Dec 18, 2023
I’m inside of a tent right now! I’m here with Dad. He’s in his own tent . It’s the first night of our road trip. We’re right next to a small lake. It looks super cool.
This morning I woke up and had breakfast. I called mom and then took a shower. I had to check out of the hostel by 10 am. I left my stuff in the luggage room and hung out at the library. I called mom again and talked with her and Mami. Mom talked about her call with Liam. Apparently Liam’s not mad at dad or anything, but he feels like it’s award and he doesn’t know what’s going on or why dad is sorta ignoring him. Mami said that she got a new bidet.
Dad picked me up and we drove out of Auckland. The traffic was quite busy. We went to Kmart and got some stuff. They didn’t have some things we needed so we kept driving and went to the next one.
In the car we almost got into an argument. I kinda lost my temper a bit. He was talking about how people will use labels for people as a way of de-valuing them. I said that he’s literally doing the exact same thing by calling people anti-vaccers and conspiracy theorists. He basically said it’s different, because some things are true and some things aren’t. Then he started talking about Joe Rogan and how he has people on his show that don’t know what they’re talking about. I kinda lost my cool and just said that I don’t want to get into this stuff, but that I’m a conspiracy theorist by his definition. I also said I think it’s such a low thing to do to use labels for people you don’t agree with. After that it was kinda quiet in the car for a bit.
I just really don’t know how to deal with those situations. I don’t know if I should just sit and keep my mouth shut. I also don’t know enough to articulate why I disagree. That’s the frustrating part. I can’t physically remove myself from the situation. I don’t want to play stupid and just agree to make things easy. I also don’t want explode and start disagreeing. I wanted to learn to be diplomatic. I want to be able to disagree while still being completely level headed and calm and polite, but strong at the same time. I also don’t want to get into a long discussion about it.
We went to K-mart and everything was fine after that. I found the rest of what I needed. We continued driving and we eventually arrived at the town. Everything suddenly smelled like farts. I thought it was dad. He said it was sulphur from the geysers. Apparently this town has cool hot springs and geysers.
We went to the campsite and so now we're here. It’s really cool.
Goodnight!!!