I’m gonna start a series of commentaries about living here in the same vein as “shitty apartment blues” called “my brother might be sexist.” So get your Tumblr Saviors ready.
I’m not gonna lie to you, my brother’s a pretty cool guy most times. He’s interested in science and astronomy, he believes in due process and rejects extremism as a form of government. Also when he’s not high out of his mind he can be acceptably intelligent. In those ways we’re pretty similar. But sometimes I can’t help but feel like a god-forsaken ignorance sits in him like the ghost of a boulder. So anyway, to not feel like I’m crazy about this, every time he says something to me that’s suspiciously sexist I’m just gonna jot this shit down, y’know, to get it off my chest/back.
So one day I’m playing Skyrim and he’s rolling a joint, and I go down into the basement of… the Blue Palace? I can’t remember. There’s a guy down there, and I’m like “Hey,” and he’s like “I cook and do dishes for the soldiers here in (wherever it was).” As soon as he hears this my brother interjects: “So in other words, you’re the bitch.”
I look at him and ask for an explanation of this shit, telling him it’s a goddamn important job to feed solders in a war, and he’s like “I cleaned in the navy for years, and whoever does it is the bitch. I know what it’s like.”
Do keep in mind this was before I started refusing to do dishes for him and his girlfriend. Nowadays I just do my own and ignore the now-moldy mountain of dishes around the sink/oven/microwave. I can’t remember if I balked at him for this, but regardless he never knew my anger. If he did I’m sure he probably wouldn’t care.
As you may or may not know, I’ve been on a mission to stop fighting with my mother long enough for her to bring me to our family doctor so I might be sent to a hospital to get my womb checked out for a cyst or something. But anyway, I somehow can’t stop fighting with her, and my brother approaches me a day or so after our first fight (as we speak the next will be the third) while I’m washing dishes (because I’m the bitch). He’s very frank and regardless sort of loud, telling me “Well… you gotta go to a hospital, y’know… to get your… Ovaries checked out, y’know?” I just stare at him because it feels sort of out of nowhere, strange to hear him speaking of my insides, and he got what needs to be checked out wrong. He goes on to tell me his girlfriend has some kind of chronic cyst problem, and says that it’s important, y’know, “because women have ovaries for a reason.”
I had not the ounce of braveness in me to ask him what in the world he thought that “reason” was.
