And I liked it.
It has some pretty standard problems: it's a very white movie which means that the one prominent black character becomes a stand in for all black people which never leads to good things; it tosses around the term "tranny" and treats it as a mark of shame, on the other hand the trans* character is shown to be a good and loyal person so... yeah. It loses points and it gains some and I'm not sure how that evens out (also the one throwing around the term is an ass.) It does not, as I recall, pass the Bechdel test.
Still, repeat it with me, there's nothing wrong with liking problematic things.
Spoilers.
It never really definitively establishes whether magic is real or not, and whether or not "the eye" exists or not.* Did the master planner make them up for his grand scheme or is it a real thing? My personal takeaway is that magic is real. But when one accepts that magic is real then it becomes the case that it's a tool. Like any good magician those getting a hold of it only use it when called for, when smoke an mirrors will do the trick it would be almost sacrilegious for a stage magician to use magic instead. Being a stage magician is all about making use of the tools at your disposal. Psychology, optics, science, technology, if we add magic to that then it becomes another tool in the box, not a replacement for the existing ones. Where slight of hand will work it would be silly to employ actual magic.
I think we see the four on the path beginning to have access to actual magic in smaller ways, and the one who turns out to be leading them using it.
And as an aside to that, I figure the hologram technology used is a melding of mundane technology and actual magic to make something that seems quite sci-fi in a place where everything else that's not explicitly part of a magic trick is at a mundane ordinary technological level.
Anyway, that still doesn't answer whether the eye exists. "Why the fuck not?" is my answer. The leader has devoted his life to a single magic trick, he'd probably qualify for inclusion, and at the end he doesn't send the four off to do whatever, he welcomes them to the eye. Why not take that at face value?
--
[Added:]
* According to something I just read this was resolved, I'll have to watch again to check.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
Guest Post at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings
As the name likely suggests, I have a guest post at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings. The post is looking at the scene where Edward violently pulls Bella across the school parking lot/sidewalk-to-said-parking-lot for no legitimate reason in order to force her into his car rather than let her drive her own truck home.
I wrote about that scene because I think that it's a really good way to see the overall dynamics of Edward and Bella's relationship in a single place and can thus be used to refind your bearings if in the weeds of deconstruction you've lost sight of the bigger picture. The post is therefore called: Twilight: My Touchstone.
So if you're interested in reading my writing, which I assume you are if you're reading this, go there and read that thing. I've linked to it three times, you must do so.
If you can't comment on disqus, or just don't want to, please feel free to comment here.
I wrote about that scene because I think that it's a really good way to see the overall dynamics of Edward and Bella's relationship in a single place and can thus be used to refind your bearings if in the weeds of deconstruction you've lost sight of the bigger picture. The post is therefore called: Twilight: My Touchstone.
So if you're interested in reading my writing, which I assume you are if you're reading this, go there and read that thing. I've linked to it three times, you must do so.
If you can't comment on disqus, or just don't want to, please feel free to comment here.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
MZAT, Part how-the-fuck-should-I-know?: Moving
[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]
Time passed as time does but it was impossible to comprehend or track. It seemed like I'd only been there moments, it felt like I'd been there years. The seconds stretched out, the hours shrank down, the days did both at once. The problem could presumably be solved by looking at my watch, but I wore it palm-side, and my left arm lay limply on the ground, palm down. To see the time I'd have to lift my arm.
Too much effort.
So the time continued to pass at whatever pace it felt like. My eyes were out of focus. The casual observer might think I was staring off into the distance, but the casual observer would be wrong. The asshole. I was staring at nothing.
Perhaps that should have evoked a feeling or two, but I'd long since lost the ability to give a shit. The only thing I could feel was the warmth of Tsukasa's hand in mine. That, at least, was reassuring.
Time passed. It does that.
The bed we were leaning against, the thing keeping us upright and sitting, collapsed. I considered saying, "Shit." I didn't.
Too much effort.
Besides, the collapse hadn't stopped it from keeping us propped in a sitting position, so what did it matter?
Time passed. The bastard.
I was getting somewhat bored, I had to do something, but I didn't have the energy or inclination to do much of anything. I introduced a small rocking into my sitting. It wasn't much. But it was something.
Time... fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck.
And furthermore: fuck.
As time is wont to do.
I'd stopped rocking, it seemed to have lost it's purpose. My left hand had found a new motion. My index finger scratching back and forth across my jeans.
Down with time, we only need three dimensions, damn it.
I'd scratched a hole right through my jeans. Time for something else.
Boredom is.
The silence was broken. I did not catch a word that was spoken. "What?" I asked.
"I have mail," Tsukasa repeated.
"Who from?" I asked.
"Helios," Tsukasa said. He clearly didn't recognize the name.
"Oh." I said.
Time passed.
"He rules the world," I added. It wasn't precisely true, but it was as close to true as possible given the amount of words I was willing to put toward the effort.
"We should..." I said.
Time passed.
"We should probably go," I said.
Time did that thing it fucking always does.
"So..." I said.
Time... you get the God damned idea.
"Going now," I said.
I hate time.
I looked at my watch. I tried to stand up. My body didn't move. I looked back at my watch. Half an hour gone. I tried again, and again, I lacked the motivation necessary to actually move myself. An hour, two, four, four and a half, seven.
Fucking time.
In the end I managed to turn myself around, climb up far enough on the broken bed to get my feet under me. And then stayed there. I tried to get up more, but I couldn't.
"I'm just gonna lay here," I said. And had resigned myself to just that when I felt Tsukasa's hands on me. He helped pull me to a standing position and said, "We're going together."
"Together," I agreed, and took his left hand with my right again. We warped out.
We landed in the cathedral. An artifact of the crossover between reality and the game, Cathedrale de Payens had merged with Hidden Forbidden Holy-place, the scales weren't exactly right and some parts of it felt like the most conservative Tardis in history, and there were various other oddities. More so, I thought, than when I'd last been there.
Bella was waiting for us. She was able to, at least somewhat, break Tsukasa out of his funk with mention of Subaru. True love will apparently do that, at least if you're a fictional character.
Then she turned her attention to me. She explained where we stood. Zombie hordes, a nuclear detonation, sort of business as usual. Nothing too remarkable. She said she'd need my help, I said I'd give it, she didn't seem too pleased with my response.
"I said I'd save the world, what more do you want?" I asked.
"I want you fucking here. I want you to care."
"Would if I could but I can't so I won't. Sorry, this is all you get."
Bella turned around angrily and growled at nothing in particular. Then she spun back to me. Took me by the shoulders, waited a moment to see if I had a problem with her doing so, I didn't give a damn, so then she started in, "The opposite of love is not hate," she said looking me in the eyes.
"It is indifference," I finished.
"The opposite of beauty is not ugliness," she said.
"It is indifference," I finished.
"The opposite of faith is not heresy," she said.
"It is indifference," I finished.
"And the opposite of life is not death," she said.
"But indifference between life and death," I finished.
"So show some bloody difference!"
"I can't," I said.
"No!" she shouted. Then she said, "Sorry. I shouldn't have done that. But the point is sound even if the delivery was problematic. This is not the world you know. There's a knot in time, there's a crossover between a game and reality, there's magic, and monsters. There are zombie hordes and completely safe non-lethal weapons. The border between fact and fiction has been abolished.
"And that means that your depression isn't what it used to be. It can be solved in ways that previously were the stuff of fantasy because fantasy has invaded reality and set up one hell of a beachhead here. You, can stop it, maybe not for good, probably not after we've fixed things, but right here right now in this world where everything is only semi-real... here you can beat this."
"I'll try," I said. And I would, but it was more to humor her than anything else. I would put in real effort, I would really try, but I was convinced it wouldn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Back when things mattered was a long time ago. It seemed a distant memory.
"Good. I need you to try," she said.
-
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
My Zombie Apocalypse Team - Index
Meta parts:
Part Alpha: General thoughts on getting the team together
Part A: Timeline
Story:
Part 1: Boring Exposition
Part 2: First Encounter
--
Part 4ish: Assessing the Underground
--
What to leave in, what to leave out
--
What is love?
--
Traveling back to right what shouldn't go wrong
Talking Time Travel at a gas station
Why we can't go back
--
Part how-the-fuck-should-I-know?: Moving
--
Part ?: Semi-final conversation
Part Alpha: General thoughts on getting the team together
Part A: Timeline
Story:
Part 1: Boring Exposition
Part 2: First Encounter
--
Part 4ish: Assessing the Underground
--
What to leave in, what to leave out
--
What is love?
--
Traveling back to right what shouldn't go wrong
Talking Time Travel at a gas station
Why we can't go back
--
Part how-the-fuck-should-I-know?: Moving
--
Part ?: Semi-final conversation
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Amazon Deal: Farscape on DVD (62% off) and Blu-ray (53% off)
This week's deal is Farscape. Both the complete series on DVD and the complete series on Blu-ray are on sale.
That is all.
That is all.
An accurate transcript of the greatest poem ever written.
It is a source of annoyance for me that the transcripts of the greatest poem ever written all seem to be wrong.
One example is that "and hail" is often replaced by "inhale" the Toxic waste and Ayatollah line gets messed up in all sorts of bizarre ways largely because people can't figure out that the "or" was an "or". (Some people don't even realize it was a conjunction.) So on, so forth, the problems are there left and right.
So, hopefully, this is an accurate transcript:
-
The Greatest Poem Ever Written:
Are You Sure?
Copyright two thousand and ten by the Reverend Sir Doctor Stephen T. Colbert DFA
Did you hear that? No? You're probably going deaf.
It's your kids back home cooking up some crystal meth.
Did you turn off the oven? Did you set the alarm?
They still haven't caught the man with one arm.
Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?
Your car, when you parked, did you lock it?
Thinking reasonably now, what are the odds that nobody here's a pickpocket?
That guy who just coughed down your neck, could he have an infection?
The restaurant where you went to brunch, did it fail its health inspection?
A mad man could set loose a virus for which there isn't a cure.
And while these things may be unlikely, ask yourself: Are you sure?
And can you be sure that you won’t get Ebola from a tainted diet cola,
Toxic waste or getting chased by a bearded Ayatollah?
Funnel clouds and hail, anthrax in the mail.
Your lover will discover your vestigial tail.
Someone's robbing your house.
I can see through your blouse.
Your mother was right, you chose the wrong spouse.
Unlabeled Drano, tornadoes, torpedoes.
The horrible sight of some Guidos in Speedos.
STDs, PCBs, SUVs, UV Light.
A giant pimple on your face, you have a date tonight.
Choking on a biscotti.
Being whacked by John Gotti.
Getting trapped over night in a full port-o-potty.
And I have one final fear to drop in your bucket
About a friend of a friend of a friend of the man from Nantucket:
There once was a man from Eau Claire
Who no one was able to scare.
He wouldn’t join panics
About the Hispanics
And later he was killed by a bear.
True story.
-----
Exactly how to divide up the lines and stanzas is subject to some question, the poem is built on a rhyming couplet base, but it isn't afraid to deviate from it. A very clear example is that it ends with a limerick (AABBA) followed by a single, short, stand alone line that is rhymed with nothing.
The line, "Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?" is rhymed with nothing instead serving as an introduction to the next two couplets.
Some people make "And can you be sure that you won’t get Ebola from a tainted diet cola," into two lines:
which would make "And can you be sure..." an unrhymed line that, like "Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?" serves as an introduction to the following string of couplets.
Two couplets with three rhymed words (Ebola cola / Ayatollah // hail mail / tail) set the stage for the three line rhyming group that follows (house / blouse / spouse) but it opens the question of whether the three rhyme couplets were really intended to be couplets and whether the three line rhyme groups were really intended to be three lines.
One example is that "and hail" is often replaced by "inhale" the Toxic waste and Ayatollah line gets messed up in all sorts of bizarre ways largely because people can't figure out that the "or" was an "or". (Some people don't even realize it was a conjunction.) So on, so forth, the problems are there left and right.
So, hopefully, this is an accurate transcript:
-
The Greatest Poem Ever Written:
Are You Sure?
Copyright two thousand and ten by the Reverend Sir Doctor Stephen T. Colbert DFA
Did you hear that? No? You're probably going deaf.
It's your kids back home cooking up some crystal meth.
Did you turn off the oven? Did you set the alarm?
They still haven't caught the man with one arm.
Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?
Your car, when you parked, did you lock it?
Thinking reasonably now, what are the odds that nobody here's a pickpocket?
That guy who just coughed down your neck, could he have an infection?
The restaurant where you went to brunch, did it fail its health inspection?
A mad man could set loose a virus for which there isn't a cure.
And while these things may be unlikely, ask yourself: Are you sure?
And can you be sure that you won’t get Ebola from a tainted diet cola,
Toxic waste or getting chased by a bearded Ayatollah?
Funnel clouds and hail, anthrax in the mail.
Your lover will discover your vestigial tail.
Someone's robbing your house.
I can see through your blouse.
Your mother was right, you chose the wrong spouse.
Unlabeled Drano, tornadoes, torpedoes.
The horrible sight of some Guidos in Speedos.
STDs, PCBs, SUVs, UV Light.
A giant pimple on your face, you have a date tonight.
Choking on a biscotti.
Being whacked by John Gotti.
Getting trapped over night in a full port-o-potty.
And I have one final fear to drop in your bucket
About a friend of a friend of a friend of the man from Nantucket:
There once was a man from Eau Claire
Who no one was able to scare.
He wouldn’t join panics
About the Hispanics
And later he was killed by a bear.
True story.
Exactly how to divide up the lines and stanzas is subject to some question, the poem is built on a rhyming couplet base, but it isn't afraid to deviate from it. A very clear example is that it ends with a limerick (AABBA) followed by a single, short, stand alone line that is rhymed with nothing.
The line, "Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?" is rhymed with nothing instead serving as an introduction to the next two couplets.
Some people make "And can you be sure that you won’t get Ebola from a tainted diet cola," into two lines:
And can you be sure...
That you won't get Ebola from a tainted diet cola
which would make "And can you be sure..." an unrhymed line that, like "Look around at these people. How safe do you feel?" serves as an introduction to the following string of couplets.
Two couplets with three rhymed words (Ebola cola / Ayatollah // hail mail / tail) set the stage for the three line rhyming group that follows (house / blouse / spouse) but it opens the question of whether the three rhyme couplets were really intended to be couplets and whether the three line rhyme groups were really intended to be three lines.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
I want something new as the most recent post (and apparently need to vent a lot)
Mostly I just don't want the first thing one sees on the blog to be announcing a sale that ended yesterday.
In my life... things suck. Yeah, more venting. If you can't deal with that right now, don't read. I understand completely.
Still dealing with my sister, and I just got a call (on the answering machine, I didn't have time to answer and wouldn't have if I did) from my aunt who co-owns the property my sister is at with my mother. The call was claiming that, after saying she would again and again for years now and utterly failing to come through every single time, she wants to get together with my mother and go through her parents' stuff to divide it.
This is almost certainly because my grandparents stuff is at my grandparents property which is the same property she's currently half-renting to my sister. (My mother being the other person half-renting it to my sister.) Given her stalking habits (when she's not having her eldest daughter break and enter to steal electronics) she's no doubt noticed the activity there and wants to fuck things up.
She loves fucking things up.
The best example is probably the fact that when it looked like the property could peaceably be divided soon after she and my mother inherited it she completely changed what she claimed to want in order to throw a wrench into the proceedings and make sure that what was a win-win became an intractable situation that could only be solved via litigation she knew my mother would not undertake.
That cost her all of the money she was hoping to make on the property, a prospect she was looking into at least as soon as my grandmother's wake. She went from being within reach of getting the land she wanted to break up and sell to spending years not earning a penny until my sister moved in and started paying her rent. (My sister didn't have to pay her rent because by the time my sister moved in my aunt had already established extremely firm rules saying that a daughter could move in and do whatever she wanted no matter how damaging to the property without ever paying a cent. My sister chose to pay rent because of some, in my opinion misplaced, sense of obligation.)
Anyway, she wanted the money she thought she could make badly, and made no secret of that, but in the end it turned out she wanted to hurt my mother more. It wasn't enough for her to get what she wanted, which it turned out my mother was ready to agree with, she had to get what my mother wanted or make sure no one actually got anything.
Which she did, with quite a bit of success. She managed to draw things out incredibly causing a slow financial bleed because, since she's more well off financially than we are, she knew that in the end she could out last my side of the family. The only thing she didn't count on was that the rules she established by, basically, bullying my mother would allow my sister to move in. Would allow my sister to move in indefinitely and free of charge if my sister hadn't decided to sign a rental agreement with my aunt of her own free will. At her own suggestion. (I maintain that this was a fucking stupid move because it means that my sister has an unnecessary financial drain monthly and means that my aunt has an agreement that, if violated, would give my aunt the power to evict my sister.)
I've previously mentioned how, under my aunt's oversight, the property became the heroin dealing --not using, dealing-- capital of the town it's in. I've mentioned how she kicked her daughter out of said property shortly before Christmas. I've talked about how winter in Maine is cold and unforgiving and suddenly becoming homeless in December could have amounted to a death sentence for said daughter. I've talked about how this was part of a plan on her part to force her daughter to come crawling to her (December in Texas isn't nearly so cold) so that she might control every aspect of said daughter's life (the offer to give the daughter free passage to Texas was already premised on her daughter breaking up with then-current boyfriend, and that was supposed to be just the start.) I've also mentioned how the plan didn't work because the daughter never left Maine.
What I don't remember if I mentioned, and I'm not going to look up, is that the exact timing of the kicking out of her daughter wasn't based on her choice. (The ideal time for her plans to work would have been early in the next year, which is even colder than December.) The exact timing was, and this only came out well after the fact, determined by a deal with the police to get my aunt out of any legal problems the whole heroin dealing capital thing might have caused. The police wanted the heroin problem to go the fuck away, and to them it was easier to do it by emptying the house than by actually making arrests. (This does not speak well of the police, but that's another story.) So the deal was struck that if my aunt got the house to be empty by the police's deadline there would be no legal repercussions to what had gone down there before. My understanding is that the police got what they wanted. When the safe harbor for dealing closed things largely migrated into a different jurisdiction.
So, there's that.
After that the house was empty which would have been fine except my aunt didn't want it to be fine and used a willingness to help cute animals on the part of my mother to make it not fine. Who could refuse, "Listen, these two cats need a place to stay for just a little while while things are rearranged and since we've got an empty house do you thing they could stay there? Please..." *puppy dog eyes*? And who would think to ask, "You're going to give them a litter box, right?" I mean, she had a litter box, we all knew she had a litter box, why would anyone think she might decide to lock the cats in the house with food and water while specifically making sure not to put in a litter box?
By the time we figured out what she was actually up to (and the fact that her supposed reasons for keeping the cats there were total bullshit) the entire house was doused in urine. Every fucking room.
She'd made a deal with the police that, for the moment at least, her family wasn't going to be in it. And if she couldn't have it, well covering it in urine was apparently plan A. She'd get to later letters of the alphabet afterward.
Who the fuck intentionally douses a house they own half of in urine? My aunt, that's who.
She didn't even need to do that much. All she had to do was keep the cats fed and watered while withholding the litter box. Of course by the time we found out what she was doing it was hard to breathe in the house, so giving the cats food and water probably involved a fair amount of personal discomfort towards the end, but she's always been willing to put up with personal discomfort if it could hurt someone else.
Then there's the little things, like illegally taking what she claimed was an equal half of my grandfather's tools with nothing more than a note to my mother saying that what was left was totally the same as the stuff she took without allowing anyone to see it to check if it was the same. (And moreover she and my mother hadn't inherited the property yet so even if they had gotten together, divided up the tools in a way both agreed was equitable, and had her take her "half" that way it still wouldn't be legal. The estate was still in probate. It was stealing no matter what.) That's not the thing. That's the set up. The thing is when, after waiting a while, she claimed she had no memory of the whole thing, and tried to get half of what was left. (For those counting, even if her original theft really was merely half, her full plan would still leave her with three times as much as my mother when she was supposed to get exactly equal.)
Or there was when she claimed that my father wasn't related to my sister and I. Even if he somehow had no genetic link, he's still the one who raised us meaning... she seriously should not have made that claim in front of her two adopted daughters. Of course this was after the whole thing where she tried to force one of them to choose between obeying her every whim and freezing to death, so any illusion of love was probably already dead at that point.
And just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse regarding the bullshit I have to put up with with my sister, this is person who has decided to interject herself into the situation.
The worst part is that she gets away with everything. If you want to have any belief that there's justice in this world crushed, talk to me some time about all of the laws she's broken, then ask me how much time she's spent in jail (none) and how much she'd had to pay in fines (nothing). Even when she's not breaking laws she tends to be doing something somehow bad.
Her career until she retired was as an ESL teacher certified by the French government to teach English to French children. To get that certification, I'm told, she had to know English grammar better than most native speakers. That fact, and the fact that she is someone with English as a first language, didn't stop her from managing to forget even the most basic aspects of English grammar and keep on teaching French children something that she claimed was English.
Now put aside for a moment the dishonesty of teaching English as a profession when you don't actually know English. Keep in mind that presumably her students went on to another teacher after her who would undo the damage she had done. Even then, there is the inevitable truth that every student who passed through one of her classes would have to unlearn what she had taught them and then play catch up just to get to the place they were supposed to have already been.
I've had some horrendously bad teachers, and I know the damage that they can do, but I've never had one who knew their subject matter as little as my aunt knew hers.
I feel very sorry for all the children, most of them now adults, who went through her class even though I've never met any of them. I can only hope that the textbook they used was very, very good to offset their instructor's lack of knowledge in the area she was meant to be teaching.
In the end the simple truth of her character seems to be this: when she isn't making things bad through one of her annoying, damaging, spiteful, never-ending schemes she seems to still manage to do damage by a callous refusal to give a damn.
Her grasp of the English language is proof enough of that. She now lives full time in an English speaking country. In fact, two of her three houses (not counting the half of my grandparent's property she owns) are in the USA. But for most of my life that wasn't the case and so it's not surprising that someone living in the various places she's lived might see their English atrophy. What is surprising is that an English teacher would see their English atrophy because an English teacher is expected to care about teaching English. She, apparently, didn't.
And now I can add dealing with her to my pre-existing problems. I, along with the rest of my family, am on her list of people to actively try to destroy. She's been trying to gaslight me since I was in high school and actively slandering me for at least as long. She's the person who, when my father saved her mother's life, said that she wished it hadn't happened. Yes, she said that she wished her mother, my grandmother, was dead. And when she finally got that wish things just went downhill from there.
She's also the person who announced the upcoming birth of her grandson by calling him a problem. And the one who tried to disrupt a devout Catholic's funeral by making a show of guffawing every time God was mentioned. That devout Catholic? The mother she made no secret of wishing dead.
She tries to hurt people I care about, and that includes her own daughters when it suits her purposes. I really, truly, intensely dislike this person. It shouldn't be possible for me to love someone more than her own mother. It just shouldn't be possible. Equally, sure. But more? And yet, I love my cousins. She treats them as possessions whose free will is an annoying flaw to be punished. And for that, and many, many other things, I hate her. Most of the time when I use that word it's hyperbole. Hate is an incredibly strong emotion and not something that I'm really given to feeling. With her it's not hyperbole. I do, in fact, hate her.
That annoys me. It's frustrating to know that she has such a strong emotional force on me, but to her I'm nothing. Yes, I'm on her shit list, but so is someone who was insufficiently kind to her in the second grade. Her shit list is vast. She cares about me enough to put some effort toward damaging me, but that doesn't seem to be very much. She just has an extremely low threshold for how much she has to dislike someone before she puts an effort into destroying them. In fact, there's a decent chance that she doesn't care about me at all and when she tries to hurt me it's part of her efforts to hurt my mother by proxy. It's a very one sided fight since my mother has no desire to hurt my aunt and no idea why my aunt wants to hurt her.
And so there's this massive imbalance. I have a great deal of emotional investment in her because hate requires that --hate is that-- she probably sees me as a tool that she doesn't give a shit about but is simply using to do something to someone else.
If I could magically stop hating her I don't know if I would. On the one hand I don't like the power she has over my emotions. On the other hand, given that she more or less constantly hurts people I love (both intentionally and via not caring about them when she should), hate seems a rather appropriate emotion. Something that is deserved.
I can imagine forgiving her, but before that could happen she'd need to change on an extraordinary level and she's never shown a capacity for change in my memory.
In my life... things suck. Yeah, more venting. If you can't deal with that right now, don't read. I understand completely.
Still dealing with my sister, and I just got a call (on the answering machine, I didn't have time to answer and wouldn't have if I did) from my aunt who co-owns the property my sister is at with my mother. The call was claiming that, after saying she would again and again for years now and utterly failing to come through every single time, she wants to get together with my mother and go through her parents' stuff to divide it.
This is almost certainly because my grandparents stuff is at my grandparents property which is the same property she's currently half-renting to my sister. (My mother being the other person half-renting it to my sister.) Given her stalking habits (when she's not having her eldest daughter break and enter to steal electronics) she's no doubt noticed the activity there and wants to fuck things up.
She loves fucking things up.
The best example is probably the fact that when it looked like the property could peaceably be divided soon after she and my mother inherited it she completely changed what she claimed to want in order to throw a wrench into the proceedings and make sure that what was a win-win became an intractable situation that could only be solved via litigation she knew my mother would not undertake.
That cost her all of the money she was hoping to make on the property, a prospect she was looking into at least as soon as my grandmother's wake. She went from being within reach of getting the land she wanted to break up and sell to spending years not earning a penny until my sister moved in and started paying her rent. (My sister didn't have to pay her rent because by the time my sister moved in my aunt had already established extremely firm rules saying that a daughter could move in and do whatever she wanted no matter how damaging to the property without ever paying a cent. My sister chose to pay rent because of some, in my opinion misplaced, sense of obligation.)
Anyway, she wanted the money she thought she could make badly, and made no secret of that, but in the end it turned out she wanted to hurt my mother more. It wasn't enough for her to get what she wanted, which it turned out my mother was ready to agree with, she had to get what my mother wanted or make sure no one actually got anything.
Which she did, with quite a bit of success. She managed to draw things out incredibly causing a slow financial bleed because, since she's more well off financially than we are, she knew that in the end she could out last my side of the family. The only thing she didn't count on was that the rules she established by, basically, bullying my mother would allow my sister to move in. Would allow my sister to move in indefinitely and free of charge if my sister hadn't decided to sign a rental agreement with my aunt of her own free will. At her own suggestion. (I maintain that this was a fucking stupid move because it means that my sister has an unnecessary financial drain monthly and means that my aunt has an agreement that, if violated, would give my aunt the power to evict my sister.)
I've previously mentioned how, under my aunt's oversight, the property became the heroin dealing --not using, dealing-- capital of the town it's in. I've mentioned how she kicked her daughter out of said property shortly before Christmas. I've talked about how winter in Maine is cold and unforgiving and suddenly becoming homeless in December could have amounted to a death sentence for said daughter. I've talked about how this was part of a plan on her part to force her daughter to come crawling to her (December in Texas isn't nearly so cold) so that she might control every aspect of said daughter's life (the offer to give the daughter free passage to Texas was already premised on her daughter breaking up with then-current boyfriend, and that was supposed to be just the start.) I've also mentioned how the plan didn't work because the daughter never left Maine.
What I don't remember if I mentioned, and I'm not going to look up, is that the exact timing of the kicking out of her daughter wasn't based on her choice. (The ideal time for her plans to work would have been early in the next year, which is even colder than December.) The exact timing was, and this only came out well after the fact, determined by a deal with the police to get my aunt out of any legal problems the whole heroin dealing capital thing might have caused. The police wanted the heroin problem to go the fuck away, and to them it was easier to do it by emptying the house than by actually making arrests. (This does not speak well of the police, but that's another story.) So the deal was struck that if my aunt got the house to be empty by the police's deadline there would be no legal repercussions to what had gone down there before. My understanding is that the police got what they wanted. When the safe harbor for dealing closed things largely migrated into a different jurisdiction.
So, there's that.
After that the house was empty which would have been fine except my aunt didn't want it to be fine and used a willingness to help cute animals on the part of my mother to make it not fine. Who could refuse, "Listen, these two cats need a place to stay for just a little while while things are rearranged and since we've got an empty house do you thing they could stay there? Please..." *puppy dog eyes*? And who would think to ask, "You're going to give them a litter box, right?" I mean, she had a litter box, we all knew she had a litter box, why would anyone think she might decide to lock the cats in the house with food and water while specifically making sure not to put in a litter box?
By the time we figured out what she was actually up to (and the fact that her supposed reasons for keeping the cats there were total bullshit) the entire house was doused in urine. Every fucking room.
She'd made a deal with the police that, for the moment at least, her family wasn't going to be in it. And if she couldn't have it, well covering it in urine was apparently plan A. She'd get to later letters of the alphabet afterward.
Who the fuck intentionally douses a house they own half of in urine? My aunt, that's who.
She didn't even need to do that much. All she had to do was keep the cats fed and watered while withholding the litter box. Of course by the time we found out what she was doing it was hard to breathe in the house, so giving the cats food and water probably involved a fair amount of personal discomfort towards the end, but she's always been willing to put up with personal discomfort if it could hurt someone else.
Then there's the little things, like illegally taking what she claimed was an equal half of my grandfather's tools with nothing more than a note to my mother saying that what was left was totally the same as the stuff she took without allowing anyone to see it to check if it was the same. (And moreover she and my mother hadn't inherited the property yet so even if they had gotten together, divided up the tools in a way both agreed was equitable, and had her take her "half" that way it still wouldn't be legal. The estate was still in probate. It was stealing no matter what.) That's not the thing. That's the set up. The thing is when, after waiting a while, she claimed she had no memory of the whole thing, and tried to get half of what was left. (For those counting, even if her original theft really was merely half, her full plan would still leave her with three times as much as my mother when she was supposed to get exactly equal.)
Or there was when she claimed that my father wasn't related to my sister and I. Even if he somehow had no genetic link, he's still the one who raised us meaning... she seriously should not have made that claim in front of her two adopted daughters. Of course this was after the whole thing where she tried to force one of them to choose between obeying her every whim and freezing to death, so any illusion of love was probably already dead at that point.
And just when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse regarding the bullshit I have to put up with with my sister, this is person who has decided to interject herself into the situation.
The worst part is that she gets away with everything. If you want to have any belief that there's justice in this world crushed, talk to me some time about all of the laws she's broken, then ask me how much time she's spent in jail (none) and how much she'd had to pay in fines (nothing). Even when she's not breaking laws she tends to be doing something somehow bad.
Her career until she retired was as an ESL teacher certified by the French government to teach English to French children. To get that certification, I'm told, she had to know English grammar better than most native speakers. That fact, and the fact that she is someone with English as a first language, didn't stop her from managing to forget even the most basic aspects of English grammar and keep on teaching French children something that she claimed was English.
Now put aside for a moment the dishonesty of teaching English as a profession when you don't actually know English. Keep in mind that presumably her students went on to another teacher after her who would undo the damage she had done. Even then, there is the inevitable truth that every student who passed through one of her classes would have to unlearn what she had taught them and then play catch up just to get to the place they were supposed to have already been.
I've had some horrendously bad teachers, and I know the damage that they can do, but I've never had one who knew their subject matter as little as my aunt knew hers.
I feel very sorry for all the children, most of them now adults, who went through her class even though I've never met any of them. I can only hope that the textbook they used was very, very good to offset their instructor's lack of knowledge in the area she was meant to be teaching.
In the end the simple truth of her character seems to be this: when she isn't making things bad through one of her annoying, damaging, spiteful, never-ending schemes she seems to still manage to do damage by a callous refusal to give a damn.
Her grasp of the English language is proof enough of that. She now lives full time in an English speaking country. In fact, two of her three houses (not counting the half of my grandparent's property she owns) are in the USA. But for most of my life that wasn't the case and so it's not surprising that someone living in the various places she's lived might see their English atrophy. What is surprising is that an English teacher would see their English atrophy because an English teacher is expected to care about teaching English. She, apparently, didn't.
And now I can add dealing with her to my pre-existing problems. I, along with the rest of my family, am on her list of people to actively try to destroy. She's been trying to gaslight me since I was in high school and actively slandering me for at least as long. She's the person who, when my father saved her mother's life, said that she wished it hadn't happened. Yes, she said that she wished her mother, my grandmother, was dead. And when she finally got that wish things just went downhill from there.
She's also the person who announced the upcoming birth of her grandson by calling him a problem. And the one who tried to disrupt a devout Catholic's funeral by making a show of guffawing every time God was mentioned. That devout Catholic? The mother she made no secret of wishing dead.
She tries to hurt people I care about, and that includes her own daughters when it suits her purposes. I really, truly, intensely dislike this person. It shouldn't be possible for me to love someone more than her own mother. It just shouldn't be possible. Equally, sure. But more? And yet, I love my cousins. She treats them as possessions whose free will is an annoying flaw to be punished. And for that, and many, many other things, I hate her. Most of the time when I use that word it's hyperbole. Hate is an incredibly strong emotion and not something that I'm really given to feeling. With her it's not hyperbole. I do, in fact, hate her.
That annoys me. It's frustrating to know that she has such a strong emotional force on me, but to her I'm nothing. Yes, I'm on her shit list, but so is someone who was insufficiently kind to her in the second grade. Her shit list is vast. She cares about me enough to put some effort toward damaging me, but that doesn't seem to be very much. She just has an extremely low threshold for how much she has to dislike someone before she puts an effort into destroying them. In fact, there's a decent chance that she doesn't care about me at all and when she tries to hurt me it's part of her efforts to hurt my mother by proxy. It's a very one sided fight since my mother has no desire to hurt my aunt and no idea why my aunt wants to hurt her.
And so there's this massive imbalance. I have a great deal of emotional investment in her because hate requires that --hate is that-- she probably sees me as a tool that she doesn't give a shit about but is simply using to do something to someone else.
If I could magically stop hating her I don't know if I would. On the one hand I don't like the power she has over my emotions. On the other hand, given that she more or less constantly hurts people I love (both intentionally and via not caring about them when she should), hate seems a rather appropriate emotion. Something that is deserved.
I can imagine forgiving her, but before that could happen she'd need to change on an extraordinary level and she's never shown a capacity for change in my memory.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)