#for instance; I'm an intelligent and helpful adult until what I say is annoying or unflattering

[alighted-willow]

(I'm not fully awake right now so please correct me if I misspeak or say something wrong-headed.)

I'm from a rather mixed familial unit and, after having moved away from my family and to a place with a different flavour of diversity and overall different culture, I've learned that I have an unusual understanding of race and culture.

The township I'm from (in the U.S.,) is mostly Catholic, mostly alcoholic, and mostly third generation Irish and Mexican. My familial unit is Italian-Lebanese-Irish-Scottish-French, Italian-French-Mexican, and Black (unspecified) and White (unspecified). I have step siblings, half siblings, and fourth siblings. We're all white passing and have what a previous person called “conditional whiteness” but which I call “Bleached Culture”.

My family absolutely lost our culture before my generation and every time I try and practice my culture, this or that relative goes into a tissy. I inherited a gorgeous pentacle that had been hand carved in Bethlehem from mother of pearl from my great-grandmother and my grandma, her daughter, looked at the drawn out version of the pentacle and called it demonic.

This symbol? This one right here? It is harshed to hell and back by the media (as well as most people in general, hipsters, and hack creators who want an easy way of saying “Ooooh, it's spoookie”). It is literally a cultural symbol. Not even just from my Irish and Scottish predecessors, it's also an early Christianity symbol that got tossed to the waste-side— that's why my hyper Catholic double-grandma had it.

And to be clear, I'm the only person in my immediate family who practices (or tries to practice) non-white-standard activities. It's annoying, cause it means I don’t really have someone in the family to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes with but that's off-topic. I am also the single palest person in the entire family. I worked on a ranch for over a year and only barely gained some yellowish pigmentation. If my skin, hair, or eyes were darker, folks would probably be less amused by my exploration of cultural identity.

It makes for some awkward situations— I was at an Arabic cultural center at my university the other week and, while everyone there was lovely and being there was incredibly enriching, it was very clear that I wasn’t considered part of the group. Folks kept giving me odd glances, one person asked if I was there for a class assignment, it was- eh- it is what it is.

What was my point again? Oh, right, having pale-person-privilege is weird and creepy and creepy and weird. I was in late high school when I realized I had it. Let me rephrase, it is deeply upsetting that other people are disadvantaged. I have siblings who are white passing up until something goes wrong, at which point my sister is an angry Latino and my brother is a n-word. My little sister once joked to my step-mom that she wouldn’t go outside because the sun would “Take away [her] whiteness”. My Mom was told by my sister’s father that certain phrases she uses are slurs and she shrugged him off because “I carried a Mexican to term, how can I be racist?”

My view of whiteness vs non-whiteness falls under the “conditional whiteness” bit posited by a previous person. I agree with you. I also view that people's perceived “whiteness” is less about cultural identity and more of a privilege that can be removed whenever someone else deems it convenient.

Americans are strangely confident that their utterly bizarre ideas concerning ethnicity are universal, and then they get confused when that's not how things work.

Like apparently as far as they're concerned, the spanish are latino but italians are white, despite of ranging in the same colours and speaking languages so similar that I can vaguely make sense of italian by understanding the basics of french and spanish, and they're baffled when J.K. Rowling manages to be racist against white people.

[overthestars-and-offtoneverland]

So something I just realized is that I think Lemony Snicket helped me unmask some of the abusive narcissists in my life.

One specifically.

And it appears to be on accident.

Let me explain.

There are so many times in my childhood where my mother would get so damn offended by my intelligence or "otherness" to her and a weird amount of these memories are ASOUE related.

In chronological order:

I referred to Sunny as an infant. Like they do in the books. My mother, ever thinking she knows everything and I must be wrong. was insistent Sunny had to be a toddler because of the way I described how intelligent she was. (It's fiction, but okay Becky). I explained, no, they describe her as an infant. She can't even walk or talk. Unfortunately, my mother took this as an instance of me questioning her authority and intelligence (as she often did when I corrected her on factual information) and insisted I had to be wrong (even though I was reading the damn books and she wasn't) and that "infant" always meant "newborn." No, Becky. It's a synonym for "baby." It was being used as a synonym for "baby." I and Daniel Handler were both using it as a synonym for "baby." In fact, in some terms in psychology, you're an infant until you're freaking five. Why is this something you want to fight with your 8-year-old about you freaking child?

Got offended that I was reading a book where all the adults were stupid. (I'm gonna let that one speak for itself)

She made me put wrong information on school work because she refused to even look at physical evidence she was wrong. What was she so adamant about? The bitch thought there was a "T" in the word "Orphan." You know, the word I had been seeing every couple of sentences for months at the point. I pointed out that I definitely spelled the word "Orphan" right (I was doing a book fair project on The Bad Beginning) and she was getting pissed I wouldn't change the spelling to "Orphant." Why did she think this? "It's Little Orphant Annie!" Newsflash, no it isn't! It's also "Orphan" there. I even showed her the book and typed it into a spellchecker to show her the "this is misspelled" line that came up underneath. SHE PHYSICALLY REFUSED TO LOOK! So yeah, I looked stupid and spelled a word wrong on my homework so my mother would quit having a tantrum.

Got it in her head that I wanted her and my father to die because I mentioned the description on Briny Beach did actually sound pleasant. (I was literally only saying that an overcast beach where there aren't a lot of people crowding around was nice. Made the mistake of admitting I got the description from ASOUE and she went off the fucking handle screaming about how I wished my parents were dead. I do now, Becky, but it has nothing to do with fictional orphans. In fact, I think the fictional orphans kept me sane.)

And here's the thing that solidified that my mother did not care about me. I got The Puzzling Puzzles. I was so excited to share it with my parents (because I didn't realize they were abusive yet and did that kid thing where I wanted my parents to love me and thought they did) and my mother straight up turned around and said "Nobody cares about that but you" because I was annoying her and my father.

And they wonder why I never shared anything I loved with them. Now, my father in an abusive pos too. If I had to actually call anyone my personal Count Olaf, it's him.

The difference is, I would rather be stuck in a room with Count Olaf than be anywhere in driving distance of my father. At least Count Olaf sort of has a motive for his cruelty. My father is just a monster.

But my mother, she's the one I realized first. And a weird amount of the inciting indicants were ASOUE related. (And it irritates the hell out of me that they tried to bond with me in my adulthood when the Netflix series came out because now they didn't have to pick up a book. 20 years too late. And my father laughed at Klaus getting smacked which was way too familiar for me...)

Sorry, Carmelita, but from experience you don't want to be raised by Olaf and Esme. It's not a pleasant experience.