owning the faults

My father is a putz. We are talking about major social-ineptitude here, borderline Asberger's, socially inept to the point of accidental sexual harassment. His discomfort makes him inappropriate.
Enough.

Within my family I am a paragon of social ease and coolness. I'm socially affable enough to recognize my father's disastrous social disfunction. Unfortunately I'm also sane enough to see it in myself. I see my father in more and more of my actions and predilections. We're doomed creatures. We share a socially awkward physical build, our very bone structures set us back. We're inclined to a reclined slouch, slack chested, thick waisted, off balance and asymmetrical. We don't know when to shut up. We have excessive vocabularies. We achieve nothing.

I am proud of my father for doing what he needed to do to take care of his family, but the truth is that mom was the bread winner for most of my childhood. Still, my father did a thankless job that sparked no passion in him and had nothing to do with who he is.

Who are you?
We are our occupations.
Graphic Designer, Accountant, Development Director, Nurse, Manager, Teacher, Small Business Owner, Contractor, Doctor, Lawyer, Mechanic.
My father is not his job. He is not a certifier, not a technician. I've worked with him. He even seems awkward on the job. He has more in common with the doctors than the contractors in the hospitals he often inspects, and not because he wears a shirt and tie, but he is not a doctor--though they share the same obsessiveness.

I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be obsessive in that way. I don't want to hold forth on obscure and suspect diatribes to unsuspecting strangers. I don't want to constantly say the wrong thing.

It boggles my mind that my parents got together. My mother seems socially agreeable. She has her neuroses. She is always in control. Perhaps it took someone with her damage to find someone with my father's ineptitude appealing.
Now that the house is empty the tenuous connection is weaker.
I don't know that I believe I'll find someone willing to put up with my ineptitude and neuroses whose damage I can stand.

I don't want to be my father. I don't want to be a failure, to slog away at something that isn't me, never achieving anything that is me, but I'm well on my way into his footsteps.

I believe that I am the progenitor of my own happiness. The right woman will not make me happy. The right town will not make me happy. The right job will not make me happy.
Happiness is something I can achieve simply by choice and I continue to choose something else. I choose to see my self in my father's form and judge that similarity.

On the other hand, the cat is a huge improvement--I only wish for more clarity on her side of the conversation. The city, is isolated but populous enough to maintain my interest when I choose to go out. The job is occasionally boring but not all consuming and a life outside of it is almost possible.
So perhaps I need a better job in a better town and perhaps a woman will provide more emotional fulfillment than the cat.

One can hope.
One can hope for a change.