March 19, 1999.

I'm home now, kicking it Xmas vacation stylee. And by that I mean I fled to B-ton for the weekend instead of freaking out every 3 hours as my roommate parties all night in the next room. It's amazing how worked up I am about this. Just contemplating the best words to describe the situation a minute ago started a bad trembling in my hands. This is not good. And it's also not good that I'm fleeing so many kilometers instead of dealing with the problem. But at least here I'll be able to sleep a whole 10 hours...and if my brother wakes me up, I have every license to stomp over and yell at him. And he'll have the grace to apologize as well.

How it happened was this: this afternoon I called home to discuss my summer lodgings, as a snag has come up in my perfect plan (more as it becomes relevant). My parents have been in Florida for the past week, and I thought they'd be home by now. Instead, my brother began talking my ear off about his horrible week. You have to understand that my brother can be very reticent. This outpouring seemed to signify a desire for human companionship. With my parents gone, there'll be a lot less distraction to my planned weekend of studying (and she'll have fun fun fun...shut up). Or at least that was the theory. Cable teevee is distraction enough without 2 parents.

Hell, maybe I just wanted to go some place where I felt at home - and not like a boarder. The litany of problems my brother recited over the phone also contributed to my desire to be home - it almost seemed like he needed someone to cook or talk to or whatever. In a week of speeding tickets, sickness, heartbreak, loneliness and a noise citation by the city, a visit from an older sister starts to seem like a good idea.

Unfortunately, we got into a massive fight on the way home, during which I accused him of being hate-filled and arrogant, and he flat-out asserted that I based my life on bullshit and told me to "shove my Bible up my ass." To be fair to him, I'd started the cavalcade of ass-related insults. It's an argument that's been brewing for a long time - he's as passionately committed to atheism as I am to my own strange brand of Xianity, and he keeps giving me badly-written hardcore punk tracts filled with weak logic and hatred against Xians. Sort of ironic, I think. If anyone in his liberal, humanist, vegan group had published a zine claiming that all African Americans are murderers and all homosexuals are child-molesters, the author would be reviled as a sick fascist hate-monger. But it's perfectly okay to hate Xians as the enemies of free thought, because, you know, Xians have a common set of beliefs dictated to them by corrupt televangelists and can't think for themselves.

Why is it that every one of these vegan hardcore Xian hating tracts mentions Jimmy Swaggart as the typical Xian, but never assumes that Hitler was a typical vegetarian?