Dad, stop inviting yourself

This is something I’ve been wanting to vent for a while now. My dad (67 years old) keeps inviting himself to my personal gatherings and it irritates the hell out of me. I’m a 21 year old male and fourth year college student who currently lives at home with my parents, but I can’t stand my dad whenever he invites himself to tag along with me whenever I go about my personal matters. One Saturday evening last year, my dad asked me where I was going while I was heading out. I made the mistake of telling him that I was going to the restaurant across the street to have dinner with friends. He responded by saying, “oh, good idea; I could use some food right now”. We walked to the restaurant and arrived before any of my friends showed up. I thought he was going to have the decency to order takeout and go home, but as we entered the restaurant, my dad told the waiter, “for six” and sat us down at a table. For some reason, I thought he was requesting the table for my five friends and me, while wondering how he knew exactly how many of us there were going to be. He stayed at the table and one by one my friends came, awkwardly asking who I was with. When my last friend came in, the table was full, so she had to sit at the end of the table with very little room. That night didn’t go too terribly, although I would’ve preferred if my dad didn’t stay in the first place. Since then, he’s always been coming uninvited to dinner with my friends. The usual scene would go something like this:Me: leaving the house My dad: “Going out to dinner with friends?” Me: (grudgingly) “Yeaaah....” My dad: “Can we leave in a minute? I want to finish this episode.” OR “Give me a minute, I need to use the restroom first.” OR “I’m busy tonight, I don’t think we can go.”No dad. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t keep inviting yourself to my personal gatherings. I CAN go because I was invited. You CAN’T because you weren’t. And by the way, for future reference, just because you can’t go to an event, it doesn’t mean I can’t. Stop thinking that my ability to go out is dependent on your availability.Within the three month span of me going out to weekend dinners with friends, I’ve had to miss about a third of them because of my dad’s dumb af reasoning. Of the dinners I went to, my dad invited himself to all but two of them. After those three months, I just stopped going altogether and haven’t received a dinner invite from my friends since. I feel like they made a new group chat without me. I also want to mention this: the second time I went out to dinner without my dad, he found out and was waiting for me at the door the same way a parent does when their 13 year old kid comes back at 2 in the morning. He started yelling at me, saying how inconsiderate it was of me to show up without him. He also yelled at me about he felt embarrassed not to show up. The thing is, I finally thought he would no longer invite himself to my planned events, so I was pretty happy after he stopped screaming. But I was wrong.Lately, I’ve been going to my school because we have a food pantry that gives out free food and toiletries every Wednesday. I live about half an hour away from school, so I go each week. When I brought back food for the first time, my dad asked me where I got it and told him the truth. And guess what? For the past several months, he’s been asking me if I’m going, what time I’m going, and what I’m going to get. And he keeps inviting himself even though the food pantry is for students only. When one of the staff members told him that he couldn’t enter because he wasn’t a student, he began yelling at her and saying that he was my father. It was probably the most embarrassing moment of my adulthood. Tbh, him coming along with me for the food pantry isn’t nearly as bad as him ruining my time with friends, but it’s still very annoying every time he comes uninvited, even when there’s no point for him to go. He just stays in the car the entire time. One time, he even had the audacity of inviting himself saying, “I can go, but I have to go to LA right after. So you’re going to have to come with me to LA.” He has his own car and I have my own as well, so he could’ve gone to LA by himself if he simply didn’t come with me. He was there to meet up and have lunch with his siblings, and said that we’d be back home by around 2 or 3. Instead, he ended up inviting himself and his other siblings to his younger brother’s house, forcing me to go with him (I should clarify and say that my dad’s younger brother is pretty successful and has a very nice home, and my dad makes the stupidest reasons to invite himself there). My dad and his other siblings ended up staying there until 7, mooching off his brother’s beer and food. I had a Zoom meeting with my research group at 5:30, but I had to text my group that I couldn’t make it. When we left at 7, I finally thought we were going home, but my dad still had the audacity to suggest that we all go out for dinner (which my dad’s younger brother ended up paying for). I had to waste another two hours, being mostly pissed that my dad caused me to miss an important meeting and waste my entire day that I had planned for working on my project.And it’s not just these two examples. He invites himself whenever I go the bank, get gas, or go to the park to get some alone time, just to name a few examples. There was one time when my dad was in his room and I tried to leave to get gas, but as I opened the front door, my dad came out of his room just to ask me where I was going. I told him I was going to Costco to get gas and he responded by saying, “Oh, give me 20 minutes, I need to take a shower.”What pisses me off the most is that I have two older siblings who go out much more than I do, yet he doesn’t invite himself to go with them.Tldr: My dad invites himself whenever I leave the house and it’s f*cking annoying. via /r/offmychest https://ift.tt/2G1vnJe