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March 11, 2005
‘Tis another one
of those times where I shall be less of a visionary in my writings and more
full of self-pity. No, let me restate
that. Not self-pity, but rather
self-situation-life-hating. So if by
chance you have wandered here looking for my incredible bits of wisdom and
flashes of intelligent wit, then perhaps you’d be better served to view one of
my previous
postings. Indeed the last one I posted
on intelligence might serve that purpose better. Though at the end here I do dwell on the future of America again,
so feel free to skip ahead if you wish.
But mainly, this is a positing wallowing not only in my self-imposed
hell, but also in the hell imposed by relatives upon my family. I make that distinction on purpose – there
are relatives of mine that will never ever be considered family. There is a definite difference: relatives
are those that have relations through blood that I would otherwise avoid at all
costs, such as the ‘bad uncle’ or the cousin that molested me for years when I
was younger or the extended useless bloodline; family refers to those that I
hold dear, such as my grandmother who is my life and gave up much to raise
myself and my brother, or my brother whose life I try to make better than mine
by giving everything that I can and providing all those things that I could
never have growing up. There are
in-between levels, I suppose some closer to family, some closer to relatives,
but they tend not to affect situations directly because they are neither
hateable or around enough to care too much for.
I will not get
into details of the family hell. First,
it would be insanely boring of course but secondly, there is just too much to
tell; too many wrongs caused by those relatives; too many hurtful intentions,
too many hell-inducing actions, too many lives ruined… One might wonder as to why I’ve let these
relatives enact such atrocities on my family.
The thing is, I wouldn’t now that I am old enough to prevent them. However, my grandmother oft falls prey to
their nefarious intentions, and thus becomes terribly distraught so that her
emotional state starts to affect her physical health. I have tried for years to prevent these underhanded dealings,
however (there is no eloquent way to put this) no one listens to me. Or rather, grandmother does not listen to
me. So I am left instead to worry about
her health and her emotional well being as best as I can while the bad uncle
again and again attacks her with his devious plots. Yes, I referenced him as ‘the bad uncle’. Simply put, my relatives include my mother
(“Mom”) and her two brothers: the
“uncle-formerly-known-as-a-bad-uncle-but-now-the-good-uncle” and the “bad
uncle”. Those who know me never
question my reference to him as the bad uncle.
We’ll just leave it at that. The
only solace I will ever have when my grandmother passes on will be watching the
bad uncle suffer and die without her to manipulate for his own purposes any
more. For I have told her often, when
she is no longer with us, these people will not be welcome, nay – will not be
allowed – in my house.
We all have those
relatives, though most are not blessed to have ones as nefarious as I, that we
wish we did not have to interact with.
These are the people who, if not for the fact that they are blood or
married to blood, we would avoid at all costs in our own choices. Yet they are relatives and thus we are told
that we should accept them as they are and care for them nonetheless. And perhaps we would be sad if they were in
horrible fatal accidents or something, but I would be sad if my neighbor’s cat
died too, that’s about the level of empathy their demise would receive. Perhaps you view me as cruel or uncaring for
saying as much. But secretly, you know
you have them too. Somewhere down the
gene pool is someone so uncouth or unintelligent or unscrupulous or just plain
un that you would never associate with them outside of the family and might not
even mind too much if something wicked befell them.
So anyway, I will
move past my family hell, back into my own personally imposed hell. Since there isn’t much I can do to help my
family hell besides support grandma as best as I can, I feel wallowing in my
self-imposed hell is at least of my own causing and therefore more
productive. The situation of my
self-imposed hell changes daily. I am a
Gemini, and quite crazy as well, so the fluctuation in my feelings is to be
expected. Unfortunately, those
fluctuations greatly impact others and therefore draw them into my self-imposed
hell. No, that is not fair, I know
this. However, the self-imposed hell
has a great deal to do with those drawn into it – through no fault of their
own, mind you, just my own insanity – and unfortunately the decisions springing
from this hell impact them significantly.
No, I will not be more specific.
For, dear reader, it is not wise to publicly burn those bridges that you
are not sure you want to set ablaze just yet, or might wish to resurrect in the
future. I will say that I spend a great
deal of time depressed by this confusion, yet I still find time to be my
usually intriguing and brilliant self.
I don’t know how I do it.
With midterms
over in my classes it is time again to return to ignoring school for another
four weeks. Two A’s and a B later, the
proof that I need not actually study, hell, need not actually learn anything,
in order to finish a degree from UCF’s Criminal Justice Program keeps
presenting itself. At least engineering
was a challenge. This is just a chore. But once I am cutting up dead bodies or
serving as Clark County Coroner in Nevada, then I will look back fondly on the
waste of tuition this was and wonder why I did not just buy a degree from one
of those spam e-mails.
In class on a
recent occasion, our professor presented to us a cold-case that he is reopening
for examination so as to garner our input, as supposedly fresh minds, to what
his investigators could pursue in their efforts to solve this murder. I will not get into details, since it is in
fact an open case, but suffice it to say it was a murder that involved
swinging, bisexuality, and bondage. *ahem* I’d like to call expert witness Cat to the
stand, your honor. If you have been
reading my posts for a bit now, you know that I pursue an, um, alternative sex
life so to speak. So beyond having
years of life experiences on my classmates, I have a bit of insider knowledge
on the goings on of such things.
However, what amazed me most about this whole experience was not the
fact that I could not get these children to listen to my point of view (as most
of my classmates are but 19 and 20 years old, with the maturity level of a 12
year old, I tend to view many of them as juvenile); it was that these minds, so
young and formative yet, were already quick to apply biases to the
situation. I thought that, as a younger
generation, we had moved past such stereotypes and personal biases based on
sexual orientation. I was quickly
brought to my senses as my group proclaimed that since this individual was a
bi-sexual swinger, he must be a pedophile with HIV and since the couple a few
residences over swung with him regularly, they must be the murderers. OK.
I stopped, blinked a few times, shook my head, and asked my group to
please restate these opinions so that I could make sure I had really just heard
that. And they did, so emphatically so
that they would not even listen to the ideas I was presenting. So I sat back, flicked open my knife, and
proceeded to clean my fingernails while silently judging them all. How could minds so young and fresh be so
clouded already, so unwilling to examine evidence with as unbiased an eye as
possible? It is still riling my nerves
and baffling my mind today, a week later almost. I wanted to e-mail my professor, to ask him – are all your
students this prejudiced? Is this what
we are turning out to the investigative community? Or is it their lack of years and life experience that leads them
to such closed minds? Because please,
please assure me that this thinking is not what is running our justice systems;
please bolster my confidence in the field I want so much to devote my career to;
please advise me that they aren’t all like this – so willing to jump to
conclusions that it is no wonder these cases go unsolved and uncared for. For if these biased minds, these prejudiced
views, these predisposed attitudes are the future of criminal investigations,
then I fear our future is as ruined as our past…
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