Say, just an announcement to everyone who chats with me, I destroyed my smartphone last night in a fit of rage, so chats will happen far less. Here's what happened:

I like having cookies with my teatime (4PM) tea. Yesterday, I bought a bag of these lightish Keebler thin cookies that was on sale for like $2 along with the rest of the night's dinner, which I had to pay for partly out of pocket because we're out of food stamps for the rest of the month. So in a sense, I bought that bag of cookies with my own money. When I got home, I hid it in my room.

See, I'm the only one in the house who seems to understand that cookies and Little Debbies and other snacks are a treat that should be eaten sparingly; in other words, I can keep it in my room and not snack on it whenever the mood strikes me. (I even have a little gumball machine full of M&Ms that's still 98% full of the fall colors M&Ms I put in last year!) Seeing as my sister eats snack foods like crazy (a jar of Nutella with herlasts about as long as it would in this chatroom), and my mother has to seriously watch her weight (especially after the coronary on Dec. 30), I have appointed myself as snack keeper and keep it in my room.

Problem is, I'm exceedingly lazy. When a box of snacks is empty, I leave it there. Thus, yesterday afternoon, when my sister went in to steal my cookies from my room, something I've never done to her and she knows it, she noticed the plethora of boxes and concluded I was, like, hogging them or something, and thus I couldn't be trusted to keep the snacks anymore.

Later that day, I made myself some tea at 4PM, y'know, teatime. I got those cookies as tea biscuits, and went looking for them. At the time, Annie (my sister) was talking to Mom in her room with the door closed because Annie doesn't want me to hear anything. So, after searching my room and the kitchen twice each, I knocked on the door and asked if they'd seen a bag of cookies.

Cue silence while, as my mother told me this morning, Annie proceeded to try and hide the bag in Mom's closet XD

I heard Mom tell Annie to give me the cookies, but she stated the conclusions she'd come to as I said before. Finally, she opened the door and held the bag out, holding it by a corner. She said I could take some cookies, but she wouldn't let me have the bag, saying I don't deserve to keep sweets anymore. I knew she was just being a bitch again, and that if I left the bag in her hands, it would be gone by midnight, and dammit, I bought the damn thing. So I did what a lot of people would do. I snatched it right out of her hand, grabbing only the exposed bag part and not touching her a bit, perhaps leaning in a little.

A moment passed, and then she attacked me in utter fury. At first, she went for the bag, and we had a brief tug-o-war, before I was like, "It's just a bag of cookies, fine, give 'em to her," and let go. But then, she hit me with the bag two or three times! And after I get my bearings and realize what happened and call her out on assaulting me, she says I assaulted her, that I lunged at her.

Let me take a second to explain something: My sister, who's turning 29 on Monday, has been through hell in a handbasket. To give you an idea, she was homeless for a good while. So yeah, she's been traumatized. Add to that the fact that I resemble our horrible father in too many ways, which makes her afraid of me (note I'm smaller and weaker than her), and you can see why she's wary of me. Therefore, she didn't see me snatching the bag, she saw me lunging at her, even though I wasn't. When you're a trauma survivor, this stuff happens. So no, Annie wasn't saying that I lunged at her just to get out of it or anything childish, she really believed I'd lunged at her. (And she was trying to get out of it, probably. She's one of those people who's never wrong.)

What ensued was a big argument, with me in utter disbelief at what happened and Mom trying her best to mediate as she always does. At some point, I called Annie a bitch, because to me, that's what she was being at the moment. As an attempt to both escape the argument and try to get Annie's temper off of me a bit, I broke away and picked up the mess that had been made, then took out all the trash. (Trash that had apparently piled up while I, the chore boy, was out of the hosue all day.)

I was in the middle of the final bag when Mom came into the kitchen and summoned me. I (tried to hold it off by saying I wanted to finish taking out the garbage, then) came with her. I did what Mom wanted me to do, say sorry to Annie for calling her a bitch. But Annie didn't take it. She said that she was tired of being nice to me and letting stuff slide, that she was going to be full bitch from then on. She then went into a rant about how I was going to have a schedule on the hall wall, she was going to monitor pretty much everything I do, and other stuff.

Now, while the part of Dad that I sadly took was his yelling and temper tantrums, Annie seems to have taken his controlling nature. And while Annie and Mom were more victims to the former, I was victim to the latter for eleven straight years. I didn't know exactly what to call Annie at that point (a control freak), but I did say that she was scaring me, because she really was. She literally sounded insane.

In the theme of "you do what you're told", she said how she noticed I'd been keeping my cell in my room with me, something I actually shouldn't have been doing, but truth be told, was overall pretty harmless. (I'm not supposed to have access to my phone except to use it as a phone because they say that I spend too much time on it talking with you guys and all, or surfing the net; I'm restricted from the net because I tend to spend more time on the computer than doing what I'm supposed to be doing. However, truth be told, I don't use my phone for much surfing or anything all that often, mainly because its got a tiny little screen and keyboard. I just liked having it in case I wanted to look something up, or check up on Twitter now and then after I'd tweeted because I wanted to see if anyone noticed.)

Of course, I wasn't happy about having the phone kept in the living room again. Then, when Mom said that I can have my phone on me when Mom isn't home, because she might need to call me, Annie objected, saying I'd just use it to screw around even more; I could just answer the phone in the hall (like how we did in the olden days with landlines). Mom objected to that because she said I might have my headphones on, and Annie objected to that, too, I think. Basically, from what I could tell Annie was saying, I can't have my phone at all. I pointed out that I'm the one that bought and pay for the phone, saying that it's only fair that I can have it, my general case for keeping it on me, and she objected with the "you live here, you don't pay the rent, you live by our rules" cop-out that she's been using for every motherfucking thing I've complained about.

The argument had been heating me up. When it got to my phone, which I worked hard to get and maintain, I got really hot. And then the cop-out, and how she was using her irrational troll logic against Mom, the only sane person in the house, all of this just...just culminated, and I boiled over.

I didn't think, "I can just put my phone in the living room, go to my tea, and be done with it." I didn't think anything. Maybe part of me couldn't think. But all I knew was that Annie was never, EVER going to stop bitching and moaning unless she had things HER way. And I was sick of the bitching and moaning. I was sick of her yelling. I wanted her to stop yelling, to stop bitching, to stop and let us get on with life. I wouldn't be surprised if part of me wanted her to stop acting like Dad.

The basic logic I had was something like, "Annie doesn't want me to use my phone PERIOD, and she'll always think I'm using it as long as it exists, and it's causing so much trouble right now, so let's break the damn thing so we don't have to worry about it ever again." So I took my phone out of my pocket and threw it hard at the floor. The screen bent and got spiderweb cracks all over. It turned on, but it was dead. I put it in the same bag as the garbage.

Then Mom asked, in a voice that was about to break down into weeping, what else I was going to break.

For some reason, probably because of the fact we have so little money and I just wasted a shitton of it by breaking my phone, Mom was REALLY upset. But I think what I thought at first was, "Uh-oh, Dad's been known to break stuff when he's angry, I just triggered Mom AND Annie." I tried to keep up the devil-may-cry facade I adopt when getting into these situations against Annie, a strategy I use to try not to show how upset I actually am and show that she's not getting to me, and I was called out on it. I said that I was doing that because I didn't want to lose control of my emotions. Annie tried to get into more arguing, but I was able to beg loudly that we all just take some time to chill; at the moment, I wasn't really able to give a good answer to either of them, I was just too caught up in emotions.

So I made dinner. I felt like shit for like an hour or two after, and I cried when I talked with Mom about all of it, and...I got better, believe it or not. My antidepressents are working, baby! When I heard Annie and Mom laughing together sometime after the event (about our cat, not me), I asked Mom if bouncing back was what I was supposed to do, even though it was my fault. She said it wasn't all my fault, and that I should bounce back, so I bounced back. I commented how I'd still have been beating myself up over it at that time were this a past me, attributing my recovery to my antidepressants, something my mom has thought weren't working.

I decided not to try and go online that evening--my cord hangs outside Annie's door so she knows I'm offline; I was afraid she'd explode again if she saw it was taken, and thought I should talk about this with my friends after I'd had time to calm down more. That's why I'm talking about this today.

So yeah, I'm now out one smartphone. Including the like huge SD card I had gotten for it for cheap, which I'm kicking myself over and over for not removing before I threw the phone out; I actually tried picking through the garbage for it, but not feeling it and instead feeling lots of chicken grease from last night's meal that I'd failed to put away--another thing Annie was pissed about; Mom said that since I paid my own money for it already, I will instead not be reimbursed--led me to realize the card's probably toast by now, too.

No more Discord or Twitter on the go, no more looking up stuff whenever I'm curious, no more checking my bank account when I really need to, no more nice contact list I'd built up, no more emergency entertainment when I'm out and about.

BUT!

No more worrying about Annie bitching about my phone, no more looking on Twitter and finding DOOOOOOOOM that depresses me for up to the entire day, no more frustration at a camera that should be decent for something like that, no more temptation to faff off when I'm home, no more grumbling internally half the time I surf the web for various reasons, no more worrying about having to make $38 a month by begging people to commission me!

Breaking my smartphone was an incredibly stupid choice, but to be honest, it could be a lot worse. I have an oldish flip phone they got me one month when I couldn't pay my phone bill, and it works well enough; it's on a different carrier, TracPhone instead of Virgin, but I learned this morning that yes, I can transfer my Virgin number to my flip phone. This way, people will still be able to contact me, no change of numbers needed! I also decided that I won't get another smartphone until either I or Annie have left the house for good, since it would only cause MORE chaos otherwise. And yes, I know, even WORSE camera, but at least it makes sense why it's so bad.

Overall, yeah, I broke my cool cell phone, and I regret it, but I've got an alternative, so I'm able to do what cell phones let you do, and that's good, because I've got bigger fish to fry. I've got a Target application to finish, I've got a house (and especially room) to straighten up and maintain, I've got a commission series I promised to Rossmallo, I've got concert band to practice for, I've got church choir rehearsals and services to sing at, I've got a DMH packet to fill out so I can get a case worker...I've got a semblance of a life to live. The simpler it is, the better.

I think I'd also like to mention that, while I was beating myself up, I thought that I really had to leave the house, that I need to find someone to live with until Annie left the house. I realize now that, as always, that's 99.99999909% impossible, especially if I want to remain on MA welfare (essential now that we've got Trump). And besides, how often does the whole "this furry needs to move in with someone" thing work? I'd have a better chance getting into a shudder group home.

So yeah, that's about it.