It's always the little things...like my computer getting zapped by a virus that cost me a fair chunk of change to clean up. One minute I think I'm coping adequately, if not feeling positively optimistic, and the next minute life gives me a little shove over the cliff and I tumble back down into the dark abyss.

I thought I was finally recovering, feeling more hopeful, and then my narcissist father calls and wants me to run interference between him and my mother. She "isn't talking to him" and he wants me to play mediator, get her to see his point of view. You don't say "no" to my father, you don't disagree with him; you keep your mouth shut or you work feverishly to placate him, so what could I say. We ordinarily get along all right, I rarely see him and, when I do, I listen and he talks. Today he talked not only about my mother (who's real issue is that she doesn't always agree with him), but about his upbringing, his abusive, conniving, thieving, horrible, terrible, no-good parents, and how he refuses to see his 90 year old mother at Christmastime, once again, because of everything she put him through ages ago. Well. I have to say that if he dropped dead tomorrow I wouldn't spend one minute mourning my "loss", but if he lives to be 90, I'll still come around, do what I can to make his life a little more bearable, and I'll sit quietly, smiling and making agreeable noises, listening to him natter on about his aches and pains and whatnot. I guess I should be thankful that I was born with a functioning conscience, but all I can think at the moment is that I sort of envy his inability to care about anyone but himself, in a twisted kind of way.

Ah, family. So looking forward to Christmas dinner tomorrow