a whore or something.

 

Two guys from my high school competed in math competitions in high school and always placed in the top 10 for the state.

Then graduation rolled around and instead of taking scholarships to MIT, got random jobs and did a lot of drugs.

Last I heard, one guy was working at Jiffy Lube, the other was doing amateur gay porn.

I didn't care for those fuckers anyway, as they were extremely conceited. Reason for not going to college? Not wanting to work for the man.

 

Chapter 2. From the Calm to the Storm.

So as mentioned above, my sister was gone, living in some drug den with a fat ugly bitch who had this mysterious hold over my sister. (Even to this day, 8 years since my sister moved out of the country, she still gets back together with this girl when she comes to the states. She tried to get my mom to fly her to Washington state. I don't understand this effect.)

Spoiler

So things were calm for my mother and I. We moved into a smaller, 2 bedroom apartment, and life went on nicely. Then my mother got a call she had been dreading in the 10 or so months my sister had been more or less out of our lives: "Deena and her mom kicked me out, and I have no place to go" Naturally my mom had no real choice but to let her come live with us. We only had two bedrooms, so my sister had to live on a mattress set up out in the living room, that she would then put back in my room. She came and went more or less as she pleased, and my mother more or less ignored her. Until a phone bill came one day.

Now she wasn't calling old IRA member. Apparently she had leeched enough money off of my dad to go to Europe. Where she met a guy in a pub in London. Lee his name was. He was from Sheffield, and she was smitten. So she started calling him constantly. Now he of course would only call to tell her to call him, as he was more or less unemployed, and occasionally he would throw a few bucks to his 6 year old kid that he never saw. So my sister started racking up more and more in phone calls to him. And again, it led to fights. Multi thousand dollar phone bills, that my sister would eventually pay off, by hooking or stealing my ritalin, and begging from my dad is my guess. But she was able to pay it off, and my sister would go visit him, god knows where she got her money. She didn't have a job, and my mom got no rent money from her.

One weekend she said she was going to Santa Barbara, a 2 hour drive. On Sunday I got a call from American Airlines saying her flight had been delayed until the next day. It was on this trip I suppose that she decided to fuck him without a condom, and she became a pregnant 19 year old. (I was wrong in my age of 19 when she left above). Now she could have aborted the kid, or given it up for adoption, or do what would have been the best for the kid if she ended up having it. Stay in Santa Monica and have my mom help raise it. Instead, her 19year old brain knew the exact best thing to do. Go move in with the father in Sheffield. Now Sheffield isn't all that bad of a city, but the place her baby daddy lived was in the worst section of town. Oh, and he was 30, and living with his mother.

So they had the baby, and got married. Now, then my sister did something incredibly stupid again. She over stayed her Visa. By 2 years. That is right, my sister was an illegal immigrant in England. So she couldn't get a job to support the kid. The dad to his credit started trying to work. Then my sister tried to apply for benifits, even though her visa was 2 years overdue. The Home Office did not appreciate that, so they took her passport for years. The US government gave her one, but to use it she had to fly to Northern Ireland, and then take a train to the Republic just to leave Europe.

For years my sister was stuck in limbo. She was able to work under the table, but that wasn't much. And during this whole time, her husband was verbally abusive, physically abusive, and would spend an entire paycheck in one weekend at the pub and on cocaine. The mother wasn't any help either, as she was abusive to my sister as well.

Finally, my mother got a call. My sister had wised up it seemed, she was getting a divorce, and wanted to bring my niece back to America, and have my mom help raise her, which would give the kid a real leg up. Moving a kid across borders in a divorce is tough, so my mom flew out to England along with my Aunt a couple of months later, and they found the best lawyer for the job. Even a consultation was over 500 pounds sterling for an hour. My mom is confident in my sister, until the middle of the consult when she announces: "I'm not coming back to the states. I have met another man" My mom starts crying, and my Aunt, who never swears screams: "Are you fucking stupid".

Basically my sister had months to tell my mother, who could have saved plane fare, and over 1k dollars on the lawyer if she had mentioned that one little thing. My mother put my sister up in a different hotel from theirs, and didn't contact her for months. Until she got a call from my sister:

"I'm pregnant again"

 

My hot Peruvian friend is a fucking trainwreck. We haven't actually spoken in a couple of months, I got a bit sloshed one night and told her that she made the most retarded choices I have ever seen. I guess she didn't like that.

When I met her she was dating this rich tool. She was so in love despite his refusal to actually call her his girlfriend or commit. Basically, he had lost his license and needed a ride. For about a year. Then he dumps her for a chick with money.

She is beyond devastated. She begins dating online. There is a guy in Texas that wants to marry her. He is supposedly loaded. He sends her dozens of pictures of his giant cock, which did not always look like the same cock. I point this out and she says she doesn't care. Okay then.

He ends up setting a date to fly here first, so that they can meet. She takes the week off from work and starves herself mercilessly. She drives to DIA to pick him up, but he is a no show. He then texts her and says he was hit by a truck while walking across the street and sends pics of his broken leg.

So they set another date, once his leg has healed some. She tells me he is so hooked on working out that he is working out at the gym for 3 hours a day, with a BROKEN FEMUR.

She is bright.

She takes another week off of work and starts eating stool softeners and eating a diet of apples and Sonic Slushies. I try to feed her, talk sense into her. She tells me I just don't believe in love.

She finds herself waiting at the airport again, stood up again. He was hit by another car the night before the flight. She is so worried about him. I tell her that someone with such bad luck should not be trifled with. She says I am just jealous.

Yup. Sure am.

She is angry now though, and tells him he needs to fly her out to Texas. He says he has purchased the ticket and it will be at the Airline counter.

She takes a week off of work. Gets dropped off at the airport to find no ticket waiting.

She calls me because she is stranded and is angry that I am at work and can't save her.

Last time I talked to her, she was STILL trying to hook up with this jackass that is probably really some married 40 year old with Cheetos stains on his wifebeater.

My brain hurts just trying to understand why she keeps doing this to herself.

 

This would have to be my ex girlfriend, Kay. She had severe daddy issues from her dad being an alcoholic absentee father who constantly cheated on her mom. During the three years we dated I saw her push everyone who cared about her out of her life, threaten to commit suicide, develop severe depression, fail to hold down a job, and abuse prescription drugs.

Kay has no work ethic or any concept of what real work is. The only job she has been able to hold down is one that was given to her at the company owned by her father. Every other job she's had has ended in some sort of incident, usually a fight with one of the managers. Anyone who tried to help give her direction in her life has been cut out of the picture. She takes no responsibility for her actions and blames everything on everyone else (I suspect this was learned from her mother). If she gets bad grades in school it's because "the professors don't like her" or "they aren't fair". It's going to take her nearly six years to graduate from a four year program because she can't get into the teaching program due to her grades (our youth is fucked if people like Kay are teaching them).

One time during my sophomore year of college, Kay threatened to kill herself and begged me to take her to a hospital so she could be admitted to the psych ward. She was diagnosed with severe depression that lasted for nearly a year and she began abusing painkillers and started hanging out with people who shared that interest.

After we broke up, she became really depressed and began abusing alcohol and prescription drugs. I called her out on it and told her she needed help and she was having none of it. The last I heard she was dating a ski bum and had been disowned by her brothers because her drinking and drug abuse had become so bad and was no longer welcome to see her niece and nephews.

At one point Kay showed promise and looked like she had a bright future but everything around her turns to shit. She's so emotionally fucked I'll be shocked if she ever graduates or works anywhere besides her dad's company.

 

Chapter 3. Can you really right a de-railed train?

Spoiler

So let me back up a bit between the new mystery man, and her getting pregnant. She met this mystery man working at a pub. You should be noticing a trend here, that she can’t meet a guy where there is no alcohol served. Not really surprising, considering I once found her list of what she had done with whom when at the time she was only 18. There were more chicks on the list that she had fucked than I have. Over 12. The list of guys that had run train on her was even longer. She seems to lose all control of her sexual impulse control when drunk or high.

So while I was living in Germany, my mom was in occasional contact with her, mostly to talk to my niece. But it was insisted that I go to spend Christmas with them. So I got to meet this new guy. Not as trashy as the first guy. But still, there was something off about him. He took me to a football game, and I saw why. All of the other guys that were there were constantly snorting coke. I could tell that he wanted to, but was trying to act normal because I was there. His friends also took a pill of god knows what before going out to the pubs. I can tell why my sister must have been attracted to him and his friends, he had good drug connections.

My sister tried to be a good mother while I was there it would seem outwardly. But I realized that all she wanted to do was go out to drink and party, which she did every night I was there. She would drop the kid off at the new guy’s parents, and go out and party, and then be hungover and grouchy towards the kid in the morning. Seems like a classic alcoholic behavior. Going into her behavior while drunk, when we were out drinking she started begging the guy to take her into the bathroom and fuck her. Another night we were at someone's house at a get together, and she did the same thing.

I was pressed for information after returning from the holiday by my mother, who wanted to see how she acted, so I informed her. Apparently that is the exact same way my sister behaves when her mother is there. I had a hard time believing that.

So she announces that she is pregnant. Her second child from as many men, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with that, but when you are working for minimum wage living in council housing as an illegal immigrant that is the last thing that you need. She could barely afford the one kid, but to have another one. She had given up a chance to move back to the United States, get a job, live with my mom in a huge house, with 2 huge yards for the kid, who would support the kid, and the kid would have the opportunity to go to some of the best public schools in the country.

But instead my sister decided to saddle up to a guy with good drug connections. She had reached the point where her decisions weren’t affecting just her life, but that of her daughter. And now she had another kid on the way.

 

Chapter 4 The Drugged out Engine that likely can't.

Spoiler

So the latest chapter in this story

It seems like being pregnant for the second time was somewhat of a wake up call in some sense. She managed to stop smoking cigarettes during the pregnancy, and I hope to god she stopped drinking and drugging.

She gave birth two years ago to her son. Unfortunately I don’t believe she was really able to stop drinking and drugging throughout the pregnancy. The kid just doesn’t thrive. He doesn’t hold down food and seems to just not be developing at the rate that he should be.

Luckily, as of earlier this year, she was finally able to get residency after 9 years of being in limbo, and can now at least go to school, however I don’t know if she is keeping it up or not. Hopefully this is helping her get her act together. She also has developed some sort of accent. I don't know if she is faking it, but she sounds like a Chav trying to do an American accent.

Thinking about it, she lives in council housing, wears Burberrey, and has kids by 2 different dads. She is a Chav!

Ultimately her current baby daddy summed it up best. She is still a child inside. She is ultimately incapable of acting like a fully grown adult, which is common in my family. She can’t set a budget, has delusions of grandeur. Her plans for her second wedding were to fly to New York and get married in Central Park, and having the reception at Tavern on the Green. I am not sure with what money though. When she visits someone she expects to be waited on hand and foot, and if visiting our mom, pays for nothing, doesn’t help with the dishes. She kind really just sits there like a bump on a log.

She still parties all the time I can tell from her Facebook updates. She seems to be posting about being hungover and partying a lot, and there are plenty of pictures to back it up. Luckily the guy’s parents are very supportive of the children, and take care of them. This is probably why she is able to continue to go out and drink and act like a childless 20 year old.

As I mentioned before, she is still in constant contact with her enabler. She seems to care more about her, this girl who has gotten he into nothing but trouble, than she cares about her own family. When out visiting for 3 weeks, she tried to convince our mother to buy her plane tickets for a week to Seattle, and leave the baby daddy and the baby in LA. My mom refused, she didn’t feel like paying for that. We then found out that ole Deena is living up there.

My next and last post will be answering some questions and giving a bit more background info.

 

Thoughts and notes.

Spoiler

I think with the majority of train wrecks, there is one of two things going on. They either have a person who is an enabler, who has a power over them that they can’t shake, and will do anything to please, or they have an emotional event that acts as something they try to bury, but can’t. I feel that the latter often leads to the former in the case of my sister. She was abused by our father, emotionally and physically, and he never acted as though he cared about her, so she decided to look for people outside the family. I don’t really think she sees our mother as anything but an ATM or a baby sitter when she is visiting.

I have no real relationship with my sister. We were amicable as kids, to the extent that a brother and sister can be. We grew apart very quickly, I think because my dad seemed to prefer me to my sister, but it really is hard to tell if you remember any posts from the Aspergers thread on the old board as he is pretty emotionless and doesn’t show affection at all. I suppose the lack of abuse directed towards me caused a jealousy.

The divorce really didn’t help matters at all. It was a terrible age for a child to go through a divorce, and moving across country didn’t really help. Before we had moved was the longest time she had ever lived in one place, and to uproot and have no friends, the desire to fit in, along with the need for people to like her is what drover her into drugs.

We never really shared or talked about anything that was going on in either of our lives. She was just another person who inhabited the house, and when she finally moved out officially to go to England, it was a huge relief to me. My mother finally calmed down, and it made life easier, and more relaxed.

I never talked to her on the phone once she left, except maybe Christmas, if even that. I think the last time I spoke to her on the phone was back when I told her I was getting married, but that was because after Jägerette and I told our parents, and a cell phone was stuck in my hands that my sister was on the other end of.

Because she was always referred to as “your sister this” and “your sister that” I actually forgot what her name was freshman year. I wracked my brain and couldn’t remember. So I suppose in a way she was dead to me.

She flat out refused to come to the wedding, even though she had time off work, and everything would have been paid for.




Will her life derail again? I hope not for the kid’s sake.

 

Kuhjager-

Don't kid yourself.

The death penalty would be far too lenient for your sister; her own destructive behavior is her own business, but this is a woman who has taken drugs twice during pregnancy, resulting in two suffering, weak children who were then abused from the day they were born. In addition to that, based on your statements, she tried to stab/smother her own little brother as well as her own mother.

I have far more sympathy and understanding towards serial killers and rapists than I do towards someone like that. She will probably die young, but her two children, who never even got a chance at life, will remain.

 

All aboard the crazy train. I've mentioned him before, but the biggest trainwreck in my life has to be the guy who I'm spending three weeks in the US with, starting from next week. (Fuck, I'm dumb.)

He's an old friend from high school, I've known him for 10 years or so. He always had a deal with his parents through high school and college that if he kept his grades above a certain level, they'd pay him an allowance and put some money into a savings account for him. Not $10, I'm talking $50 a week each way during high school, and up to what we could only guess was at least $100 a week in college. Due to this, and unlike the rest of the entire fucking world, he never got a crappy part-time job during school to have a bit of money on the side. Because of this, he never learned to interact with new people, strangers and especially women. After his undergrad degree he decided to stay in school and do honours, then a PhD, and only a year ago did he get his first real job.

So instead of having to work between classes during college, he would just go home and watch shit-tons of TV shows. Series after series after series. Subsequently, his idea of "reality" is pretty firmly based on what he's seen from TV, especially his idea of relationships and how shit works.

Over the last five or six years, he's "fallen in love" with three different girls (all from the same friendship group, might I add, a bunch of girls who I introduced my buddies to about six years ago). His strategy is simple: send them "endearingly stupid" text messages when he's drunk, apologise the next day, fawn over them, tell everyone but the girl in question that he's in love with her so hopefully it gets around to her and she'll make the first move, relieving him of the task, and then eventually makes a half-assed attempt (normally by text message) to ask them out. It's absolutely never worked for him - 25 and never been on a date, much less had a relationship - but he's never seen that it doesn't work and keeps doing the same thing in cycle. He's seen one too many TV shows and movies (think One Tree Hill, one of his old favourites) where the hero/nice guy plays his bumbling, sweet and unaggressive self and eventually lands the girl of his dreams, and figures one day it'll happen to him too.

To give you some more context about how heavily he leans on TV shows as a basis for his experiences and reality, when I invited him to come to the US with me for a couple of weeks he agreed, then a few weeks later he was telling me how watching How To Make It In America was "preparing him for our week in New York City". I watched it, thought it was alright, but didn't realise he had plans to start up a denim company...because I fail to see where that show had any other "survival tips".

Seemingly every week he comes out with some stupid comment that makes the rest of us think "what fucking world do you live in?" and wonder when he's going to figure it out. He's very smart but is too afraid of failure to actually experience the world (approach girls, travel, whatever) so he stays safe in the cocoon and learns life's lessons via TV.

 

Again, I know that at least in the beginning of her first pregnancy she was using, because she didn't know until 3 months in, and she came home high several times. The second, the health of the child indicates drug use, but I should not have been so positive in my definite answer. I shouldn't say yes when I wasn't there. I am only going on her history.

I don't really specify as much, but my niece, though she was a little slow (and still is. I thought she had a speech impediment. It was just her Yorkshire accent), is growing into a wonderful girl. She doesn't deserve to have a mother like she does, but she has her grandmother, who has given up a lot for that little girl, and thankfully the new guy's parents are normal people who love her to death, and have given up a lot for her.

 

I love ya KIMaster, but harsh words man. There are so many things that factor into a person like this aside from mere choice. Three things I'm getting from Kuhjager's story off the bat is an abusive father (mentally/physically) and a mother that used money to attempt to buy her stability or happiness with trips (and I'm guessing a lot of other shit, leading to the whole "no concept of money" thing), and a radical displacement in her formative years leaving her with only the "bad" kids to latch on to (and be influenced by). Combine that with what Kuhjager mentioned earlier, ie. the familial disposition for addiction and all that, and it's probably pretty likely that she ended up like she did.

I'm not saying she's innocent by any means, she has a will in all this, but it certainly isn't a freewill, (of course, "freewill" doesn't exist ). Maybe if you *tried* to understand a little better, you could have a bit more sympathy for her.

I've had a similar situation, with my step brother, but I'm not going to go into it. Suffice to say though I hate him, I can somewhat understand, and certainly sympathize.

 

I feel like this is an editing board for my story. To be honest, this is the first time I have written this stuff down, and it is oddly cathartic, and making me think even more.

I should have alluded to the fact that my mother did try everything. She tried hard parenting, she tried soft parenting, and nothing would work. My mom didn't just hand her money as a teenager, or even after she left the house. The gravy train emerged after my niece was born, because my mom wanted to do everything she could for the child, and that has led to years of extra money coming in from my mother, that was destined for the child.

What I was trying to get to through examples of my mother's attempts was that there was seemingly no authority figure that my sister would respect. My grandfather, who was the person my sister adored most in the world as a child was of no use, and in fact she once hit a 75 year old man when she was angry as a teenager. I honestly believe he would have lived several more years had she not broken his heart so bad.

But SamR, you are spot on about everything else from what I believe.