'Tis the season to realize once more that your family is not happy and shiny like everyone else's. I know everyone has a crazy aunt and senile grandmother, but for some reason I feel as though my family has been hit with a particularly hard case of the untolerables.

My mother and sister are visiting me for a week. Mistake number one: having them down here for a week. My sister is bored and she's not afraid to show it. Yesterday we met up with my boyfriend's parents for lunch, and my sister spent the entire time with her arms folded, a pout across her face and her gaze fixed on the napkin dispenser at the table. Now I realize that meeting my boyfriend's family is probably not the most intriguing activity for a 17-year-old, but would it kill her to act at least mildly interested? It's called being sociable. Of course, since she got an almost-perfect SAT score, she's way too smart to stoop down to our level and communicate with a group of people who never took AP classes in high school. She IS graduating high school after all, so therefore she knows everything about life and she's not even an adult yet. I truly do not understand how parents put up with teenagers.
What a snotty bunch of brats.

And then of course there's my mother, who has actually been pretty tame these past few days. Still, I get annoyed when she asks about what so-and-so from high school is doing for the millionth time. The woman also needs a hearing aid but is too stubborn to admit it. A few days ago when we were driving to lunch, my mother asked if she could throw away my old diaries to remove some of the clutter from my room at her house. When I said no, she replied with, "Can't you let go of the past?" Sigh.

I really wish I could claim that my mother and sister were my best friends. I wish I could say that I couldn't go a day without speaking to them on the phone, but the truth is that I function better when I am 700 miles away and have little to no contact with them. They aren't bad people, but we'll just never be that warm, close knit unit Wal-mart depicts on its commercials. My boyfriend's family is pretty cool, and I think I'm a little jealous. His parents are funny and not socially awkward like my mother is. Everyone has a sense of humor and can be together without strangling one another.

My family annoys me to no end, but I do enjoy their company. No matter what, they are my family, even if my sister acts like an angsty little brat and even if my mother sees nothing wrong with tossing ten years of diaries into the trash.