The Impotence in Being Earnest

No this isn't a blog about a play that you read in AP English, whose title I have obviously misspelled. But buckle in and get ready to read the first legitimate blog I've dropped in a while.

Yesterday evening I flew in to terrible Pittsbugh, PA from the sunny climes of Central Florida. For thsoe of you who don't know, I grew up in Miami, Florida. Even though I left Miami almost 10 years ago, I still consider it my home. Most of my family lives in Florida, I still have a number of close friends in Florida, and my stomach still flips over with happiness whenever I'm on a plane that touches down on a runway in Florida. The sights, the smells, the warm breeze that always seems to be floating through the air-everything about Florida appeals to every part of me. The experience of going back to Florida, for me, is akin to that feeling of walking into your parents house after that first bout with college finals-instantly everything feels safe, feels calm, feels welcoming. I know it seems to be uber-sentimental, but I swear that when I touch down in Florida the palm trees wave to me, welcoming me back. And when I leave, they sway their arms in the most exaggerated goodbye that never abates in intensity until they are far out of eyesight. It's like when I go to Florida I check the weight of my cares at the airport, and when I return I pick them up right where I dropped them off. This time back, though, someone piled up more baggage for me to take back.

I went down to Florida just for a few days to wish my grandmother a happy 80th birthday. While I'm sure that Grandma would love to have a slew of grandchildren fly down to see her on her birthday, the fact is that Grandma only has 4 grandkids: me and my brother and 2 sisters. So on this mission to Florida I was the unofficial emissary of goodwill from all the grandchildren...all 4 of them. My mom has 2 sisters, none of whome have kids but both of whom have failed marriages (which when you combine and average out the length of my aunts' first marriages, I think they total roughly 2 years). It's gotta be kind of sad for my Grandma to only have 4 grandkids. It's gotta be even sadder for her that one of her daughters (not my mom) still lives with her, works at Wal-Mart on the midnight shift, has no friends, and weighs roughly as much as a small elephant. I kid you not. This is where my blog starts for real.

My aunt, is for all intents and purposes, worthless. She doesn't produce offspring. She doesn't contribute to her local community. She doesn't better others with scintillating wit in conversation. She doesn't go to church and has essentially abandoned her faith...not because something incredibly traumatizing or disenchanting happened to her, but because she is too lazy to keep up. She doesn't exercise or maintain a semblance of a healthy lifestyle. She doesn't even give my Grandma a meagre check for rent. All my aunt does is consume...she's like a parasite. She consumes, I'm going to guess, roughly 5 times the daily caloric intake that humans should consume. She consumes my Grandma's money (and my inheritance?) and wastes it on things like going out to eat, impulse purchases on QVC, and tattoos of Tigger.
(author's note: Yeah you heard me right...my aunt has at least 7 Tigger tattoos. I dated a girl once who was unfortunate enough to find herself in a room alone with my aunt who was in the mood to show off her body art. While this girl and I eventually broke up in a not so conspicuous (or mature) display of fireworks, I do feel eternally sorry that the image of my Aunt Heiffer with no shirt on will be forever burned into her brain. Honestly!)
Basically my aunt is terrible. I know I throw that term around, but it's completely applicable to my aunt.

The purpose of this blog isn't to complain that I had to spend 5 days with a woman who is the spitting image of what a lack of self control/esteem should look like. The purpose is to pose a series of questions. How can you communicate to someone that they need to change when they don't want to hear it? How do you bring to light that someone is failing at life when they've put up psychological blocks that blind them to the truth? How do you earnestly try to care for family members who don't care about themselves? How do you resolve the feeling that you know you should love your family members with the reality that you can't stand being around them? These are questions that I've wrestled with over the past few days (in betwen rounds of golf, of course...hello I was in Florida!) and can't seem to come up with answers for. Maybe you all have answers, and maybe you don't; I really just needed to get some of that off my chest. And hey maybe we won't have to answer these questions. Maybe when my aunt gets married to the man she's engaged to (after having known him for 8 months) in June, she'll find the answers herself.

I've got 5 bucks and a failed marriage says that I'm wrong, though.