They say intelligence skips a generation. I say sometimes we need to make generation a plural. My mother and much of her family are steeped in intellectual challenge and willful ignorance. That doesn't mean I don't love them, but it does mean that the challenge of keeping them out of financial trouble can be immense. Also, there is a tendency for them to cause embarrasment from a strong social isolationism that keeps them from making good choices when meeting people who are not identical to themselves.
Last year after my father died, I inherented my mother. In addition, my brother who tends to deny himself any responsibility as a human being abandoned two of his children and our ancestral home, which my mother gave to him about ten years ago. My father saved enough money to keep my mother in good comfort for a number of years if she chose to live with me. Instead, she insisted on giving her home away up north, and buying a rather expensive house at the worst possible time in the housing market.
Stupidly, I signed a mortgage agreement with her so that she could get a house. The alternative was that she would spend all of her money to buy my brother out of debt (which never actually seems to work no matter how much money is involved). Now, in these dark days of evil emperors, 24 hour government survellance, terrorism against civil liberty and economic implosion due to dullard financial management I find myself in an even more grim situation. How to get my name off of my mother's mortgage before she ruins the both of us financially. It will be most difficult in the coming years to keep solvent, without someone who gives her money to 12 year olds rather than pay her debts mucking things up. Perhaps the madness in this scenario is not to simply join and contribute to the economic collapse of my country, rather than resist it as seems natural to do. The plot is only beginning. Our government, through it's agencies of psycology have suggested that "obsessive texting and emailing" is a form of insanity. I give to you that insanity is acceptance of the world as it is instead of resisting the tyranny of the status quo and the mandates of a government that does not love us.