Family is Hell

No progress on the DVD review project from prior posts. I've gained some ground on the sleep front, but now I'm getting these unpredictable fits of intense fatigue. I thought maybe I was forgetting to eat again. There aren't any good, obvious landmarks during the night to let you know when you should be getting lunch or whatever. So I get doing things and forget.

I tried to eat into one of these times, but it didn't really help. I guess I'm going to have to start huffing caffeine or something. I could try sleeping pills and caffeine pills simultaneously. I bet that would be exciting. Isn't that how Elvis died, passed out on the toilet and suffocated in shag carpet?

My cousin Kim called a few days ago and she really, really wanted to talk about some documentary about 1968. I haven't talked to her in like a year, and it hadn't been long enough. My cousin used to be interesting, but about a year before the accident she went crazy for Jesus. She went from being bright and quick to being plodding and rigid. You can see it just looking at her. It's like the church sucked all the life out of her body. She actually told me last year when we talked, inside of about ninety seconds, both that morality is absolute black and white and that it's full of gray. She didn't notice it either. That's what I'm talking about.

I guess that's not really why I can't stand her. I can't stand her because she decided to tell me at the funeral that I'd better get right with the Lord or I would end up burning forever in Hell. She tells me this while looking at my parents' bodies with this kind of smug insistent look on her face. I called her a sick pervert and told her to get out. Then suddenly this is a time for the family. She wasn't going. So I bailed.

Or that's what I would have done if it wasn't the middle of the afternoon and I had a car. Instead, since I didn't have a car and my ride was in my aunt's minivan, I got to sit through this. That aunt is Kim's mother. I should have thrown something, or whatever. But I needed the minivan because it was wide enough that I could lay down in the back seat and put a blanket over myself if the sun got bad. On the way home, she says she wants to adopt me. I don't think so.

But I didn't try to cut her head off, so Kim apparently thinks I got over this. She calls me at 8:30. That has to be an accident, because I'm awake. No one in my family remembers I sleep all day. Ever. Kim wants to know what I think of this History Channel documentary on 1968, which I have not seen because I haven't watched the History Channel in five or six years. She tells me -Kim is like this, she actually told me like it was an assignment for one of the kids at the unaccredited private school she teaches at- to go online and find out when it's rerunning so I can watch it and tell her what I think. She'll be calling back. I tried not answering my phone once, but she came over unannounced, during daylight, the last time I did that. She thought I "did something awful".

So the fastest way to get rid of her is to endure a three hour telephone conversation where she rants about how dirty hippies and feminists destroyed America. I programmed the History Channel back into my TV and caught about an hour tonight. I think I know what Kim is going to want to talk about. Right after Robert Kennedy gets shot, the show goes from talking about drugs, music, and protests into letting a bunch of guys who worked on the Nixon campaign and write for the Wall Street Journal lay into the whole decade for being the product of lazy, dirty, destructive hippies.

Kim's probably going to start with asking me to think about how undermining the foundation of the family (Mom: MA in History) has led to ruin. She'll make these leading questions about how people -she's not going to come out and say me that early- need to turn to Christ and faithfully accept his word and will or whatever. If I hang up, she'll call back. If I don't answer, she'll eventually show up. She might even bring friends from church. She's threatened that before. Sometimes she shows up even if I answer. Kim really wants a fight. She thinks when I argue with her I'm at some kind of crisis point where my heart might open up or something and she needs to be there to plant a seed. The fact that Kim's pissing me off means she's forced me open a sliver and deep down inside, I know she's right. My pride is just keeping me from submitting.

It would be funny if she wasn't absolutely serious. That's really how she thinks.

By the way, she's always talking about how women should lovingly submit to their husbands and how she wants to do that. Kim's never managed to get hitched, though. Not even to a nice Christian boy who believes all this stuff about women submitting. Especially not to one of those. She also wants to be a missionary, but somehow never finds it in herself to save up for a plane ticket or prevail on her church which does actually have a fund for that kind of thing.

When she does call back, she's going to want to know why I'm not showing up at any family gatherings. Apparently sitting in a corner glaring and not speaking is how people in Kim's universe show they're having fun.