a wolf angel is not a good angel

Two days ago, I fix my evil sister’s computer. Again.

Yesterday, my mother and I are doing the crossword puzzle in the kitchen. My evil sister walks in to eat dinner (my sisters ordered pizza, my parents and I ate barbecued stuff later). She gets mad that my mother and I are doing a puzzle because, I don’t know, she doesn’t like it. She asks us to stop, she’d like to talk to my mother. I say we were here first, blah blah.

Eventually I say fine, let’s talk! I ask her about something: she ignores me. I keep trying to talk to her. She alternately ignores me and yells at me that she’s not talking to me, and that I should shut up. I say fine, continue doing the crossword puzzle, though I read a bunch of the clues out loud. She gets mad. I say I’m happy to do either, she just needs to choose. She gets madder. She says she doesn’t want me doing the crossword puzzle in front of her. She says she doesn’t want to talk to me, either. She does not seem to understand how her dislike of me doesn’t mean I’m going to not exist except when she needs stuff from me.

My first cousin once removed, to his 90 year old mother, one of the most elegant women on this planet: “But you’re quite the player, aren’t you, mom?”
Me: “Yes, Aunt H, you’re quite the player.”

My sister is nuts. I know I’ve complained about her a lot, in the long past. She’s also, as symptom of her nuts, abusive. She’s quit with some of the worst ones — say, when she said, proudly, that at least *she* had never wanted to kill herself, I said that hey, at least I had friends and a job and had finished school. It was cruel, but on the other hand, it was effective: she’s dropped that one entirely. I don’t know if I’m proud of it, but I’m relieved about the outcome.

(Irrelevant digressive story follows, then at the end the point I really wanted to make and which I’d like any sort of intelligent words on. I certainly have no ideas. I cannot, for other reasons, stop actually seeing her.)

She still attacks. She told me the other day she really for sure wants to study X now. (Doesn’t matter what X is, though it’s something she’s terrifically unsuited for.) I said that I hoped it worked out well. She badgered and badgered me until I said that, yes, well, she’s had a million really for sures, so it’s nice and all, but I don’t believe it. She said this time is different. Now, I do think she really really means it, but I also think this time isn’t different. I said ok. She badgered some more. I said that she said the same thing every time, so excuse me if I don’t have much faith, maybe she should get a job first.

Badger badger badger. Fine! Fine, I think it’s a job you are not going to be good at, that you don’t have the skills for it (nb: this is true also for me), and that you should just get a job and figure out what you want to do when you can actually support yourself. Then she yells at me.

We both knew where the conversation would lead. I can start out casually saying yes, it’s a fine idea, blah blah blah, but after fifty zillion hearings of ‘but what do you really think?’, I tend to actually say what I really think.

I never am sure: she doesn’t know how she comes across at times, but she does know how to be cruel, and is it deliberate? She never sees her fault in anything.

This was not at all the post I meant to write. But my thoughts about her are so incoherent.

On the one hand, she’s family. On the other hand, she’s abusive. Back to the first hand, she’s really clearly sick and incapable, and is it fair to resent her for being sick and incapable? But on that second hand, she refuses to try anything to change it. But then, isn’t that a symptom of being sick? And on and on and on I go.

My mother informs me that I am expected at my aunt’s house Saturday night at 6 (or 6:30 or whatever, some time). I seethe some because, yet again, no one sees fit to be in touch with *me*, but this isn’t exactly a surprise date which I can reasonably have made other plans for. (During Chanukah, OTOH, I will make plans EVERY SINGLE NIGHT (and reschedule iff I get my own actual invitation (like a phone call or an email)) because hey! I can’t be expected to keep 8 nights free!)

My mother suggests I go there separately, which sounds like a fine plan, because then I can leave separately. Which sounds less fine because I am expected to leave with my crazy sister, which is unfun. On the other hand, if she drives and not me, I can drink (they make strong drinks). On the spare hand which I keep in a drawer it’s not a mixed drink sort of occasion. But in any case, this means I can get there whenever I want.

Some salient rationalisation background: they always invite friends of theirs I dislike, ignoring us for their friends, and they always always come quite late (usually with a coffee — Starbucks or 2nd cup — in hand), and we wait dinner on them, half an hour, an hour.

So: do I go with my good angels and get there around when I was called for? Do I go with my bad angels and get there half an hour late? Or more? Can I claim to have gotten totally lost and forget my cell phone and not have any money on me?

Today I decided to teach my sister to recognise sexism in ads. Fine if she loves all the fashion magazines, but enough with the unexamined reading of them. I pointed out the women who typically had their mouths open, looking through their lashes or out the sides of their eyes or anything but directly at you. The ads which focussed on the women despite naked men in them. I pointed out that a lot of things weren’t inherently sexist, but the biased use of things was. We went from ad to ad, pointing it out, looking for things. She’d find some, or bring one to ask me what I thought of it. I complained about the idea of the [whatever] making up your identity — dissolving into makeup, not existing without the right glasses, hidden faces, etc.

A Lacoste ad, she said, wasn’t sexist. And I said no, the first one (a 20s-ish picture of a man jumping) was not. But look at the related, modern one. A woman — but unlike the man, she wasn’t moving. She was just in the air. Men *do*, in ads; women just are.

At dinner, she pointed out a fashion spread. Look, she said, all the men are moving, doing gymnastics, while the women are just watching them. I feel much better about her reading these magazines now.

When I was little, my grandfather used to carry me on his shoulders and walk out into the ocean.

I’m older now, and he’s older (85, I think, this year. 85!) and he has never carried my little sister like that, he barely even goes into the ocean himself anymore, and not chest deep when he does.

But today we were at the pool together, playing with all the inflatable toys (and pool noodles) that were in there. He flipped me over (on lounges) a few times; we dueled with the noodles; I managed to flip him over once, because he spent most of the time cheating by slipping out of the tube whenever I came near. I don’t know when I last played with him like that — years and years, probably. Oh, we tease, and we see each other regularly, but this was better.

It makes me sad, too, watching time fly, knowing that I do not have much longer with him, that my sisters and cousins did not get the same grandparents as I did. (I am the oldest grandchild.) I think of my greatuncle, now 6 years in hospital, unable to remember anything. Give-me-a-kiss-Mort, he called himself. I don’t know who else remembers that. I wish I had seen him more before he got sick, in the earliest parts of his illness. I think of my greataunt, how we used to have the breaking of the fast at her apartment, that it seems like just a few years ago that we stopped, though it’s been more like 12 years. And it makes me sad thinking what the world will be like when I am their age.

I don’t know how this post suddenly turned so melancholy.

My grandparents have been unhappy in the facility they moved to. They chose the cheapest place available (note: they have always been thrifty and thus now have lots of money leftover), and they’re in a 1-bedroom, so one of them sleeps in the living room. I’m not totally sure what all their complaints are, really; I found it horribly depressing when I visited, but at that point they were still happy there. They’re debating between two places, and I assume they’re just waiting for a 2-bedroom to show up in one of them.

My aunt, however, doesn’t want them to move. (Why? Possibility 1: one of the two choices is next door to where she lives. Possibility 2: she’ll inherit less if they do.) So she informed them that she looked it up, and the post office won’t deliver to their new address if they move again, they’d need to pick up their mail every day. Apparently, after you’re 80, you can only do one change of address, then no more. My father gently suggested that perhaps this was a load of bunk, but no, they insisted, my aunt looked it up, it’s true.

Because I have always been nerdy, I have done sudokus for years and years now — they used to be called Number Place (where place is, I assume, a verb), and I never much liked them — too easy. (Now I do the hard ones and also the weird shaped ones.)

About a year ago, my father got into them, which sort of surprised me. My father is a wonderful guy, but logic was never his strong suit. My mother got him a book of all easy ones, but he outgrew those fairly quickly, though at first he liked to do them occasionally to feel confident when he finished it in 2 minutes. He now does them at all levels, and has started doing the ones where they give you the sums of some boxes instead of initial squares.

My mother, on the other hand, though a logical person refused utterly to touch them. No interest! She likes her crossword puzzles and that is it. But one day my father got stuck on one of the sum ones, and I wasn’t there, so my mother took it and solved it and now she has started doing the normal ones (which she finds harder, oddly), though she is still on the easiest ones. She has weird solving strategies, ones that don’t quite make sense to me — and are probably inefficient, since she is still quite slow at them.

But I haven’t seen her touch a crossword puzzle since.

Is this beer? It’s so much better than wine!

My family is working on the assumption that making alcohol not a big deal, it will make my sister (now 13) uninterested in overindulging. I guess we’ll see if it works in a few years.

And I have no idea what to get him! Last year I turned him from the evils of creationism, but there’s no way I’m going to make him less right-wing in his politics just by buying him a book. I got him tickets to see Four Anglos of the Apocalypse for his birthday, and I got him a Sudoku book for Chanukah. Take him out to [meal]? I never know what to get for him.

This Sunday we are having all the family over for dinner. Which is good, because enough people means I can avoid the ones I would prefer not to see. My uncle will not be there though: his gift to himself is leaving the city so he doesn’t have to see his father.