i have learned to hate someone.

it is a terrific burden.  but it is a truer better thing than my usual modus operandi, which is to shrug things off, and shoulder what i can.  now, i know that there are times when the hypocrisy of people is sufficient to allow true hatred.  i just have to be careful not to let that one hatred infect others.  because the hypocrisy of this one individual highlights the hypocrisy of many.

breath.

... i need time to forgive and forget.  i always do.  (but then again, perhaps that is my problem.  maybe i SHOULD hate.  maybe i should hold a burning ember in my heart...  there is something paradoxically cleansing in the moment of hate, before it realizes the double edged nature of its momentum...)

***

i try to help my family in meager ways.  i have been trying to take all the kids out (ALL of them, including my nieces and nephew) in order to alleviate the burden on my aging parents.  soon, i am sure, the responsibility of caring for these children will fall upon my wife and i, because no one else will want to take the responsibility.  although my wife is reluctant about it, i feel that she is akin to me in my belief in filial obligations, and basic compassion.  with family, you have no choice... (unless you are someone who thinks that blood is something you can wash your hands of...)

it is sad to me, particularly at this time of year.  my grandmother, whom i loved dearly and still miss, she believed in holding the family together at all costs.  now, perhaps 5 years after her passing, i find that my family has progressively fragmented apart.  in the immediate aftermath of my grandmother's passing, a rivalry between my mother and her siblings sundered relations, such that we have not seen our aunt and uncle (and their families) very often for years.  and now, this fall/winter, i no longer have relations with my brother and my sister.  it is a sad thing, and i feel that i have failed my grandmother, and her aspirations...

...but there is little that i think that i could have done.  at least, there is little i could have done, and remain "in character."  sometimes, i think that it is ironic/paradoxical that the very reason people "get along" with me is because i am unassuming.  and yet, in this season, it is my unassuming nature that prevents me from cajoling a relationship between all disparate parties...  and besides that, my brother has inspired in me a feeling of such intense hatred, that it truly throws me out of balance, and exhausts me in the simple processing of this rage.  there are things i will NEVER forgive about my brother, even if relations will proceed...

(but then again... but then again...  i once chided my mother regarding the sundered relationships with her siblings, saying that it was grandmother's wish that the family hold together, and NOT ONE WEEK after her death, there were attempts to break away.  and at that time i told my mother that she should be bigger than that...  maybe it is the same thing, the very same thing, with me...)

***

i think i am averse to people, in one very fundamental sense.  the realm of people, as represented by "facebook conversations," can be nice, but in most senses, is trivial and superficial (in the worst sense of the word).  it is quite literally a distraction.  i do not operate on that realm, or at least, i do not operate optimally there.  as i may have mentioned, i have always felt that true friendship was like people on isolated, but visible, mesas, living parallel lives, suffering their own trials and tribulations...  a sense of distance was always incorporated into it.  it wasn't because i didn't believe in helping people... but it was more because i felt that, in this world, one didn't and shouldn't and can't EVER count on people.  you can't expect friends to save you (they literally never have).  and to put that expectation upon them is to be unfair to them...

i guess i have issues with "friends."  with "brothers."  with a lot of things.  suffice it to say that i have very few friends who are close, and, let's be honest, none outside of my family that i can hang out with here.

[got to go.]