Due to my hectic regimen, and trying to shoehorn this blog into my schedule along with all the novels, poetry, publication, the full-time college routine, and being an overtime dad, I haven't been able to post much this last year or so. To remedy this, I'm going to start posting random bits of things from school. Why? Because I spend all my damn mind there, and I tend to have fun with my assignments. It's not as if I can ever publish my homework, but I have a ton of it and I need things to post, so I've decided to throw the occasional, finished assignment onto this blog from time to time.
So here goes:
The following is an assignment in which I was given several statements regarding a husband named 'Roger' being selfish, and I was to supply supporting evidence, as his wife, to qualify those statements in paragraph format. You know... finish the paragraph. That sort of thing. We were asked to provide specific details that reinforce that 'Roger' is selfish.
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Specific Support – Roger’s Selfishness
(BOLD denotes provided starting material)
My husband Roger is a selfish person. For one thing, he refuses to move out of the city, even though it is a bad place to raise the children. We inherited some money when my parents died, and it might be enough for a down-payment on a small house in a nearby town. But Roger says he would miss his buddies in the neighborhood. He walks around with his shirt off quite often, flexing his pectoral muscles at me, and when I try to say anything about this behavior, he only flexes them faster and interrupts me, saying, “Oh, stop it. They don’t need your words.” His buddies are a strange sort, and they all seem to speak in an odd, indecipherable language, but last month, when I asked Roger what language his friends were speaking, he only laughed and said, “You don’t have to hog your way into everything. Just accept that some things are mine. Because guess who knows more than you? That’s right, me. And everyone.”
Also, when we go on vacation, we always go where Roger wants to go. When I proposed the idea of going to Epcot Center early last Summer, Roger forbade it. This would have been a fun vacation and also allowed me to visit my mother at the retirement home Roger had forced her to live in, but when I asked, he merely frowned and told me “Florida’s where families go when they have no imagination of their own. People rot in Florida. And they should.” My husband then chose to take the family on a tour of pubs, and brought one of his friends with him over our six-state tour of these particular places. Night after night, Roger would leave the family, drink pints of cheap beer, and return to the RV barely able to walk. Our family vacation was more of a vacation for Roger and his alcoholic friend, with myself and the children allowed to tag along and sit in the stolen RV while he drank himself into multiple arrests. When I bailed him out of jail the first time, he didn’t even thank me, but instead muttered “These cops nag almost as much as you do.” At one point, near the end of the vacation, he returned to the RV at three in the morning without his friend, and instead had with him another woman. When I inquired just what it was he thought he was doing, he gave me three dollars and told me to go find a Denny’s. I took the kids and as we left, he said he’d meet up with us later, and to order him a Moon Over My Hammy, once we'd been there an hour.
“Oh, and waffles for the pair,” he added, indicating the other woman.
Another example of Roger’s selfishness is that he always spends any budget money that is left over. Once our bills are paid and we’re out of the hole for the month, whatever is left should go toward family-oriented activity, maybe a nicer grade of meals for us, and any number of other things that most would consider important and useful wants. Roger made money ice-cream by first withdrawing the excess money we had at the end of the month and then churning it with scalded milk in an ice-trough. He bought his own private mini-fridge to store his ice cream and beer in, and when I complained that we couldn’t afford to make money ice-cream, he then barred me from having any and purchased an expensive lock to put on his refrigerator. He wrote ‘No Ice Cream for Nags’ on the white, front wall of the appliance. Whenever I see this message, my mood plummets into a dire, recurring guilt, somewhat matching in scope the acute drop of our finances into suffocating, inescapable debt.
Finally, Roger leaves all the work of caring for the children to me. While I know that we do not have children in the traditional sense, the dolls are most certainly conscious and if their whims are not met, they will cause me horrid thoughts and sing that terrible song of theirs. I resent Roger for it, but he does not seem to care. He knows how important it is to keep the dolls pleased, and that when their eyes light up and cast red on the walls of the room, it only means trouble for me and that more pictures of me will spontaneously catch fire around the house, but Roger will do nothing to aid me in sating the dolls. When the children give me nightmares, he only laughs and purchases more of the awful dolls for me to take care of. They sit on a shelf labeled Roger’s Babies. The few times I’ve asked him to do his share of doll-rearing, he simply waves his hand and tells me that children are for girls, even though the dolls have made it clear to both of us that they belong to Roger, and not myself. They call me ‘The Interloper’, and Roger ‘Daddy’, and when they want more blood poured onto the sacrificial anvil they had us build under the house, Roger can never be bothered to go out and find it for them. Honestly, how does he expect us all to ascend into the Realm of Black Torpor, a place the dolls have promised to take us, if he doesn’t do his share of the work? Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one keeping our church alive at all.
Also, he recently painted the image of his face on all the mirrors in the house so when I try to look at myself, I see only him. Roger is so selfish. Sometimes when I talk with him, I become so exasperated that I find myself wondering if he might fit in the oven or not. I think he would if he were unconscious.
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I think I'll post more homework throughout the next few terms. I'm somewhat interested in what I can get away with.
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