krebabble

(Actually being written on 2/11/05)

I put in a placeholder for this entry quite a while ago, but it’s taken me this long to go back to fill it in.

When I got home on Christmas night, I had decided that I wouldn’t write down the details of what went on. There were many reasons I told myself I should do this: I just wanted to get past it, there was no reason to dwell on the negative, I was going to have a long break from J1 now that the holidays were over.

But then, a few days after Christmas, I changed my mind.

The tale really starts on the 23rd, when I received a frantic email from my mother while I was at work. J2 had a take home test in math, she wrote, and he had no idea how to do it! It was due by noon! My reaction was one of irritation (misplaced, as I later found out) with J2, who is notorious for slacking off until the last minute and then relying on others to pull him out of a jam. Being neither very good with statistics, nor possessed of any free time that morning, I plugged the text of the question into google and came up with a page that had the answer. I dispatched it back to mom and that was that.

Bob and I arrived at mom’s house on Christmas Eve afternoon. I was run down and tired, as I usually am after a week of work, but I was looking forward to the holiday. It could not, I figured, be any worse than Thanksgiving, which had, overall, been bearable.

After arriving, I saw little of J2 and J1 for some time. They were upstairs doing last minute wrapping and otherwise engaged. Bob, mom and I made Christmas cookies, and then the two of us stayed at home while mom and the J-team went to church.

Our peaceful evening was shattered by their return. J1 was furious at mom and continued to berate her long after they got back to the house. Her crime? A woman seated in their pew in the overcrowded church had fainted during the mass. Though she was not alone and her companion was helping her, mom had the temerity to be merely sympathetic from afar. From this he launched out into other perceived failures on her part, and began to lecture her on the proper way to raise J2.

Mom was eventually made so upset by his behavior that she retreated to her room. I went up to see if I could help, but we were soon followed by J1, who resumed spouting his ridiculous opinions on her parenting skills. She told him a few things about his accumulated behavior that I won’t repeat here, and a conversation then ensued that I attempt to recreate, because mere description cannot do it justice.

Mom: *talks about how J2 tells her things*
Mom: You never tell me about yourself. What you’re doing, how you’re doing.
J1: I’m not a girl.
Mom: …
J2 (who’s come in by this point): Uh…
J1: You want to know about my life? I go to work, I come home and eat, I go to sleep. That’s it. That’s all.
J1: I can’t tell you about my life. You couldn’t handle it.
Me and J2: Uh…
J1: You don’t know! You have no idea!

Yeah. So, we really just had no clue what to make of this. About all it served to illustrate was that J1 is crazy. Everyone suggested he seek professional help.

Things calmed down after that, and the remainder of the evening passed without much incident. I offered to stay up and put together the icebox cookies for the next day, and what with that and insomnia, I didn’t fall asleep until about 3am. Bob had to leave to catch his plane really early the next morning, so when the alarm went off at 6:30, it was so loud, and I was so disoriented, that I woke up with a yell. I was so freaked out! I thought it was a fire alarm.

The adrenaline made it difficult for me to fall back asleep. I managed it eventually, and was then woken up by J1 about an hour later, shaking the bed. It was far too early to get up, so I told him to go away. He did, then returned a few minutes later to pull off the sheets. Again he left, and then came back a third time to take all the covers from the bed, shove the matress around with me on it, then take off downstairs with the sheets and quilt.

At this point I’d had less than 5 hours of sleep. I was exhausted. Bob had had a cold and I was feeling like I might be getting it myself. I was so upset and so furious that I seriously considered packing up and driving home right then and there. If not for the fact that it would have made mom even more miserable, I would have done it.

My rage at J1 simmered all morning and into the afternoon, and I avoided talking to him as much as I possibly could. I departed in the evening with great relief: the holidays were over, and there was no reason for me to have any contact with him for at least the next several months.

Or so I thought.

I can’t remember now if I wrote about my problems with J1 and job hunting. But as a preamble to this next incident: in May I graduated and started looking for a job. J1 was eager to ‘help’ and pestered mom until she finally convinced me to send him my resume, with her assurances that this would satisfy him and cause the nagging to cease. He began forwarding job postings to me. Random jobs, for which I was not qualified. On the day we all went to Fenway, I tried to drive home this point: he did not know what skills and experience I had, so it was a waste of his time to continue sending these things to me. I told him flat out that it needed to stop.

I thought I had gotten through to him, until the day in August when I got a call out of the blue from some company to whom I had sent my resume. Except, of course, that I hadn’t. I discovered that not only was J1 sending me job postings, he had set up a yahoo ID and was applying for jobs PRETENDING TO BE ME.

I was pissed and not a little frightened. I have no way of knowing exactly what he told these people my qualifications were, or what misrepresentations he may have made. I told him to stop, and then I reported him to Yahoo for identity theft, trying to get that account shut down.

I again thought that was the end of it, until 3 days after Christmas, when I got an email from him. “I submitted your resume for this job.” he said.

I could not believe it. How could he possibly think that this was okay? He had been told multiple times to stop pretending to be me, to stop this unwanted, unnecessary and freakish assistance. I fired back a furious email.

He had the temerity to reply and tell me that he was doing it for my own good(!), and that dad would have expected him to do this(!!), and that I was ungrateful and should basically fall at his feet that I had such a wonderful brother as he.

At that point I told him that I was done speaking to him. That if he continued to pretend to be me, I would be forced to contact an attorney, and that I was setting up my email to filter any messages from his address as spam.

And that is also what decided me to write this out. Because I wanted a record of his psychoness.