My relationship with Mike is having a new low point. It started roughly before Chinese New Year-cum-Valentine's Day. Mike went to visit a friend in Boston and stayed in her apartment for almost a week. He told me that he had been exchanging emails with her since January and also wrote the longest email in his life to her. While in Boston, they went to see Avatar together, went to Cape Code together, and did a bunch of other things together. Wasn't that very nice of Mike? He proved to me that they were just normal friends by calling her in front of me and letting me hear the tone that he used. I didn't say anything about it after that.
Today, the first thing I read on my cell phone was Mike's text messages. He said he was too tired last night to practice Chinese with me, and because he didn't have his cell phone with him, he couldn't reply my messages until very late at night. But he did respond my Facebook message blandly. And he sent me an email with lots of exclamation marks with no relevance to me. I think he sent that to me by mistake, but he denied it.
I begged him for emotional support today because I was sad. He, like the Americans he described, couldn't differentiate sadness from depression. He suggested that I get self-help books, go to support groups. My negative emotions of him reached a new high at those moments. "Exercise also helps," he suggested, right after I explained him that I could fall apart so do not hurt me, and I needed emotional support from him. He showed no signs and no interests in either of those. I was extremely hurt, I cried.
A moment ago, I told him that to sound cool, I would just respond that if he could give, great, but if not, fine, but this was nothing that I wanted. The revelation of my weakness invited more and more of his violence. He told me that the world is a composition of shit. I never know I could hate Mike this much.
So, after I told Elizabeth that you would be here on Friday, she threw another tantrum. She was ranting a number of things that were hard for me to keep track of. Each time I was about to win an argument, she brought up something else. Her most useful trope was to say that I didn't speak standard English so she couldn't understand what I meant. I suppose she could understand "more fair" instead of "fairer"? Basically we went around in circles. In the end, she shouted at me, "Stop!" from her room, after she slammed the door close. And in a burst of anger, she said she would transfer the bills under my name without my approval.
The whole conversation is still somewhat fresh in my head, so I will try to reproduce parts of it as best as I can.
It started off by her asking me our plan for the weekend. I said we would go out on Sunday, but for the rest of the time, we were probably going to stay in because it would be cold outside. She responded by saying that it was not so cold like the subway wasn't going to be running or restaurants weren't going to open. And then she went on to prove her point that I obviously had a problem because I didn't go out. I asked her how she could be sure that I had not been going out. She said it was because every time she came back, I was here. I told her that this observation could not be used to prove that I never went out. In fact, I went to events that she wasn't aware of. At some point there, she modified her accusation to "you don't go out at night." She stated, young people of my age should go out at night or else they are not normal.
I am also not normal vaguely because my boyfriend has bipolar, according to her. She used both your illness and the December incident to prove that you couldn't be trusted. I didn't have much to say on the December incident because you were wrong. But I pointed out to her that you had never left the front door open since then and had always taken your shoes off when you came inside the apartment. She then said that bipolar people don't change. I disagreed with her by saying that some bipolar people did recover successfully, as can be referenced in various researches. She said that she knew bipolar people in her life and knew doctors and psychiatrists, so I should not tell her that she didn't know much about bipolar. Yet, she never confronted my point that some bipolar people could recover.
Then at some point she tried to argue that I did not show her respect. But I reminded her that she said things like "your parents don't teach you," "you have a problem," and "you are not normal," which couldn't be count as respecting me in any sense at all.
In the midst of this, she complained that I left the kitchen light on. Listen to how crazy this is. She caught me when I was just moving my laptop to my study. I was literally plugging the cord, and I didn't even have a chance to put the lights in my study on! Anyway I got up to go to the kitchen to turn the lights off. But she blocked my way! I asked her to stand aside so I could go, but she wanted me to back off first. My left hand accidentally touched hers when I turned, and she squeaked, "Don't touch me!" I let her be.
I asked her to stop wasting my time and tell me what she wanted. She said the bill. So for quite some time during the long conversation, she tried to negotiate how we could split the bill because I seemed to have used more electricity. I had my points. 1). Her hairdryer, which she uses in the morning, is of 1000-1500 watts. But my light bulb is only of 60 watts. How can we calculate the electricity bill fairly? 2). I paid 50% of the electricity bill for the past winter break. Should I have paid that at all, since I wasn't even here? For 1), she said she would stop using her hairdryer from now on. For 2), she said that let us not deal with the past.
"Let us not deal with the past." That was incredibly funny for her to say because all she had been arguing with me was things from the past. In fact, the "charges" against me from the past, as brought up by her right after then, was how I was responsible for giving her troubles by letting her drive my stuff from Boston to New York. I was calm, I maintained my poise, I made it very clear to her that at that point in time, she knew just as clearly as I did, that I didn't need anything from Boston, for I was determined to buy new furniture. It was her who said that it would be nice to not have to go and buy a new kitchen table etc. She also said that she didn't appreciate your help with moving the furniture because she could have asked her friends to come. Somehow I was "pathetic" to have used her for help and have stayed in Mark's apartment for the night before the moving, despite the fact that I could stay in my friend's place too; but she was not pathetic, though she used your help.
She called me a liar too, all because I said in the summer that these should be the best years of my life and she could see that I didn't live up to it. In order to live up to it, I needed to do what she deemed necessary for a young woman to do. So I asked her, "Didn't Mark and you lie about treating me back when he came to visit too?" It threw her into a rage. She said that I should have brought them a gift when I stayed at their place, and because I didn't, it showed how I didn't know the American culture, and how my parents "don't" (not just "didn't") teach me. But I bought them an expensive meal the night I stayed over. Oh, wasn't what I did a worthless thing to do?
And she said that when she used the "f" word, it was not an insult on me. Is "You could f***ing tell me" an insult? Is "F*** off" an insult?
We didn't settle on the bill eventually. Obviously I didn't agree to pay for 70% of the electricity bill, which she suggested. My terms were 55% of the units used each month and a fifty-fifty share of the basic service charge. She didn't not agree to that. So right now, we are unresolved.
