Slept like ass yesterday (and not the good kind, either) even by my feeble sleep standards. Kept hearing people mumbling and whispering all kinds of random shit. If this is what the descent into insanity (let's face it, never a very long journey for me) is like, then I hope they give you a family-size box of Advils to go with it.

Obviously, my dumping yesterday is the trigger to all this, but the underlying insecurities and damaged emotions are what's at play here. I called my parents today to wish them a happy Eid...but I was so dumbstruck and edgy that I think I did more damage than good. Plus, I spoke to my dad for about 20 seconds, felt like lashing out at him, so cut the conversation short and asked for my mum. She got on, gave me her life-battered voice which pissed me off so much, I had to get off the phone immediately. The only person I didn't mind was my brother: he's a good kid who doesn't deserve to be stuck in between two lunatics like me and my mother, and a cold, avoidant fatalist like my dad. My brother's a shred of decency in the midst of a giant indecency, namely our family.

So, I hung up on them, obsessed with ways never to call them again and have it be alright. I watched Pedro Almodovar's 'Volver' yesterday and it was all about a fractured matriarchal family, who'd been savaged by the men in their lives. Not one single man emerges from this film with any credit. Almodovar is a gigantic fag who nevertheless has an overwhelming love for womankind (lending credence to my theory that all homosexuals are actually faking it, in order to get closer to as many women as they can, without being rebuffed), typified by the loving portraits of different women that he serves up in almost every scene of Volver.

I'm tempted to go on a tangent of how if he's this gay and yet loves women as much as he does, then maybe this somehow indicates that you're supposed to hate the people you sleep with, in order for there to be some kind of attraction. I guess the resentment stems from the power they have over you...that you allowed yourself to be vulnerable to them. I could come up with a whole theory around that..

But I won't. Like all my theories, it's got holes the size of craters and it's almost entirely subjective, biased and exhausting. I exhaust myself sometimes.

Why I brought up Volver is because it's about forgiving family and reconciling with them, while letting the past be the past. It almost inspired me to do the same. I say almost because that lasted exactly twenty seconds after being on the phone with them. I just got so angry and so frustrated, that I had to hang up. I felt paralyzed whilst talking to them, having neither the language, nor the emotions to reach out and connect with them.

The list of possible conclusions:

1. I'm just a hateful person, a total jerk.
2. I can't deal with the demands of emotional closeness.
3. I don't speak Arabic well enough to make a connection with them.

All the above are true. They may not be popular, they may not square with anyone who's met me's impression and they may seem like neat and easy answers, but they're all true.

Ok, I'm rambling. Pretty apt for a blog called Ramblefish but pretty insufferable all the same.

The point I'm trying to make is I don't know where to go from here. Running out of options, unable to connect with either friends or family and carrying enough misery-laced ennui to keep a convention of nihilists employed through the next millenium.

From Gorey's Gashlycrumb Tinies: "N is for Neville who died of ennui"