Alterior Motive Weekend

My weekend was interesting enough. After driving through torrential rain to get home on Saturday I hung out with my family, and then hung out with Emma for a bit which was nice. Saturday night we took my dad out to Bubba Gump's at the Pike in downtown Long Beach for his birthday. Mmmm... fried shrimp is so good!

Of course half of the reason that I wanted to come home, well maybe even more than half, was to have the Apartment Talk.
I'll have to say my pros and cons list was way longer than my parents. And of course they had many more cons than pros, whereas I was the opposite. I think after this weekend I now know that one of my moms biggest fears is that I'm not going to finish school, even though there's no way I'd quit. Oh yes, and of course that some crazy man is going to follow me and rape me. I think that yes, as a parent, you are supposed to worry. But at some point you have to get over these fears, or at least realize that you can't protect your daughter from everything, you just have to trust that she is smart and will be safe and is in God's hands. Life happens sometimes. The crazy guy situation could happen ANYWHERE.
After much talking/arguing my mother started to warm up to the idea. If that's what you could call it. She started asking me all of these questions about the apartments that I've been looking at. Then at the end said "So are you going to work alot this summer so that you can pay for the furniture?" Of course I said yes. I told her all I am asking is that she pay for rent and my schooling, I will figure out how to pay for everything else. I am seriously considering getting a different job next year that pays more anyway. And that way I can afford having more to pay for next year. Of course she doesn't want me to get a different job because she doesn't understand why I feel the need to make more money, and that my parents will give me more money if I need it. Hmm, this conversation is making less and less sense to me. But they don't have a say in what job I have next year or how much I choose to work, or any of that, so whatever, they can be upset.
Basically not this weekend, but the next weekend we're going to try and get all of the parents to come down and check out the apartments that we are looking at and hopefully they will for sure make the final decision of yes. They haven't specifically said yes, but I don't think they can say no anymore.
At what point do I finally have to not ask permission for all of this stuff? At what point am I making my own decisions? Do they really think that me not living at home hasn't changed anything? I guess once I'm finally out of college, or get so frustrated that I just take out student loans and pay my own way.
So there we have it.