The first few days of 2009 have been a mixed bag, to say the least.

New Year's Eve was uneventful due to inclement weather and a general feeling of winter malaise. I haven't been sleeping very well at night which results in wasted days and anxious nights. On Friday night (the 2nd?) I met with a few Purchase friends in the city. At a friend's apartment, I saw what a Pulitzer Prize in Photography looks like (it's really unimpressive, sadly; just a baseball-sized crystal statuette) and spent some time catching up with people I haven't seen in a few weeks. It was a very strange night because the group of people I was with, on paper, should all be fantastic friends, yet there was an undercurrent of contempt amongst most of them. Later on in the night, both "sides" (literally boys vs. girls) would air their distaste for the other to me, leaving me in a very strange position. I like all of these people and I feel like the only common link between them, the only thing they can agree on. I'm sure I'm dedicating more than the necessary amount of thought to this, but it was a very sobering experience.

On Saturday night, my sister (who is 14) spent the night at a friend's house. It's probably the first time my parents have had the house to themselves in...over a decade. Times have been rough with my family, and as in the case with some of my friends, my mom and dad air their grievances with the other at me. I've become accustomed to it as it's been going on for years. I had to wonder what Saturday night would be like; for the past year or so, they've been at each others throats mainly because of my sister.

My sister has a lot of issues, all of which are being aired out in therapy as of recently, and it puts a lot of strain on my mom, especially. She's the type who is mainly concerned with school;for her, good grades make a good person, so I've always been the apple of my mother's eye (with a few exceptions, of course). My dad values education but is much more pragmatic about it; for him, memorizing something isn't learning and that's exactly what my sister does when she actually decides to do her schoolwork. My sister throws both of them into a shitstorm because she doesn't do her schoolwork, fails tests and lies about it. This has been going on for years and all that time my mom has spent countless hours tutoring her and doing work with/for her. It's been established that my sister has learning disabilites, amongst other things, but my mom is too proud to enroll her in special education programs. The constant strain of having to literally teach my sister ever night has made her completely untolerable and my dad becomes even worse.

That said, Saturday night was wonderful. Dinner was quiet and we were able to have a civilized conversation. My mom and dad even kind of smiled with each other, something that I haven't witnessed in a while. It was a quiet night at home--my mom took down Christmas decorations, my dad watched a movie and I read upstairs. I actually heard my mom and dad having a conversation that wasn't a screaming match. It was totally enjoyable.

On Sunday at 3pm, sress walked in the door. The decible level quickly returned to normal and so did the amount of tension. I don't know what to suggest to my parents at this point.

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This morning when I woke up, I had a Facebook message from my manager at the bookstore. I knew it couldn't be good because it said "Check your Purchase email ASAP." Usually when it involves my schedule, she just asks me to send her my classes. This was different. When I checked my email, there was a new message in my Inbox titled "Bookstore." I knew right off the bat that I had worked my last day at the bookstore. She regretted she had to let me go after 3 years of not only working there but knowing her on a personal level, but money is money and they don't have enough hours to give. Besides the obvious (being fired via email is fucking cold!), I was kind of upset for another reason; I wanted to quit anyway and I will never have the satisfaction of simply quitting that job. The handwriting was on the wall for a while as my hours kept getting cut and my responsibilites became fewer and fewer. By the end, all I was doing was working the cash register for eight hours a week. So now, I'll need to find a new job, which at Purchase, especially in January, is hard to begin with, regardless of our worldwide economic depression. I'm not ENTIRELY worried about getting a new job because I have a good chunk of money saved away that will get me through a few months, but I'd have prefered to kept that as rainy day money, but I guess it just started drizzling?