So i am at my parents house for the weekend. i am here and have been here for the last two days. today is thanksgiving and i realized once again today for an instant one of the biggest reasons that i like that i am no longer a close member of this family. although i guess it all depends upon how you call close. i mean me and my brother both left home after high school to go to university. i to kingston, 4800 km's away and he to waterloo, 4500 km's away. i guess the difference is that for summers i mostly came back home and stayed near my parents, or at least in BC whereas my brother left and didn't come back very often at all. As well as the fact that i make a point to see my parents at least every 3 months (they only live an hours' drive from me) whereas my brother sees them about once a year. and when i come home i am in there helping mom and dad a much as i can, doing dad's endless projects (this weekend we finished building a shack and adding the tools to it and i stepped on a nail) but my brother does one of two things, he hides or he sits on the couch and reads. it doesn't matter if people are asking him to do things or asking him to participate, because then he goes and hides, although he might grudgingly help for a second or two.

i am closer than that i guess. but i try to keep myself my own person, the person that i grew into because i was able to leave home, if you know what i mean. Well this weekend hasn't been that bad really but it does wear on me. Take yesterday at breakfast for instance. All of a sudden mom, dad and myself were talking about the best way to do something. what was it? oh right, to cook the perogies that night. My sis in law lee is very violently allergic to milk. thus the perogies that are potatoes and cheese can't be cooked in the same pot as hers, or with the same spoon or anything like that. But we have made some safe potato and cheese ones for her using the soy cheese that she kind of likes. well, we are having this discussion about which ones are going to be cooked and by who and when. At the same time i am having my first lesson from my Ukrainian grandmother today on the proper method of making perogies and i am refusing to make them with the fake cheese because i want to learn the right way. So we are basically yelling back and forth. One might think that i wouldn't be yelling, but i was, because it is the only way to get heard. Now the suggestions that we decided on eventually were i make mine, i get to freeze them and take them home. then we make some of the perogies that my grandmother has made and frozen since she has been here. Try just over 800 of them. Sis in law's get to be made first in a pot and then the other two types together. Simple. How did this take 15 minutes of yelling to arrive at? Cause not one person was listening to the others. Everyone was kind of saying the same thing, and there really only was one good answer for the situation, but they weren't yelling about the same thing at the same time. mom would be yelling about the cooking while dad was yelling about the preparing and vice versa. man it was stultifying. all i could say (i mean yell) after a while, was, 'LISTEN.' because they just weren't. and we got that squared away.

That is a good example of how it wears on me, i mean i participated, i yelled back, i sunk back towards my roots. My mom wears on me as well. but the worst, is my sister. What is it about my sister that bothers me? her unyielding, unstoppable, unending selfishness and thoughtlessness. When we make a meal for everyone that lee can make it is an attack on her. When we are watching a show she doesn't like, we are attacking her. every time she talks her voice drips such spite and hatred that i wince.. there is little that i hate more in this universe than unprovoked and unjust hatred. she has it in spades. and the fun part, she doesn't care what she says as long as it hurts someone else. well that is all fun and stuff. but it enrages me. when mom is getting screamed at with this hatred and with such hurtful words, because she had the nerve to wash the knife that my sister was going to use in an hour, i just don't like it.

So, finally we approach the topic of this entry, the rage. (Isn't it ironic that i talk about how hard it is to make me angry over and over and here i am talking about rage?) dad and i are preparing the turkey, and mom is doing the stuffing. we are following this recipe that dad found on martha's website (i know, i know, and no i am not going to link there for you, yeesh) and setting the bird up for its brief life in the oven. sister comes down stairs, steaming mad at the world. an accepted thing she's always mad at the word, a more bitter person i have never met. so she comes down and starts sniping at us. bitterly, with spite and hatred. apparently the fact that we didn't put pepper in (something she abhors, she hates pepper in things) is reason to yell at us because we have put pepper in things in the past. and then we are stupid for doing things wrong (you know, like by the recipe). So i find myself getting angry, not so much at what she is saying but rather that she directing so much hatred at my parents. My parents have done everything they could for that girl since she was born and it really destroys them that she hates them so much. And the biggest thing, in a couple of hours she will come down and not remember that she had been in such a mood and ask for something. She won't be sweet or pleasant or apologetic just kind of demanding, as if you, you know i deserve for you to give me enough money to go to mcdonald's for supper so just give it to me. so she is standing about 4 inches from me, or rather she is pretty much touching me and she says something really loudly about pepper again, after we had told her there was none, kind of in my ear. i was already angry, so i turn to her and i say, 'shhhhh,' with vociferousness. she didn't like that. not one bit. she took a second to turn to my dad and talk very firmly about pepper for another second before she turned back to me and says with very thinly repressed rage, you do that again and i shall punch you.

So here i am, i encountered rage, my family being the only people who can do me this favour. and i hate it. because it had me to the point where i might hit a person, whether she deserved it or not, i don't like that. and it had me angry and yelling. so as much as i think that anger is healthy, i don't like it when i do get it. but i do think that this might be the source of the anger and i hate that i get it from my family and for such bad reasons. and that i think that this has wandered over to the rest of my life such that i now don't anger anywhere.

just a thought.

turkey in a few minutes. yay. and then i go home. double yay.

That is all done now.  Dinner gone, it was good, i am home. this is wonderful.  And there is more to say about sis, but i am not going to say it.  it would drag down my evening.  Suffice it to say, things were broken and the pure rage on her face kind of scared my friend J.  It was fun.  But not really.  But it was.

Oh, and the food was soooo ,good. i am afraid that while martha's recipe made a good bird as good as it normally would be, her recipe helped the gravy to be rather incredible.

enough. i am going to lie on the couch.  mmmm.
i am going to consider a challenge update for tonight, but it might not happne.