Joan Bryan

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Department of Fire Protection Engineering

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Joan has always been a combination of mimicking Sarah, spoiled brat entitlement, and aggressive insecurity (like Sarah). Like all of us, she is physically unattractive but rather than developing any genuine interests or concern for others adopted the wannabe tactic of mimicking the most rigid, negative attitudes around her. She adopted the Sarah shtick of loud-mouthed abuse and scammy insistence on overrating her own non-existent qualities, character, and competence.

She oddly continues to comment on other people's physical appearance as if it is another area in which she is an undisputed expert. It is all a combination of rote Sarah-isms and stunted fifth-rate adolescent, failed sorority rushee, mean girl/popular girl wannabe - the perpetual asides denigrating other people including her vaguely transactional husband ("Tim doesn't make very much money", "Tim works almost full time"), the constant references to what is "popular" or "on trend" or has "made money" as a guide, the canned corporate jargon word salad, the astonishing belief that she is smarter than everyone else coupled with grotesque ignorance and cookie-cutter self-promotion. Like all truly stupid and ignorant people (including Sarah), she is grotesquely incurious, inconsiderate, and thinks she is indisputably smarter and more capable than anyone else - or at the very least committed to pretending she is smarter and more capable.

She has always been arrogant, violent, selfish, bullying, insecure, shallow, willfully ignorant, aggressively stupid, grotesquely un-self-aware, rigid, bigoted, closed-minded, and emotionally unstable. She adopted all of Sarah’s hysterics and neuroses - her violence, bigotries, and lying – as a matter of course and considers them entirely normal and proper. This was compounded by Sarah trying perpetually to prop Joan up, coddling and spoiling her - doing her homework, encouraging her temper tantrums, taking her to overpriced shopping malls, praising her failures, denigrating anything Joan did poorly at (i.e., most things), exaggerating her abilities. Joan remains chronically condescending - as child and adult - without noticing or admitting that she has next to nothing to condescend about, not even getting into the whole mindset of seeing condescension and snottiness as positive traits. She is incapable of questioning anything because she is fundamentally empty and can only copy or regurgitate what is around her.

She mimics Sarah's gestures (the hunched over storming about; sticking her bony finger in people's faces; the grabbing and pulling; the blocking people's paths, the performative busy-ness and frantic counterproductive running around to pretend she is Oh So Busy And Important). She regurgitates all of Sarah's slogans at full screeching volume - "I'M NOT HERE TO BE POPULAR!" (which also serves as cover for the fact that she isn't but has always been shamelessly obsessed with being so, as was Sarah), "I'LL JUST KNOCK SOME HEADS TOGETHERl!!!", "NO! WE'RE NOT GOING TO DO THAT!", "YOU LISTEN TO ME!", "YOU'RE CAUSING PROBLEMS IN OUR MARRIAGE!","YOU'RE NOT GONNA LIKE IT!!!!!", "MAYBE THAT'S JUST WHAT YOU NEED!!" and most strangely "I'M A LOUDMOUTH WHITE WOMAN!!!" which she ludicrously pretends has nothing to do with Sarah's blatant racism (and, for that matter, John's far quieter version). 

She refuses to learn or listen. Like Sarah, she has always refused to read (and, like Sarah is barely able to do so), jumps to conclusions and has problems with anything that is not rote regurgitation and cookie-cutter boilerplate. So her information sources are incredibly limited and she latches onto whatever handful of factoids or sources she comes up with and regurgitates ad nauseam. If challenged, she will simply increase the volume - like Sarah. She projects constantly and assumes everyone is as shallow and selfish as she is while couching it all in cookie cutter, boilerplate slogans - a hefty portion of which are borrowed from Sarah while others are regurgitated wannabe-isms or delusional asides about her non-existent "morality" and "conscience". She thinks she knows everything, but based on nothing or the sort of combination of random bigotries, prejudices, misunderstandings, assumptions and poor judgment typical of Sarah. Screeching, arrogant and autoritarian but too lazy to bother with facts, specifics, details, logic or anythign but the tiniest of information sources.

The consummate little brat, she would go into her rages and come up and start kicking and screaming and throwing whatever she had handy. She would be some nothing wimp at school, incompetent at everything, then come home, stomp around imitating Sarah and throw her manipulative little temper tantrums. We could never go on any sort of vacation or family outing without Joan launching into one of her screeching, Look At Me! performances whereupon we all had to stop and watch Sarah fawn over the little brat. She couldn’t stand my having birthday parties or us doing anything for my birthday so she would suIk or fake being ill so that Sarah would make us come back early. Like Sarah she would go into spastic nervous attacks driving - wrecked one car with me in it driving to the local, garbage Springbrook High School in Silver Spring when she panicked and turned the wrong way into a lane of oncoming traffic. 

The anorexia was one sign though it went beyond the relatively brief period of not eating and drama queen food productions. Her post-forced mental ward internment - daddy, of course, had to fly out to get her out - with its screeching, dictatorial projection was much in character ("YOU'RE MEASURING YOUR FOOD!!!! I SAW YOU!!!!!!" in response to nothing and without the slightest change to her Sarah-esque assumption that she always and everywhere was "right" ("NO!! THAT'S WRONG!!!")). The general traits were the same: rigid and controlling of herself and others, obliviously selfish, aggressively dictatorial though inevitably clueless, uninformed, incurious, and incompetent. Even the anorexia was in the tradition of all her other grosstly egotistical "look at me while I perform!" productions. Lord knows we had to be subjected to her weekly swim meet breakdowns every friggin' summer where after coming in fourth or fifth or sixth or whatever in the piddly local swim club meet (and knowing she would since other folks were obviously and always faster as if any of it even remotely mattered) she would break into hysterical tears and rush over and perform for mommy. Every stinkin' week for a decade as standard narcissistic grossly selfish practice. Joanie needs this, Joanie needs that; Joanie stomps her feet again screaming "I'M VERY ANGRY!!!!!" as if anyone should be anything but repulsed with her garbage. She would, and does, insist on whatever random half-baked idea she has fallen upon and then whips herself into a fury trying to force them onto others - most often with typically counterproductive results.

It continued after I went to college with Joan calling and screeching or doing holiday visit productions. Sarah would have me do favors for Joan and then Joan would, of course, not say any thanks but would turn around and launch into her hysterics and grossly ignorant lectures and smarmy asides. Sarah thought Joan was too unstable to drive across country herself in 1990 so she asked me to fly out to Colorado and drive with her. Stupidly I agreed. Joan showed up at the airport and promptly launched into her typical, Sarah-inflected psychopath routine. This was wrong, that was wrong. She would panic and then demand directions. We couldn't possibly walk around the block in Topeka of all places because it was "too dangerous" (i.e., Joan had seen a "black person"). She couldn't find her exit so started screaming for directions for someplace I had no clue about, "WHERE'S THE EXIT!! WHERE'S THE EXIT!! WHERE'S THE EXIT!!!!!!! YOU TELL ME WHERE THE EXIT IS!!!!!!!!!!" (a trick she had pulled before when she invited herself out to visit me in college when she simply wanted to prance around and look at the campus while otherwise performing and spouting passive aggressive criticisms). She pulled up to the house screaming, slamming doors, stomping, flinging her arms around screeching, "HE KNEW WHERE THE EXIT WAS AND HE WOULDN'T TELL ME!!!!!!!" in typical toddler Joanie fashion, turned around and shoved me while Sarah and John stood there doing nothing as usual. Sarah simply went in and coddled Joan, asked her what she wanted for dinner. John went and shoved peanuts down his face. 

At Christmas during during my first year of law school with exams after break and when I was in peak ulcerative colitis and vomiting non-stop three days in a row out of every ten Joan stomped around as usual demanding attention, flinging out insults, screaming orders, plopping down where I was studying and turning on some crap TV program while she flipped through her Glamour magazine (as if that was going to do any good). When even Sarah asked her to tone it down, her response was to scream "IT'S MY HOUSE, TOO!!!!!", turn the TV up louder and stomp around some more. I ended up leaving and going back to school for the rest of the holiday break. After I came out Sarah and Joan both attacked me with Joan calling up to screech (in typical Joan-style, regurgitated Sarah fashion) "HOW DARE YOU?!! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!!!!" 

A couple of years later a friend of mine who was moving to DC stayed over for a couple of days before his apartment was ready. Utterly unremarkable. Joan, of course, launched into hysterics as usual. She melted down into her usual aggressive insecurity and after some typical snotty asides stormed about throwing yet another temper tantrum ("I HAVE A VERY STRESSFUL JOB AND NEED TO RELAX!!!!!!") and gojo'd herself back to Cincinnati. Lord knows why, though typical. Part of it, it seems, was the fact that he was fairly decent looking and not a complete idiot while Joan was, of course, ugly, stupid, awkward and unpleasant and, at the age of 29, still had not apparently really dated and it seems from another wildly self-centered, hysterical outburst had not even had sex yet ("I HAVE BASIC BODILY NEEDS THAT ARE NOT BEING MET!!!!!"). Sure, fine whatever, - yet another of the never ending excuses for performative temper tantrums and which, of course, had John and Sarah worrying that she was going to sleep with some random person off the street and get HIV or whatever given her history of over the top meltdowns, ignorance and poor judgment. The typical Joan main character syndrome bit.

Part of it is also that Joan's idea of family has always been her performing and everyone else coddling and covering up for her. Like Sarah, everything with Joan is pitched to 11 - it is always SO difficult, and SO demanding, and SO stressful, and must involve a maximum of self-centered emoting and performance art. That has been a constant since the very beginning and is a direct copy of Sarah and her perpetual need to hyperventilate and perform. 

When Sarah found out she had terminal lung cancer (big surprise; Sarah smoked for a quarter century including in front of us as children; "the best part of college was going to the coffee shop, drinking my coffee and smoking my cigarettes" as she liked to say), Joan decided to start calling overseas in the middle of the night demanding that I quit my job and fly back to the U.S. to do lord knows what - not that Joan had any intention of quitting her job or doing anything beyond flapping her mouth ("YOU NEED TO COME HOME RIGHT NOW!!!! WE NEED TO RALLY AROUND AS A FAMILY!!!!"). Again, Joan's idea of "family" has always meant Joan storming around making demands, throwing temper tantrums and expecting everyone else to accommodate her. 

Joan lies and bullshits constantly and thinks it's "normal" because Sarah did the same. She shamelessly copies other people without having the slightest thought or concern. She thinks her children should do the same, generically flinging around meaningless, brain-dead phrases like "crafting compelling narratives" in her usual corporate wannabe gibberish. She flaps her mouth about how "moral" she is and her "good conscience" while being the same shamelessly selfish and insecure egotist she was as a toddler and adolescent.

She hired consultants to write their college application essays and tell them what books to pretend to have read and what activities to pretend to be interested in. She made quid pro quo wannabe donations to her preferred college (for typically scammy and haphazard reasons Cornell, which she then repackaged into a typically truth-stretching fairy tale) oh so coincidentally timed with her children's applications - bonus points for using money from our father that she was trying to avoid paying taxes on. She conned our father and me into setting up accounts for her children supposedly to pay for their college. Precious, entitled, spoiled brat, incompetent little Joanie couldn't possibly pay for her own children's college just as she couldn't possibly be bothered to pay for any other major expense in her life despite being fully able to do so. She stomped around, as usual, complaining that everything was so expensive and he thought she didn't have money and they wouldn't be able to afford it - which is what he told me when he called me about it and left the decision to me about setting up the accounts or not. She, of course, had and has more than enough as she likes to passive aggressively brag ("not bragging, just stating fact") when she is not trying to get other people to pay her expenses (cars, condo, boob job, family vacations, children's college etc etc). 

She later tried to deny I had any role at all in (foolishly) getting her the money and then refused to respond when I sent her the emails backing it up. Typical for Joan, she still has not paid back my part of the money and, as far as I can tell, has no intention of doing so. She ultimately never even used the children's accounts to pay for their college but instead paid herself and is having them reimburse her to take tax breaks or some such manipulation. This, of course, after I had scholarships for undergrad and took out loans for law school while Joan - like Sarah - never cared a thing about education and learning or much in general beyond her shallow Sarah-esque wannabe-ism and passive aggressive insecurities.

She likes to nickel and dime and "garnish", as she calls it, if she thinks she's owed money or simply wants to be abusive and obnoxious - and she almost always thinks she is owed something, monetary or otherwise. When our father died he had a pension with survivor benefits. Since Joan was in the U.S. and I was overseas and it was paid out at the time in US bank checks he put her name down as the beneficiary (there could only be one) and then left written instructions that it was to be split 50/50. Joan has gone through periods - as she of course would - where she likes to dick around with it, sometime send it, sometime not, complain that PayPal or an electronic transfer is far too complicated for her, etc. I've spoken to lawyers about this and am perfectly happy to sue if she pulls this or any other stunt ever again. 

In short, Joan was, and fundamentally remains, a violent, abusive, shallow, selfish, shriveled up little bigot and coward - like Sarah. As with everything else, she has tried to use the ridiculous, dishonest Sarah scholarship to parade around and attempt to prop herself up - and still doesn't have sense enough not to push the most blatant lies.