Refusing Rex

No Workout Today
I can’t workout on Wednesdays. I barely get any sleep between jobs and I wake up very sore.

Yesterday I got headaches. Big ones. That could only mean one thing: Family. Whenever I speak to family members I get these huge headaches, especially with my parents. Sometimes they are talking about normal stuff but I still get headaches. I’m sure it’s something that’s psycho-symptomatic and I’ll probably use the social blog to fix that. But the headaches always occurred when talking to everyone in my family except my brother, Rex. That all changed yesterday.

With some time to kill at the bank job, I decided to call my mom and my dad yesterday. I hadn’t talked to them in a while and I didn’t want them to call me first, or else I’d have to sit through 5 minutes of why I should call more often. My mom Rita was her usual self, telling me that she had a dream that I got a girl pregnant but won’t claim responsibility, then asking me if it was true. She must be watching too much Maury. Then I called my dad, Roy, and he started asking details about my fake classes that I was taking. I kept tripping up because I’m not very good at lying, but I did a good enough job. Operation LFS is getting more difficult to continue as time goes on. Then Rex called me.

He first warned me by saying that I wasn’t going to like what he was going to say. He said that he needed money to start up his Forex trading strategies again, as his first venture didn’t go as planned. When he said the amount he needed, I… let’s just say the headache I had was enough to make me lose my balance if I were standing. He wanted $5,000. $5,000. I told him I’d have to think about it but I knew that I couldn’t do it. When an underwriter looks at a bank account, they look for certain trends. Until now, my bank account has been steadily rising. If I take out $5,000 for something right now it would reflect negatively on me, especially if I told the truth about where it got sent to. Even if I give Rex the $5,000 and everything works out, it wouldn’t matter. The underwriter would see on my bank statement that I’m willing to give up $5,000 on a risky investment and that sends my chances of getting the commercial loan deeper in the gutter. It’s bad enough that my credit isn’t the best; I can’t send any more red flags as banks are looking for any reason at all to deny loans.

So the answer was obviously no but I couldn’t say it, and I didn’t understand why. If anyone else would ask for $5K I’d probably laugh at them and then throw a bottle of ketchup at the back of their head. But this is Rex, my last connection to my family and the only one I get along with. For some reason he still has this hold over me and I couldn’t shake it. I even re-read some posts I did last year like The Ties That Bind, The Bank is Closed, and even To Refuse a Friend, but I still felt weird about saying no. It bothered me all day and I couldn’t shake it. I’ve never had to say no to Rex before. This morning I woke up and everything was back to normal. I understand that if I can’t give it, then I can’t give it and there’s nothing I can do—Rex most likely understands this as well, even though the phone call I had to make today felt like torture. Maybe after I buy the first commercial property I would be able to lend him the money, but it’s just impossible now.

What’s important right now is to keep doing as I do. Rex will find a job doing something or borrow money from Rita, but he should be fine. Meanwhile, I have to make sure that quotas are reached, bills are paid, and rents are handed in. I want to be in a better position so that, the next time someone like Rex needs help, I might be able to give it.