I have a difficult to understand father. He never appreciates what I do. For example, I love reading, and he never acknowledges how good and healthy it is for my brain and personal/intellectual growth. He knows it is healthy, but instead decides to focus on the most trivial defects or quirks I have, and makes them look as if they were crimes.
I never cared about fashion, and I always get shooking heads from him when J dress in a peculiar way. To be honest, I just want to dress to cover myself up, and go back to thinking about other matters. And he makes me feel as if I am doing something wrong, or as if I was disappointing.
Despite my excellent grades (for which he never reacts positively in the least degree), he continues to call my love for learning an addiction.
He used to make reading seem very profitable, and a necessary action, but now he always implies it is useless, and that he already knows more than what professionals or other thinkers have to say.
I have noticed he is a contrarian. He loves Golden Corral, and I used to hate it with a passion. The moment I started liking it and actually loving it, the moment he started taking us to the place less and less until he eventually stopped.
It is just beyond imagination!
He reads one thing and believes it, and next time reads something else contrary to what he read before and believes it, rejecting his previous belief. For example: he reads a book which says money and material possessions shouldn't matter in marriages and love, but when he finishes the book, he rejects that notion and believes the contrary, specially after I open up about my agreeing with the irrelevance of such things to love.
He recommends me authors, and insists heavily that they are good, and the moment I start reading them and acknowledging what he said is true, he starts criticizing them and pointing out their character flaws and focusing on the things he doesn't agree with them. It happened with Carl Sagan. He recommends me his books when I was into UFOs, and quite young and dumb. I read Carl's books later, starting with Cosmos, and it saves me from the pseudoscience of UFOlogy. When I showed my enthusiasm for Sagan, my dad starts constantly pointing out he was a marijuana smoker, and saying that astronomy is useless.
I honestly don't get it. He has recommended me good stuff, and the moment I like it he dismisses it, and if I never actually like it keeps dismissing why I like. I never do as he says when I see what he recommends is not to my taste, but man, it is getting quite old already...
Today, he was criticizing how society always changes the names we use to refer to people with disabilities. He mocks the fact that the blind aren't called blind anymore, that now they are called something less offensive, or that people who we referred to as mentally retarded are now called people with intellectual disability. I don't agree with his position at all. Words can be offensive and hurt others, whether you want to or not. I, however, agree to a certain extent, and pointed out to him how in our country we have since recently let very trivial things offend us. His response was: "let those who have nothing else to do think and talk about such things". After that I thought: "umm.. Hello...?!!!!!".
Now you see what I mean by contrarian? He is not just contrarian, he is too practial to the point of being incurious, even though he has plenty of time for being curious. Incidentally, he mentions all his practicallity bable when I start talking about subjects that interest me like astronomy. After I finish talking, he sometimes responds "and how does that help one in daily life?".
I just resolved to the tactic of not talking to him about what I like or am interested in, because he doesn't care, and will never stop saying such hurtful things.