He's a sociopath.

He hates his mother, and his step-mother, the latter because she favored his half-brother over him. He's talked several times about his hatred for his mother.

He must be on something - always jerking, randomly making weird noises, saying things and then forgetting what he's saying. He's admitted he used to "have fun with the bong" a lot, but doesn't anymore, but did spend his lunch hour buying "special ethnic cigarettes" from a sketch area of town.

He says he's trying to quit smoking, but I know he's not. I've been there, that's not what gets me. At the firm, we have a smoking cessation program, where the insurance will pay for things like patches and gum to help someone quit smoking. This guy asked if hynoptism was covered; it's not. He said hypnotism has helped him a lot in the past, especially with his "severe anger problems" that would cause him to lash out at everyone.

And I'm stuck in this room with him every day.

My new coworker is a sociopath.

So I got an LSAT study book! It's actually really cool, and I feel like a total dork for admitting that.

I bought it this weekend, and there are several tests: 2 each of reading comprehension, logic games and logic, and then one final test. They're timed, and each are 35ish minutes.

I've done the two reading comprehension ones already. The first one I took this weekend, and got 14 right and 13 wrong (ugh). I just took the second and got 16 right and 11 wrong.

Movin' up...

Lots of things happened today, and I'm tired, but I want to remember them, so I'll write in clips.

***

We visited my patenral grandmother, et al. today and heard some good stories about my father and his five siblings. Two of my favorites:

*One of the six broke something in the house (a pretty much daily occurrence) and no one would fess up to who broke it, so my grandmother sent them outside where they had to stand against the side of hte house until someone admitted to it. So when they're standing out there, my dad and his brother (two oldest) convince their sister to say she did it, because she's the good one and won't get a spanking. So she did it, and my dad remembers he and his brother outside listening to her get a spanking.

*My dad and his brother convinced their sister (a different one) that the deaf woman down the street, the one who takes daily walks around the neighborhood, gets angry whenever she sees red. So whenever my aunt wore her favorite red-and-white checkered shirt (frequently) she would hide behind bushes or trees and wait for the woman to pass.

***

My sister and I saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" tonight at the new movie theater uptown. The movie was good, a little slow towards the end and a little long (2:47), but creative and good. The movie theater was freaking awesome. They're trying to make downtown a lot more livelier and better for the younger yuppies, I guess, and have opened a lot of new clubs and places within a few-block radius. I'm actually excited about it, and will have to come back and try everything out.

I saw the movie with my sister, who coughed the whole time. I admit that there are some things that I'm type A personality about - being on time for instance (which is why I'm almost always at least 45 minutes early for volleyball practice and have to drive around for a while). Movies are another thing. I can take some talking, some cell phones going off, but only so much. So when my sister begins coughing every three-to-six seconds during one of the most significant scenes in the movie, I get a little type A and let her know it. So she's pissed at me.

As we're walking to the car after the movie, she makes a comment that the only people she sees in downtown are "unattractive girls." And she follows the statement with this little laugh, though it's not really a laugh - just a little noise thing that is supposed to make her look like less of a bitch when she says something mean, almost as if she's adding the little laugh as a way for her to cop out with a "just kidding" if the person she's speaking to gets offended.

I've noticed this about her. She's become this person who's so critical, especially of other women and their looks, and I don't even want to be around her because it's like there's this big negative force around her. It used to be that she'd just ignore everyone and scowl, which she'll still do occasionally, but my god. I didn't think it was possible for more bitchiness to come out of her personality, but now...

I did point out a pile of puke on the sidewalk, though, which grossed her out and made me laugh, for some reason.

***

There's something strangely painful about being justifiably left out of certain things, but then feeling a bitter nostalgia. I saw a picture today of an old friend and his fiance, one of the first I've seen since the engagement, and it's sad to think that I'll probably never meet her, and that they're a beautiful couple but...but what? I don't know. It's not like I ever did what I could to keep up with him. To be honest, I've been a pretty shitty friend in the past. Something else to work on.

***

I spoke with my uncle (the cool one who works in the Pentagon, who works in MY CITY) yesterday and he asked what I was waiting for. Goooood question. As of now, my plan is to get engaged, get married and have cute babies and a house with a yard for my future dog. But in terms of my career? Fuck no I don't have a plan.

So I thought about it and about what's important to me that I can make a career out of. I decided that the ideal situation would be to become a homicide detective and work part-time as a pastry chef. Obviously, neither is practical.

But, I can do something about it. So I'm going to try and take classes to get paralegal certification, and maybe a few fun baking classes. I can't get into law school with my undergrad GPA - not sure I even want to go to law school yet, but if I ever decide to do it, the paralegal certification could help me out. Hopefully I can then work my way into either a criminal defense firm (I used to tell myself that I never would, but the more I've thought about it, the more I realize that the judicial system only works if both sides are adequately represented) or a prosecution position. We'll have to see.

***

I go back home tomorrow, and back to work Monday. Both have good and bad aspects. Though I think knowing that I'll be moving towards something in my life will make things a bit better. :) The holidays are over and I barely even noticed they were here. I might like that better.

She Saw No Contradiction

Just a brief blog - I woke up this morning and read the news that Israeli F-16 bombers have killed at least 155 people in the Gaza Strip, most likely all of whom are Palestinian.

The Israeli-Palestinian crisis has always been a bit too in depth for me to fully grasp, but I've tried, and with a Palestinian friend, I've gotten the general idea of both sides.

It's a terrible situation (duh) but one I can't understand, in terms of the motivations for the violence. The creation of Israel was questionable, I believe, not that we can go back in time and change it. But, and I know I sound terrible saying this, I would have expected more from the people who "gained" Israel, considering why they did.

It reminds me of a news article I read while researching Apartheid for one of my literature classes: "Brothers in Arms - Israel's Secret Pact with Pretoria." In the second part, the author begins:

Several years ago in Johannesburg I met a Jewish woman whose mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz. After their deaths, she was forced into a gas chamber, but by some miracle that bout of killing was called off. Vera Reitzer survived the extermination camp, married soon after the war and moved to South Africa.

Reitzer joined the apartheid Nationalist party (NP) in the early 1950s, at about the time that the new prime minister, DF Malan, was introducing legislation reminiscent of Hitler's Nuremberg laws against Jews: the population registration act that classified South Africans according to race, legislation that forbade sex and marriage across the colour line and laws barring black people from many jobs.

Reitzer saw no contradiction in surviving the Holocaust only to sign up for a system that was disturbingly reminiscent in its underpinning philosophy, if not in the scale of its crimes, as the one she had outlived. She vigorously defended apartheid as a necessary bulwark against black domination and the communism that engulfed her native Yugoslavia. Reitzer let slip that she thought Africans inferior to other human beings and not entitled to be treated as equals. I asked if Hitler hadn't said the same thing about her as a Jew. She called a halt to the conversation.

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg, working for the Holocaust survivors association, while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

Many Israelis recoil at suggestions that their country, risen from the ashes of genocide and built on Jewish ideals, could be compared to a racist regime. Yet for years the bulk of South Africa's Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefited and thrived under its protection, even if some of their number figured prominently in the liberation movements. In time, Israeli governments too set aside objections to a regime whose leaders had once been admirers of Adolf Hitler. Within three decades of its birth, Israel's self-proclaimed "purity of arms" - what it describes as the moral superiority of its soldiers - was secretly sacrificed as the fate of the Jewish state became so intertwined with South Africa that the Israeli security establishment came to believe the relationship saved the Jewish state.

I know that's a long quote, but it's worth reading, as is the rest of the article. This is one of the many concepts that I don't think I'll understand, and it's frustrating.

In other news, off to visit my paternal grandmother in the country. I get to see kittens. :)

Yep, today was a weird day.

Well, okay, some background - last week, my brother (you know, the one who had a heart attack in his twenties) was beat up by two guys. To save a long boring history lesson - my mother's relationship with my brother is frustrating. He takes advantage of her, both economically and however else he can, and she won't listen to anyone who tries to even just reason with her. My father has stopped trying.

Basically, my brother is my mother's project, the one thing she'll pour everything into to try and mold him into the person that both she and society accepts as a "normal" person. He's far from it, and she won't stop trying. Every once in a while I'll be like, "Hey, sure, what the hell, he's not too bad a guy," but then he'll act like he always does and everything will go back to the way it was.

So anyways, ever since he got beat up, my mother's been so on edge that we're all walking on eggshells. I didn't think she was serious when she yelled at me for laughing today, but yeah, she was. And it's gotten my father all on edge, too.

I went with her to drop off Christmas presents for my brother's ex-girlfriend's daughter (another story), and we were in the neighborhood where my brother was beat up. As she was walking back to the car I was sitting in waiting on her, I unlocked the doors, and she yelled at me because she thought she already did it, or something. And then immediatly called my brother to ask him what kind of car the guys who beat him up drive. She said that every person she sees, she just wonders if "that's one of them."

I guess I just don't really get it. My brother's fine, aside from a broken finger and hurt eye. And now, a week later, she's still acting kind of crazy, and is almost acting like the mother I met who lost her son in a gang fight - she never found out who did it and always questions it. I don't know, I'm not my mother, but I feel like she may be taking it too far.

But the again, this is my mother, and she's always dropped everything in her life to help my brother become the person he is - a border-line unemployed pot addict.

Phew, I'm feeling a little better now. I think it's more that I'm in my room and can finally breathe. But tomorrow is another day, which will hopefully be a better one.

Oh Christmas...

I saw my first dead body today.

No, it wasn't ER's. It was SW's, a 90-year-old woman who just died from old age issues, and who is apparently my grandmother's cousin. My mother was attending ER's funeral, and my grandmother needed someone to go with her to SW's wake, so I figured I could go.

Neither of us expected for there to be an open casket. She had on too much makeup, and looked waxy. I was freaked out at first, and then was a little intrigued. I wanted to touch her and see what a dead person's skin felt like, but figured that was a bad idea. Instead I just stared.

Another death.

It was good to spend time with my grandmother though. While we were eating dinner (before the dead body), my grandmother stopped at one point, as if she remembered something, and asked me what "m f" stands for.

"It's mother fucker, right?"

All I could really do was nod and laugh. If you knew my grandmother, you'd understand why it's funny.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I'm such a grinch. I don't even care. But I am excited about the gift I bought for my parents - one of those vhs to dvd recorder things, so they can transfer all the tapes from when my sister and I were kids onto a DVD. I know my father will really like it. Plus I'll get to see the video of me when I was a kid trying to do a somersault.

Will it ever feel like Christmas again?

Even If You Cannot Hear My Voice, I'll Be Right Beside You Dear

There's nothing quite as sobering as death. It's one of the few concepts I'm genuinely obsessed with, one of the few that I think about and try to understand at least several times a day. It could be because my job deals with injuries and, unfortunately, death is one ideal for us. But I've had this infatuation, obsession, since I was 12.

I remember riding in my parents' old Dodge Caravan, the one that broke down every six months, when the concept of death hit me for the first time. I don't remember why I was thinking of it, but I remember that it was truly frightening for me.

"Death is scary," I said in the middle of my daydream. My father was sitting in the driver's seat and was quiet, and my sister in the front passenger seat gave her signature "what the fuck is wrong with you" scoff. "Because when you die, you can't think or anything."

"No duh, that's what dead means," my sister said.

My father cleared his throat and said, "It is scary."

It's a small conversation that I think about often, whenever my menopausal mother says she won't be around to see me get old and bitchy, or whenever we get bad news. I regret remembering the conversation, in part because it marked the beginning of my obsession, and in part because I know my father fears death as much as I do, which is something that truly saddens me, and is something that I know will make his inevitable death much harder to accept.

This reflection of my obsession was brought on by bad news. In July I saw a Facebook group one of my friends joined, called Pray for ER. Groups about praying for people catch my attention because of my beliefs, and this one did in particular because we shared a name.

I read the group description and learned ER was attending my old high school. Several days before, she went to the doctor for a sore throat, and within a week or two was diagnosed with leukemia. I called my mother, who currently works at my old high school, and found out ER was a student of hers.

To give some background, my mother is inspirational in her determination to better the lives of anyone she can, to put aside her needs in hopes of helping others reach their full potential. I got my listening skills from my mother, which works well because we can both call each other at times of frustration and each feel better at the end of the conversation.

Because of this, it wasn't surprising for me to hear the honest sadness in her voice upon learning about ER's condition. I'll be truthful and say that I nearly dismissed the situation; this isn't the first time I've known someone facing the struggle with a disease. But something about this situation was different.

I followed ER's CaringBridge journal, reading the ups and downs of the treatments and her progression. I watched the local news segments that focused on her fight and that covered the candlelight vigils held outside of the school.

In September I went with my mother to drop off Greek pastries for her at the hospital, and the nurse said she was doing well. Even now I get that compulsory feeling of apprehension and incapability I felt while walking down the wing of the children's cancer ward.

Forty-five days ago she underwent a bone marrow transplant and would have to stay in the hospital for 100 days for monitoring. The 100 days are amazingly significant, and if something goes wrong in this period...well, it's bad.

On November 30, her mother posted to her online journal that the bone marrow transplant was a success. The excitement and relief in her mother's writing was obvious and deserved:

When Amy told her that yesterday, she burst into tears of joy and exclaimed "It's a miracle!" While this may be too expected and medically possible to technically be a miracle, it is a HUGE BLESSING. So you'll just have to forgive E and us if we don't use the word properly.

On December 11, day 35, her mother posted that it had been five months since Emily was diagnosed with AML. The doctor had given some good and bad news, but the family was optimistic and asking for prayers.

Day 37, December 13, was a great day.

Day 41, December 17, was a bad day. The blood flow to Emily's spleen reversed, meaning the treatment wasn't succeeding, and there were no further options.

Yesterday, December 20, day 44, Emily died. They said she died peacefully and without pain less than 6 months after the diagnosis.

For the family, and for her friends, they're all comforted by the fact that she was a child of God and that she's with him now. I'm very happy for their relief and I hope that their faith helps them through this.

To me, though, it's upsetting, because there are terrible, horrible people who don't deserve the chances they're given, while someone like ER, who by every account was beautiful in all ways, was dealt this card. But, I guess that's why I don't make the decisions about life or death.

I don't really have anymore to say. As I told Barefoot, my blog is my therapist, and I've gotten out what I needed to in order to move on. "Move on" maybe isn't the right phrase.

My boyfriend thinks I'm pretty crazy. He doesn't understand how the death of someone I never met can have an impact of me. He's not the only one. To be honest, I don't understand it either. But I like to tell myself that there's a reason for it and I should just accept it, and let it put my life into perspective, and use the lives of others to ensure mine isn't wasted.

Well, we're not going to spend New Years in DC...again. Instead, we'll spend it here, getting drunk and blowing in the breathalyzer I got him for Christmas, listening to Amanda's (aka "I bet my life's more fucked up than yours - want to see") stories while thinking how awesome it would have been being at the monuments at night, and while realizing that he couldn't get past a grudge enough to spend one night in my dream city for the second year in a row. But good news - we'll get to visit DC sometime next year, and we'll be engaged within 6 months to a year.

He asked me tonight if I would say yes. Well, of course. How could I say no? We agreed on sapphires instead of diamonds. And he actually danced an entire dance with me last night at the company Christmas party.

There's only one thing I can think right now...he's planned well enough to provide a great life for my future children. Can I ask for more? Yes. Should I? No.

My brother's going to die soon. He got in a fight (really, his drunk irresponsible excuse for a girlfriend shoved him into it) and spent the night in the hospital. He's now vowing revenge. It's weird to think that my brother's going to end up either dead or in prison for killing someone, but I don't think there's any other paths for him. Which is a shame considering how much my mother tried to open all these doors for him.

It doesn't feel like Christmas, and I'm afraid it won't again.

STUPID FOOTBALL. The Simpsons aren't coming on.

So this time last year I had already finished all my Christmas shopping, and ran up my credit card buying more gifts so I could be out with other Christmas shoppers and hear the Christmas music in the stores. Oh, and see the little kids visiting Santa.

But I haven't even started. And I don't even want to. Why does this year feel so different? Maybe it's the economy. I don't know. But the economy doesn't explain the Christmas music - I started listening to it after Halloween, but I haven't now, and don't really want to. GOD I'm such a scrooge.

In other news, I have to find a dress to wear to the office Christmas party. I overheard the temps in the same area as me talking about it, and they're going all out - cocktail dresses and everything. I guess I should look nice, as well. I'm more looking forward to the free booze and cheaper hotel room (the office is paying for most of it) so neither J nor I have to DD this year - thank GOD. I can't wait for "Frost/Nixon." I think that'll be the Christmas highlight.

Oh, new obsession - The Ting Tings. Their song "That's Not My Name" was played during the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which I love, for some reason. Check it...

Update
So the Simpsons are coming on! Just late.

Also, this is my second obsession: A Sort Fairytale. But more people seem to like the Victoria's Secret one (I wonder why...). :)

And I'm So Sad, Like A Good Book I Can't Put This Day Back

I've been wondering if being lonely for once would be such a bad thing. I think I'm just freaking out. I had an engagement ring chat this weekend - diamonds, or white sapphire? - and I don't know where I am right now. I want to go through with it. But, there's so much I still haven't done. Not that I couldn't do it if it happened. Could it?

My mother keeps asking me if I'm happy. My sister is going to my city for an interview for a job this weekend. I've given up on Africa, and just about given up on my city, but the thought of her having it is just...just a little too much. One minute I'm sure I should just go for it, and the next minute I think that I can't leave the life I have now.

I almost wish I had someone to make decisions for me.