So.

My brother's just screwed himself out of college. He failed (well, this time he made a D) Trig twice. His GPA is 2.0 (up .8 points!). My dad doesn't want to pay for my brother to screw off like that--and he is screwing off, it's got nuts to do with giving a genuine effort, if my brother put as much effort as he did into his physique or hanging out with friends or going on camping trips with friends as he did in doing well in classes, he'd have got at least a C or B, which would have been grudgingly acceptable to my dad, and if not an A.

I have a problem with Schadenfreude, admittedly. And frankly, the higher the horse you fall off of, the better, more spectacular, and more painful the fall is. I want a video camera and a microphone for when my dad finally gets a hold of Z: he's been avoiding the house like the plague these past couple of days.

My parents aren't the kind to let children live with them if they're over 18 and doing nothing. They can do nothing with their lives elsewhere and stop mooching off the parents. (Whatever sad moralizing might be done by anyone reading this: that's the way my parents work. Step off, your parents can do as they like. But as for "heartless," I won't hear it. I don't feel like my parents owe me a room, just because I exist, at all: if anything I owe them.) I'm not bothered, I have nothing to worry about. I come home for summer break. And they'd tolerate me staying at their house, say, if I were to have a definite job lined up but only kicking in a few months later, as might happen with the JET program or with the FSOT. If not, I can find a way to fend for myself until I get something lined up, there are ways I might have never lived on my own--that doesn't mean I don't learn well on the fly and can't figure something out quick, or that I haven't vicariously paid attention to the stuff my friends deal with living on their own. But if my brother thinks he can just move back into my parents' house after pretty much near-flunking out of college and screw off and take off with his buddies to go to Renaissance Festivals in full gear, business as usual, he's quite mistaken.

Anyway I'm not sure he really realizes it in the sense that it hasn't really sunk in as to the real effectual meaning. Or if he cares. Either he's going to a community college, into the service, or moving out of the house entirely to do God knows what. And God knows what he's going to do for a career. Be some sort of meathead, I suppose.

Why doesn't my brother realize he's really got himself into a world of problems? I know college isn't the most important thing in the world. You can be absolutely successful without college. It isn't necessary (if I wanted to write as a career, I would never have gone to college). But that aside, my brother has never had the drive to be independently successful. He comes off as this easygoing doofus, though this unfortunately pervades all parts of his personality, up to and including his desire to see how to get from point A to point B--in other words, he fantasizes or just lies to get somebody out of his face. I do it because I'm terribly spiteful (I get a kick out of it, as well), and like to kick sand in the faces of people who say I can't. But he's just existed as a kind of dazed and confused bag of "how to get by under their radar."

I'm the elder sibling. I'm the snippier one, as he likes to point out, as if it made a difference, but damned if I'm not a happy one: I'm finally getting to do some of the things I've wanted to do for forever, beyond happily taking the non-medical route in college, as my parents pleasantly accepted once my dad was satisfied one could make a decent living with it, and if the overload petition goes through I'll be licensed for scuba diving by winter break, too. I'm taking violin next semester, I've started fencing, I'm studying wonderful things that are engaging and fun for me, and I have good friends. _{I'll miss college when it's gone and I'm considering grad school as a result.} Want to know why I'm snippier, and in general just plain unpleasant the majority of the time? It's not to do with me being unhappy: bitter and cynical might be a better turn of phrase, with side orders of pity lite, and exasperation, and a vengeful "thinks it's great fun" sauce.

It's because I've got my idiot younger brother to contend with. There is an Italian saying (or so the website said, I don't speak Italian so don't hold me to any of this) that pretty much went: if you can't be smart, you've got to be physically capable. Well, my brother is physically capable: see above about working out. But damned if his head isn't a vacant black hole. My parents don't want to hover over him like a helicopter, making sure he's doing exactly what he should be doing. They aren't helicopter parents. And how did he get such a nice, intelligent girlfriend? Certainly not for the quality of his thought processes.

Mom protects him relentlessly. I guess I can understand: she's a youngest child too, so she assumes his problems are half the result of eldest-child mental abuse (or some shit), meaning myself and my father. But besides that, she doesn't treat us in the same way: my punishments for the far-between mistake I make these days far outstrips in harshness the punishment my brother receives for the results of his dumbfuckery. She assumed that I needed the harsher punishment, because I just kept doing what I wanted. He acquiesced as a kid and you know what you taught him, mom? That he can fuck up and he'll be gone easy on.

I mean, seriously, what are you going to do for his lying to you about getting in his grades when he hadn't, mom? And telling you it was an A? Nothing. You're going to decline to tell dad in the first place, because you want to protect him from severe punishment. You're not doing him a favor. He boiled the soup, now make him slurp it.

I dunno what he's doing, but he's not going back to Arkansas next year. If he goes back, he'll be under extreme scrutiny.

And as a final note: I found out I get the Miata when I graduate, for keeps.