november 12, 2001. As if summoned by yesterday's entry, I had my main reoccurring dream last night. It went better than usual: I was in the club, I was dressed appropriately (that is to say, wildly inappropriately), and there were even some friends about. But halfway through the first song, ravers with karaoke intentions busted into the place & began to set up. I started chasing them out with much growling, punching and high kicking. I was just about to face off with the dj when I woke up. Fun! Today I got down on my hands and knees and I washed the fucking kitchen floor. I've been meaning to do that since July and it feels glorious to look at linoleum corners and see nothing but tile. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I have a project due tomorrow that I have yet to start. Coincidence??) The actual washing pleased me hugely, although I can't see myself doing this very often. It reminded me of moving into a new apartment or house, and the deep cleansing you do to wash away the funk of the previous inhabitants. This is the time when you lie to your house and tell it that you will give it this kind of attention and love as often as needed. It's the housework equivalent of a New Year's Resolution and the follow-through tends to be even less than the typical quit-smoking song & dance. Even knowing this, I whispered sweet nothings to my cabinets, phrases along the lines of I will never let you get this dirty again. It's a nice sentiment even if I know I'm a black-hearted liar. But aren't we all when it comes to housework. So my brother's at it again. He has an email list that he uses to communicate with his friends at home. I'm on it, much to my occasional dismay. It's not just the crazy theories (AIDS is a government conspiracy that can be healed with a raw food diet, milk is poison, human faeces will not smell if the human is eating the right foods). It's not just the far-too-intimate discussions of his eating/crapping/colonics. And it's not just the terrible, terrible grammar (and you think I'm bad...). It's the raw hatred directed at my parents. Reading between the lines, he just had a phone call with my dad in which my father encouraged him to get a bus pass because it's not worth a) freezing to death or b) slipping while bike riding & seriously injuring himself. I think those are both valid points, and I think my father has a right to be concerned about his headstrong nutbar of a son spending a full winter in Winnipeg by himself. Of course, I fully appreciate that my father holds onto a point with the frustrating tenacity of pure emotion, and that opposition to him is painful & difficult. But Nic will not, perhaps cannot, give my parents the benefit of the doubt. He went on from this anecdote to list the crimes of my parents, including ignoring his back pain while he did manual labour for my dad's company cooking for him and laundering his clothes when he lived at home so that now he's completely helpless showing concern about his love life on valentine's day and not at any other time getting concerned because he lived in the house in the most hermetic, angry fashion possible disapproving of his career choices when he was in high school. I think there are some real concerns here, and I've run into many of the same walls in dealing with my parents. For instance, the fear and helplessness masquerading as belligerence - I've been down that road again and again. The problems he had working under my dad were exactly the same as the ones I had, except I was in spiritual pain, not physical pain. Yeah, it's hard to keep a house when you don't know the basics of housework. Yeah, the relationship model we were shown has serious flaws, as I've discovered when I tried to duplicate them in my own first year of marriage. Yes, they can give some ridiculous advice in response to the pain of alienation (see: the infamous "there's still time to change your personality" comment after a difficult day of volunteering with students who didn't like me.) But to constantly blame is immature. The laundry & Valentine's items are perfect examples of this: even if an act is meant kindly, it must have some downside that kept him from reaching his apotheosis as a human beacon of light to us less-enlightened mortals. We were not abused as children, and perhaps this is what galls him the most. He has no real complaint, no real place to vent his anger, so every target must be magnified. My parents fed us & cared for us: this is bad because we were not thrown out of the nest as soon as possible, or better yet, raised in an impoverished place where he could not feel guilty about consuming. The fact that we enjoyed our pampered status seems to escape him. He certainly never tried to do his own laundry. Just last month he took home a free DVD player from my father - I suppose in a week we'll get to hear how my parents never let him discover the low-rent joy of sock puppet theatre because they tried to ram digital entertainment down his throat. As for back pain, that story changes every year. Sometimes his back pain is the result of that moving job; sometimes it comes from impure and unholy animal products he has eaten in the past. I was under the impression that 8 years of wildly amateur wrestling at punk shows and in suburban basements smashed up his vertebrae, not to mention dozens of times crowd surfing at rock concerts (these rides almost inevitably ended by being dropped on his back. Once he was dropped on a manhole cover that protruded a foot from the ground.) But because he's mad today, it's all my dad's fault for employing him. Boo fucking hoo. this time 2 years ago: I offer joyful giggling unto the Lord