Well the funny thing is my mother has a master's in english and his father had a degree in american history or something. My dad finished undergrad for ecology and I'm currently a bio and psych major in my second year. That's the really sad thing here. He's a great guy, hilarious, can do any accent imaginable and he's athletic, smart, and driven when he wants to be. He's just lazy as hell. The man has more than fifty pounds on me (I'm at ~150lbs) of muscle and works out constantly, yet when we were renovating the house when my parents moved down here I worked ten hours a day while he'd drift off and look at facebook. Hell, once he even "traded jobs" with me while I was staining and he was cleaning since he said the cleaning was driving him mad. Turns out my job of staining railings which I had about 15 minutes left to go was swapped for two hours worth of cleaning.
I'm not raging here, I'm genuinely sad. He got great grades in school until he got involved with drugs, he has years of cooking experience and can make a meal worthy of a five star establishment, but he just can't take stress or orders and thus winds up losing any job he gets. My mother even gave him a job in her business paying 25$ an hour but he simply stopped doing the work after a while since he thought he should get the full 75$ she was paying her clients. Recently he's lost his car to a one of those "get cash now" loan places and it was only narrowly haggled back at the price of the loan by my father who informed the place that it's unsellable since it's been totaled so many times and he's stolen my parent's credit cards and gone out on thousand dollar buying sprees.
The plan was to kick him out of the house at the start of last year if he didn't get a job or go to school, so he signed up to go to community college. On the third day my father drove around in the lots around the school to check for my brother's car. It wasn't there.
He's uninsurable and thus has no car insurance, he'll be too old to be on my parent's health insurance next year, he doesn't pay parking tickets and drives through the smarttag lane at toll booths since the car's in my parent's names, he's now unemployable since he's been convicted for shoplifting and has no references, and he goes into horrible depressions for weeks and even months. He's been to a psychiatrist, or rather a few different ones, to try types of medication that don't work. He has lived on his own for two years when he graduated high school, but when things fell out with his girlfriend he moved back home.
I really want to help him and I really want to believe that he's going to make next semester at school work. He's always been a good older brother despite everything and, other than the stupid "You're breathing too loud purely to annoy me" accusations when we were kids we've never really had fights. I talk to him less now that his sleep schedule's opposite mine and I miss hanging out with him, but I'd gladly never see him again if we could just get him on his feet. I always thought he was going to take over my uncle's law firm and be more successful than I could ever be. Then, after he got through his rough patch, I thought that he'd take over my mom's business and make a good living doing writing that I could never match. Now I'm worried as hell. How do you get someone who won't do work that they're "too good for", hates discipline, and has a (minor) criminal record motivated to do something with their lives? (Might belong in life advice, but I don't really expect an answer)
Author
Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9790034 times)