If I was an alcoholic, I would have been on a bender for the last two days.

Divorce Friend wanted my help and I didn't want to help her. I see that as a weakness of character and have been in self-loathing mode. I told her I would call her and then didn't and turned off my phone. I didn't want to tell her no; I didn't want to have to listen to her troubles; and I didn't want to have to not answer her calls (which I did last week).

But even so, like I say, I was miserable. I hated myself for letting her down in her moment of need and for having said I would call her and then not doing it. (I tried to justify it to myself by saying she's done it to me plenty of times [said she'd call and then not] but it's not the same. especially since she's asking me for help and when she doesn't call me, I don't lose out on any support.

Another excuse I give myself is that it's never-ending: she calls, asks for help, I try to help and she ends up right back in the same place she started - angry, upset, depressed. The second part is that I don't want to deal with her emotions. She wants to unload to me and I just can't take it. Part of it is: I'm a man; I want to solve problems, not listen to them. I want to have clearly defined tasks that I can come in and accomplish. I want things I can be done with; but her situation is always either recurring or sprouting a new head; finding a new way to manifest itself.

So I turned off my phone and shut her out.

The second part of the problem was that I got this notion in my head that I could be a significant presence/help to my brother's family while he was out of town. I got this impression because he had been home for the week after Christmas. I thought that I could take his place while he was out of town and provide some balance around the house.

What I forgot was that my brother usually isn't home during the day; he leaves very, very early in the morning and gets home at around 6 or later. Plus, he's been working 6 or 7 days a week for six months now. So she's been getting along without him for months.

Add to that the fact that I'm shitty help. I keep bad hours and so I end up sleeping during the all-important early morning hours when the kids all wake up and are getting ready for school. Then, around 9:45-10am when I am getting up, mom's about to go out and do something and invites me along. Because she's been doing it herself for so long, I'm sure she just invites me as a courtesy and maybe for some company. But those are the trips that she could probably use me on; like when she went to Target the other day and the two-year-old pulled an (unprecendented) full-blown tantrum in the middle of an aisle. That's when my assistance would have been useful. But since I was guilt-tripping and not feeling particularly clean or mobile, I passed up that trip.

The only way I can think I was helpful was that I could listen to her tell the story and commiserate when she got home. Other than that, I was useless.

So basically I kept my terrible schedule; only I tried to sleep even more because I didn't want to think about the fact that I was ducking my friend and being a shitty person.

My mood plummeted. I started to resent my nephew for all his cuteness. The buried layer saw the cuteness; the depression and anger on top hated him for his ability to keep making the same mistakes and doing annoying shit and getting away with it because he was so cute (acknowledged; totally true) and because he had the mind of a child and couldn't be counted on to retain the lessons he learned yesterday or last week. He angered me because I couldn't be as carefree and thoughtless as he was; how dickish is that? Very.

Today my brother came home. The job ended earlier than they thought and he came home this afternoon. He didn't do anything else except go to the store for a few things (I was invited, of course; and I turned it down, of course). That restored order to the house and I told him - in a veiled way - about how I had been avoiding my friend; because that was the other thing: I wasn't talking to anyone about the problem. The closest I got was to call Best Friend from the house phone this morning (cell phone still off) but she didn't answer after four rings and I hung up. Someone called later in the day but I don't know if anyone answered; those calls are usually from collection agencies.

Not talking to anyone was compounding the anger and hate I was feeling for myself. In the past two days I've been having an increasingly hard time enjoying anything; I was in the middle of a book and had hundreds of movies and episodes of TV on my brother's Netflix to watch but I didn't really care about any of it. I watched a little bit of "Gnomeo & Juliet" with my 3-year-old niece today and while I recognized the jokes and appreciated them from an intellectual and logical perspective I couldn't laugh at them or find the movie fun at all.

Today, with the balance restored by my brother's presence, I suddenly felt a little bit more comfortable and I decided to try to break myself out of my funk and see if I could raise my mood a little bit.

I took a shower and went out to feed my other addiction: I went to McDonald's and had dinner and finished my book. I considered turning on my phone but I never did. (I did a little after eleven. I had six texts and two voice mails. I didn't listen to the voice mails [because I expect them to be Divorce Friend] and none of the texts were from her. I sent a short email to Best Friend saying I had turned my phone off to avoid Divorce Friend and that I was sorry.)

I'm going to have to deal with Divorce Friend sooner or later and she's probably going to say feels terrible because she 'chased me away' or something like that, which doesn't help either of us and just makes me feel shitty because she's blaming herself for something that isn't her fault and is my lack of character. (Which maybe doesn't help either but fuck you, well-adjusted people. I can't do it all in one fucking day.)

That's it. I have to stop now because I can't focus. My mood has improved some; enough that I'm actually thinking of staying for the whole weekend - which doesn't make any sense at all. I need to just go home. (Problem four: I see no future for me at home, which is just a depressing reality I don't want to go face.)