November 23 - 25, 2012 (Friday-Sunday)
''Weekend in Review''

An old proverb came to mind following the events of this weekend, and reiterated to me that  ''a snake is still a snake''  and they do not change their character or their basic nature. I should have picked-up on it at that little ''ohana gathering'' we all had in the kitchen Friday night (Nov. 23) before I left for work, where my sister (the ''snake'' of this story) was dispensing with her ''interpretation'' about the personalities and dynamics of my relationship with Gracie after she and my mother had returned from running about town, bringing me a vegetarian platter from a Mexican restaurant where they had dined, along with a pair of boots my sister had purchased for me. Much of what she said was ''spot-on,'' as usual... but her penchant for assessing beyond what falls within the realm of ''accuracy'' and ''reason'' sometimes comes across as a very deliberate attempt to  ''de-elevate''  somebody without giving the other person ample opportunity to correct the misconception, but I just let it go for the most part, deeming it not that important to huff over.

But the  ''Fit Hit the Shan''  for real Saturday night (Nov. 24) -- That's when ''Fred'' (supposedly her ''boyfriend''-- who also, supposedly, happens to be a ''married'' man --who lives here locally) had come by to visit and to work on my sister's laptop which seemed to be experiencing the same problems with accessing the modem network and Internet as Gracie's own unit had been. Fred had managed to clear-up my sister's problem in just a few short minutes, so I'd asked him if he would do me the favor of having a look at Gracie's laptop to see if her inability to get reconnected via  ''Windows''  could be corrected. Unfortunately, for all of his digging into the command lines, running of diagnostics, shutting down functions, and the all, Fred was unable to locate/correct what was preventing the system from accessing the ''public'' network (Internet), although after much of the tweaking he did manage to establish a connection between the computer and the ''home network'' (modem). But because of the level of involvement Fred was devoting to this task, my sister expressed impatience with him (granted, he did spend at least a half-hour and perhaps close to an hour trying to work on it) and she was trying to rush him off of the job: so this was the  second  indicator, but it was still was not enough to make me think that she was still on some slimy $#!T.

What really set things off was when after Fred had gone as far as he felt he could go with the repairs, that's when I remained in the hallway with Gracie's laptop and tried to do a little additional tweaking & exploring on my own, and though I had no clue what Fred had done to make it possible, this time, unlike every other previous time I'd attempted to do so during all of my trials & errors of trying to clear-up any or all of the problems that Gracie's laptop had developed which refused to be repaired or removed, I'd finally managed (quite by very accident) to access the  ''System Restore''  partition on her laptop's hard drive and activate it. Still somewhat skeptical, I took the plunge and selected the option to completely scrub Gracie's hard drive and have the recovery system restore the ''original factory settings'' OS & software suite (which of course would unfortunately mean that all of Gracie's saved files and preferences would be wiped out in the process).

It was during this time of overseeing the reinstallation of the OS software that I'd overheard the telephone conversation Gracie was having in our bedroom with her grandmother when she thought that I was out of the house and at, or on my way to, work (I'd been outside in the hallway the entire time, ever since Gracie had returned from her job and went ''straight to bed''). Throughout this conversation Gracie kept relaying to her grandmother all of the negative things about myself and my character (true or not) which had been fed to her by my sister, which only reaffirmed in her grandmother's mind that I was virtually a spawn of Satan who was devoid of any emotion and was some ruthless conniving controlling demon.

I was much less upset about what my sister had done and how she sleezily attempted to sabotage my relationship (which I still keep wavering on enough on my own without any outside ''assistance'' from anybody else) than I was that Gracie, as usual, had to run and relay every bit of my/our personal information to her grandmother, only this time everything said during this communiqué was centered around how ''cold'' and ''ruthless'' and ''manipulative'' I really was in this relationship -- and of course all of this negativity was fueled by the poison my sister had infused into Gracie's head after an all-night-long conversation she'd had with my sister the previous night that had lasted well into the next morning after I'd already come back home from work.

So much of what I'd been trying to enlighten Gracie about regarding how her grandmother uses emotionalism to control & manipulate her went getting tossed out the window, and they seemed to reveling in the idea that ''Grandma'' and others of her family were ''right about'' me all along. Needless to say, this put an uncomfortable strain on our interactions when I came to bed after she learned that I had been right outside of our bedroom entryway the entire time and had overheard everything she had relayed to her grandmother: I'd wanted to remain silent about the whole incident, but eventually I gave in and discussed what was happening and what my sister was attempting to do.

But what had happened also did not escape my mother's notice in the least, and on Sunday afternoon (Nov. 25), after having returned from a short grocery shopping trip, my mother confronted me and confided in me that she was aware of what my sister had done, on top of the fact that she had finally reached the point of indignation with my sister's constant unrelenting insistence on  ''dredging up the past''  of reiterating how Martha had ''failed'' as a wife and as a parent rather than letting go of the dark past and taking a page out of  Nelson Mandela's  playbook...  ''Truth... and Reconcilliation.'' As a result, Martha confronted Gwyndolyn (my sister) later in the evening when we were both back at the house together (I'd had the place entirely to myself most of the day and night, utilizing that free time on trying to get my dresser and desk drawers organized) and she essentially laid her out, stating once & for all that she'd had enough of all of the guilt-tripping and of all of the revisitations of past failures and of Gwyndolyn's utter refusal to leave it allto rest in the ''grave'' where ''dead'' things belong.

My indignation (though as yet unstated) stems from an entirely different place. My upset comes less from my sister's trying to put me in the worst possible light that she could devise without explanation or fair analysis, but when it involves spreading outright lies about things I'd supposedly done, and having the audacity to pull my Dad into her fabricated stories, I could only come to the conclusion that everything my mother had ever said about Gwyndolyn's  ''jealousy''  of her ''younger brother'' must indeed have some genuine validity.

November 26, 2012 (Monday)
18:50, Eastern Standard Time

Gwyndolyn announced this morning that she would be returning home to Kansas City, which even though it still fit in with what was said to be her  original  length of stay (three days), it was told to me by my mother prior to their confrontation that her stay had been extended to a full week... so this announcement came as a  slight  but not entirely unexpected shock.

After my sister's departure, my mother began to share more of what had taken place prior to and during their face-off, and about how Gwyn kept trying to make it an issue about  me  and about the dynamic I share with our mother, and about how my sister was trying to play  divisive politics  between Gracie and myself... even though, as I would learn both from my mother and from Gracie later, Gwyndolyn's involvement with ''Fred'' is that of a ''woman-on-the-side'' of a  ''snake'' man! -- the same sort of arrangement she'd admitted to me a few months ago as having had with the man I'd thought she was just ''best buddies'' with when I was living with her in Topeka, Kansas when I was 16-years-old.

Gracie also shared with me more of what Gwyndolyn had been sharing with her, much of which yet again turned out to be nothing but pure unadulterated lies that were so severe and serious that it eliminated my ''cautious'' approach to the things I'd overheard Gracie relaying to her grandmother -- the accusations were no longer ''ambiguous,'' but  [[...]]  blatant, with every & all attempt and intent to ''disrupt'' & ''destabilize.'' After this latest experience and these revelations, I'm now decidedly determined not to have any further dealings with this woman who has been assigned my  sibling,  and have designated her henceforth a ''toxic stranger'' and potential enemy! (I just couldn't keep ignoring the vibes in my gut, despite the many efforts I'd made to ''override'' them and to offer an extension of re-acceptance... but unfortunately, my suspicions about her all proved to be true; my ''feelings'' still have not lied to me regarding ''who'' & ''what'' my sister is and what she may perhaps  always  be.)

I'd called my father shortly before taking a nap, driven largely on the basis of the distortions about my interactions with him which kept coming up in Gracie's discussions with Gwyn, but also because I'd not spoken with anyone in Jersey about their progress in the aftermath of the ''Superstorm Sandy'' catastrophe: I'd also wanted to know if he was aware that Gwyndolyn was on this side of the country (he said he had indeed spoken with her since she had been here with us). It was also during this time that my Dad acknowledged that he'd finally sold-off his fixer-upper  ''Chevelle''  and had exchanged it for a  ''Ford Focus'' -- something Gwyndolyn did not divulge when I had brought the subject of the car up in a conversation with her on Friday (Nov. 23).

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