I have been lurking on the SDMB for probably 8 years now… I found this site one day when Cecil’s column was the first response to a google I did about some random thing I can no longer remember. I’ve been a bit of an addict ever since, and have regaled friends and family with all sorts of information, to which their standard response is “Where in the hell did you hear about that?”. For example, just today I was able to inform a ‘backed-up’ friend about www.colonblow.com (I’m pretty sure I found that by following a link from the TMI thread, but I could be mistaken). I’ve been tempted to join up more than once, but usually by the time I’m finished reading a thread that I’m particularily interested in someone else has already made my point, and in such a way that I would feel foolish to try to reiterate in my own clumsy manner. However, something happened to me that I feel the need to share, for reasons that I will attempt to make clear.
Yesterday, while waiting for a taxi-cab at the corner of whatever and where’sit, I was attacked by a transvestite (or possibly transsexual) hooker.
I was not at all really injured, and the whole thing is not something that I’m considering a big deal. But as funny as this sounds now to many people I’ve told (and I’m laughing at it also), yesterday I didn’t find it so humerous.
When I mentioned this episode to my older sister, she asked me if I didn’t think something like this would eventually happen, considering the ‘sort’ that I hang out with.
Now, my sister says stuff like this all the time to me. She doesn’t like my friends, because some of them happen to be gay men who like to dress up like women and lip-sync for charity (maybe she’d be fine with it if they were straight, or if they really sang instead of pretending, I dunno). But for some reason, this time it really pissed me off.
For one thing, this person is not of the ‘sort’ that I hang out with at all. The people that I’m friends with are not drugged-out, filthy dirty prostitutes that will assault a person on the street for either looking at him/her funny and/or not providing said person with cigarettes and money on demand. They are community minded individuals who happen to like having sex with members of the same gender, and also appreciate good beadwork on a nice ball gown.
Secondly, I WAS ASSAULTED! Doesn’t that get something other than derision and blame? I’m her sister for the love of criminy!
I have two sisters and I’m the middle child. We are all very close in age, and we all grew up in some pretty serious dysfunction. I would want to seriously physically injure anyone who ever hurt either one of them. But the truth is that no one else in the world hurts any of us nearly as bad as we hurt each other. We are all master button pushers and know exactly what to say (or how to say it) to get the most violent reaction from each other. I’ve spent quite a lot of time and money in therapy to curb this behaviour in myself, but I think a lot of it is that I’ve grown up and no longer think this is the best way to deal with my family. I still have to bite my tongue sometimes, because it’s almost too easy to ‘go there’.
I’m just so fed up with this sort of thing. She is not interested in looking at this behaviour and trying to change it. I have also been openly ridiculed for the very efforts I have made that have made it possible to ignore her mean-spirited comments about those efforts (the aforementioned therapy).
I’m curious to hear from Dopers who have any similar familial weirdness, and how they cope. I have to go to my nephew’s first birthday in a couple of weeks, and this point I am just so hurt by her comments that I don’t know how I’ll keep my cool around her.
