I’ve been told everything changes when you fall in love. I have always thought that was a crappy way of expressing that you’re just a sucker. My cynical shoulder angel pacifies and tells me that such phrases are simply ill phrased and used to try to impress the blasé, kind of like the time when my friend Mollie reenacted her favorite scene from The Patriot one afternoon while I puked my guts out from a bad migraine in the seventh grade. I picked up The Odyssey the other day and felt like I was force fed this lie yet again as I rolled my eyes to the fact that Odysseus feels the need to feign his love for Penelope by fighting off Cyclops and having adventures with his men, floating the ocean on a magical veil, feasting with kings, and sleeping with total babes. Homer romantically reinforces Odysseus’ love for Penelope by remembering to tack on the idea that Odysseus only thinks of Penelope when he sleeps with them, of course. What a dedicated hubby –if any literary character has mastered the challenge of taking thoughts captive, he is my gold medalist. I have trouble deciding who I feel sorrier for though: Odysseus for being so blind to his true desires or Penelope, with her angst-y offspring, waiting around for her sly fox of a husband who is suffering a major identity crisis.
I was struck the other day at how much Penelope reminded me of my brother. John is thirteen and stuck at home with our obnoxiously emotional younger sister who fights for attention with Henry, the family poodle. John called me last weekend while I was on a date to complain that our sister had been practicing her cheerleading routines over a dozen times right across from his room and had been picking Henry’s eye boogers and leaving the clouded Kleenexes on top of his freshly laundered clothes. His voice sounded strained and he ended his call by asking when I would be coming home. He always does this, as if I can magically melt his problems away. While I find it somewhat annoying, it does help build anticipation to upcoming breaks from the college grind. I clutter my life at school with enough binge socializing and academia that there is rarely enough space in my slowly frying brain for thoughts of home. But I always tell them I miss them, which isn’t entirely true. I want it to be though. I convince myself I am needed at home and guilt myself with John’s pubescent voice in my head and find myself making a surprise trip home, just me and five loads of laundry.
In my mind, going home is a refreshing idea but John’s behavior is appalling. I make a three and a half hour drive to appease this sympathy drainer and I come home to a house riddled with gaming systems, online social networking, a basketball hoop, and a chubby neighborhood kid we call Beans. I’m lucky to get an afternoon with John, not without fighting Beans for his attention though. The emotional roller coaster I go through to see the guy who guilts me into coming to see him, only then to toy with my affections while being ruled by these agents of separation. I curse them all -except Beans.
I’m frustrated that I let it all bother me. In years past, it wouldn’t have hurt me in the slightest. Like Odysseus with the goddess Calypso on her private island of paradise, I know I would be happier back up at school stuffing my face with cheap Mexican food on the weekends, enjoying the company of my sleep deprived friends. That’s what I should want. Sure, I’m not exactly eating forbidden beef while planning on how I destroy each suitor of John’s attention, yet every semester I find myself tearing my bed sheets off, stuffing them in my laundry basket and taking them home for my annual washing, hoping my dorky little brother will distract me from washing them. But you see in years past, there wasn’t John. It was just my five sisters and me. As much I hate to admit it, when John was born I might have fallen a little bit in love. And begrudgingly I submit to you he might have changed everything in my life. While he and Penelope share a romantic connection and John and I just a platonic one, I can’t help but cry out with Odysseus when I spy John logging onto Facebook and unconsciously signing off his whipped older sister, “by heaven you’ve stung me now!”
What can I say? I suppose I’m a sucker.
