Once upon a time, GM wrote a thingamajig online about the nature of "altruism." I just don't know if I buy into the whole concept; no matter how selfless an action a person may be doing, there is almost always a selfish motive for doing so.
The old classic is the person jumping into traffic to push a kid out of the way of an oncoming truck and being hit themselves.
The response is that the person probably never could have looked at themselves in the mirror again if they thought they could have done something and didn't. There tends to be selfish motives underneath even the most altruistic of acts is the point; this isn't being said to minimize the actions of those altruistic "heroes" ...merely an interesting way of viewing it from another angle.
I'm slowly beginning to wonder if I may have been wrong on my initial premise there though.
Most of the folks who have known me on here for a while know that I take care of my father 2-3 days a week, and he has Alzheimers. I don't often like to talk about this much because I don't really care that much for any "attaboys" for what I do; in fact, most days when I with him I can almost get wood while fantasizing about being the dude with the old man in the "Bring out your Dead" skit in "Monty Python & the Search for the Holy Grail." ...so please spare me the accolades. I'm honestly a bad, bad person, really I am!!!!
To tell the truth though, I'm quite patient with him most of the time. He has almost zero short term memory, and it's quite often like listening to a broken record. Since my own attention span tends to be roughly equivalent to that of a turnip most days (sorry turnips), I can generally handle him with a modicum of tact.
Other days I just want to scream.
First of all, one has to bear in mind that my father has always been a bit of a prick. ...and now with the Alzheimers in play, he's kind of the prick times 100. Of all the annoying crap that he did all his life, now he does it over and over with no idea he just did/said exactly the same thing approximately 93.2 seconds ago. Most of the time he is fairly easily distracted with find-a-word puzzles, but more and more in recent months he's been approaching his find-a-words like Russell Crowe attacked his cryptography in "A Beautiful Mind." Somehow they have become a thing of earth-shattering importance that MUST be checked and double checked by someone else IMMEDIATELY.
Oh ...and of course it is NEVER a "hey, could you check this?!" ...more of a "CHECK THIS NOW" kind of thing. The upside is that you can almost literally tell him to fuck off and he won't remember it 5 minutes later; the downside is that he doesn't remember he's already asked 13 times in the last hour either. VERY frustrating at times!
His mother had just about the same thing that he has and I'm honestly hoping he doesn't hang on as long as she did. Dad was such a jerk with his mother, it almost seems like Karma that he is in the same boat; perhaps that may even be part of my hidden selfish motivations for helping to take care of him. I think it's almost a foregone conclusion that he wouldn't have wanted to die like he's going to. yuck ...brutal fucking disease for sure.
*sigh* ...more another time.
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