The genetics of conscience

So I haven't written a blessed thing on my blog in two months, that's what happens when you move form the Promised Land of wireless internet connection down into the technological inner city ghetto known as dialup. Yeah, dialup, go ahead, mock me. I still say that I am impressed that my landlord actually found it in all that muck in La Brea. That tar is a devil to get out of the carpets.

So what's happened in between March and June? One of the major things that happened, I suppose, is that I made the mistake of being there for my pet mope because it was the (loud inner sigh) the right thing to do, goddamnit, which had consequences which culminated plots involving a knife, some Psycho re-enactments and making snarly sex faces across a dinner table.

And it has dawned on me that much as I like to believe that I'm a tough-as-nails rock chick, I'm not. I, apparently, have a regrettably gooey centre like a Mars Bar left too long in the sun. Miss C once told me that I had an unswerving moral compass. Hachar smirks and calls it "endearing" (but has the decency not to chant 'I told you so!' and do victory dances when things go arse over tit).

Most of these torturous adherence to the little voice in my head makes me think that like Captain Ahab, I appear doomed to follow forever the trail of my Moby-Dick-esque ethical convictions only to end up in dire straits. I am constantly surprised when no one else seems similarly driven, when really, you'd think I would have learned my lesson by now. And when I get surprised, I can hear the Universe yelling 'Sucker!' (The universe, by the way, sounds eerily like this girl who used to bully me in kindergarten. She grew up and got fat, and I didn't. Ha, who's laughing now?)

Anyway, I am beginning to question the point of it all. Why do the right thing when no one else will, and when all that happens is that the universe throws figurative cream pies at your unprotected face? What's right, I've found, is an absolutely bloody useless shield against metaphorical cream pies. Why bother if no one else will? I asked The Boy this once and he said, "Because no one else will."

'Because no one else will' is why my mother has to feed my grandmother, bathe her, help her use the toilet and walk her down the stairs because my grandmother's own goddamned flesh and blood will not. Martyrdom, it seems, is a hereditary disease.