A few days ago, I called my father and told him that I felt that I had no compelling reasons to continue on in this cruel world. This has been exacerbated by the fact that in a desperate grasp for some sort of structure in my life, I'm on another restrictive diet that allows me very little sustenance and takes from me the few pleasures I have in life, namely eating calorically rich foods and drinking.

My father's response was to refuse to directly respond to my lament, and rather, detail the myriad of ways in which his life was far worse than mine. He cited finding a receipt from a couch that he had purchased in 1981 and which was removed from our house sometime in my childhood. Finding this scrap of paper, he claimed, was the ultimate proof of a life not worth living. "I still have the receipt Lina," he bawled. "Do you know what that means for me? Do you understand how much crap I have to throw away?" He paused for a moment. "I," he mused, "really have no reason to live." A moment later he told me that he was too busy to talk, and then hung up. Needless to say, despite learning that my father's list of reasons to jump out of a window was longer than mine, I didn't feel better.

His response though, was not a surprise though. Just like his overbite, I've inherited his overwhelming negativity and tendency towards depression. I've spent the last 20-odd years trying to fight them both, with no noticeable progress in either category.

The older I get, the more I seem to be behaving like my father. The only things that make him happy are insulting other people and seething quietly, his face marred only by a rictus of murderous rage and a single throbbing vein in the middle of his forehead. Luckily, I lack the vein, for now. The rest, however, is all falling into place.