Happy 4th of July! Or belated depending on when I get to post this. Coincidentally, the date will be relative to when I'll prevail getting to use the internet at my house, the one my sister buys and hogs. Somehow she is able to stay on the computer from 10 am to 10 pm with a few intermittent breaks from here to there, as my eyes have witnessed. So if I expect myself to be able to get online, I must a) Sneak in 15 minutes of internet use while she's eating b) Beg her to get off her buttocks and let me use it once in awhile or c) Go to the library nearby. Lately I've been opting for option (c.) since I need it for at least an hour and I also cower from confrontations with her. However, today, she put up a new condition, changing what was tolerable to unbearable. She ordained that the use of her internet required that I must read at least one chapter of the bible. What in the name of-is she doing?! Discriminating against people void of the same religious zealous that she claimed to have? What an outrage! I thought there were laws against this! All the repressed anger of letting her slide with using the internet for 8-12 hours a day, actually, all the anger from me always condoning her commandeering behavior simmered to a boil. Thankfully, these thoughts cooled as quickly as they heated.
Despite the lack of an verbal eruption, I did tell her what I thought. If she wanted to push something on me, even religion, there are better ways of doing it than bribery, even close to blackmail from my perspective. My religious views got pretty slighted after something happened in college, hugely contributed by her, but skip that for now. In other words, in her opinion, I fell from grace, which I felt I was never perched on in the first place. I'll admit that I was affronted and anger was wholly my motivation here to rebel. But what was I actually angry at? My sister being an unreasonable cow, at having to compromise yet another belief, or just the plain fact I couldn't even use the internet freely at my house? It was a mish mash of all these things, but at the center of it was my resentment towards myself, wanting to express, perhaps for a change, that I do not want to lie about who I am anymore. Truthfully, I wouldn't have minded lieing about not using the internet or could have easily pretended that I followed her directive since about a minute after boasting her decree, she had to go out for an errand. She wouldn't have known, but...I, Kris...would. That alone is enough to stop the criminal mind, and instead to rethink a better way out, imaginably an earnest attempt to break off the part of me that was a fraud. I chose the other way out not because of my moral education nor the 10 commandments, but from my own acceptance of who I am. I'm not the little boy that used to tread down the guided path set out for me by my family neither am I blindsighted by religion anymore. And I'm surely not the boy who used to believe gays were perverts and sinners. I am one now. I certainly won't flaunt it, but neither am I going to fake it any longer, not to myself and not to my family. If I read the bible, it wouldn't be me, it wouldn't be the naïve supplicant that has gone through 11 years of Christianty only to come out a mediocre product. So I end up at the crossroads of a) Cheating my new beliefs b) Lieing to my sister c) Just using the internet regardless of it all, but the answer simply became none of the above, with me lying on the ground typing out this anecdote with the internet modem right infront of me, pitch black. Stronger than my selfish desire to use it, is my selfish hope to never mislead anyone about who I am any further.
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