A clue: No

This summer as we sat dragging our legs in a night time pool my friend was trying to verbalize how her dysfunctional family made her feel and she finally just said "You know what it's like. How do you deal with knowing your sibling is the favorite?"
I sat silent for a moment. It was a true enough statement. "It's not the fact that they like her more, its the inequality in treatment that has always bothered me... but then she has always needed more than I have" I shrugged. I'm resigned.
So I can't be too surprised that my sister (the smart one) is going back to school or that my mother (the poor one) is paying for it. She needs more education. She's too smart to be doing manual labor her whole life and she's already wearing her body out. It's a much more just than a plan my mother cavalierly tossed out a year or two ago "thinking about starting a college fund for needy students" I told her she could pay me back for my college first.
Even if our parents could have helped me with college I doubt they would have. They didn't approve of my choices. They wouldn't help me support my "lifestyle" as that would be condoning it. So I was on my own. This is how it feels to be the older sibling: Breaking the parents in to new ideas, wearing them down, acclimating them. Now they're there to help her, even tho' she's living in sin with a guy we all have reservations about.
So again I shrug. I'm past the age of reacting to feeling 2nd string and, again, she needs the help. It's smarter for her to take their help as opposed to taking out a loan (as it always has been). It's better, if my mother wants to help someone, that it go to her than it go to a stranger and I have to take 2nd place to a stranger.

Am I used to it enough that it doesn't bother me?

Is it odd

I often confuse the names Joseph Campbell and Joseph Conrad. Tho' their writings are completely different their ideas often aren't.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. ~ Joseph Campbell

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns. ~ Joseph Conrad

Perhaps they would forgive me, so long as I don't invite them to the same party.

Draft

Pain is the gateway drug

Once you lose the sensation for physical pain
and the absence of feeling overwhelms the thin lines cut into flesh
there are pills for that.
Analgesic pills: 1 for headaches, 10 for broken hearts
Blue and yellow pills for exhaustion
Tiny white ones for residual alertness
Green ones float you thru the anxiety
Big white ones for dizzying oblivion
A handful split up in a public bathroom
Trade 2 for a hit
these two should counteract each other
but like a frantic sublimation it rolls the mind
side effects may include
indifference, intensity, turning giddy or goo
Too many side effects to gauge
balancing and counter balancing with little helpers.
Effects may intensify with alcohol

Happy Wedding Birthday

This month year last I was in a flurry.
This week last year I hardly had a drink.
Today last year I was married.

We were reminded how quickly the date was coming up by all the wedding gift shopping. Lazy as we are we couldn’t really justify doing nothing, after all next year we know we’ll probably forget.
First anniversary is paper. Paper: Books, love letters, art, money, tickets. A dinner boat tour on the Lake? Perfect, romantic, something we’ve never done. It didn’t occur to us that 8-8-08 the boats might be sold out for, uh, I dunno, weddings? 8 is the number of new beginnings so there are a lot of weddings. Almost all of my Asian friends say this is the best year (year of the rat, the first sign of the Chinese zodiac, also an auspicious number for Buddhists) and the numerologists see the 8 meaning fortune/ prosperity and 888 meaning three times the prosperity. Mathematicians: Eight is a power of two. A fallen 8 is infinity. On and on. The point is all the wedding parties seemed to have the same idea.
And tickets seemed like such a good idea. Lucky us they extended Cirque Du Soleil. Something else we’ve never done.
So here’s to the first birthday of new beginnings, celebrated with limber contortionists and sensory over load.

Oh look, its a computer screen again.
I have to apologize but this is part of the reason I don't post often. Spend all day typing up legal documents and you might resent the screen too. Part of it is I type r-e-a-l-l-y slooowly. and I've tried to improve but I'm out of practice now and it is painful. My hands actually hurt. It doesn't help that my desk is too high and the chair well is too low, but that is beside the point. I guess this post is mostly complaining so far so I feel I should change that and focus on the positives. I'm good at hiding behind positivity.

I had a little heartbreaking experience recently and spent a day trying to convince my self it didn't matter. The same universal problem of need for acceptance and fear of betrayal. The problem was it did matter. When you let yourself care for people you care how they perceive you. But I'm a "good little actress" and I have to get over it. As I was told in 3rd grade "girls are mean and you just have to learn how to take it if you want to be their friends" The girl (my "friend") who told me that was a well -liked, -adjusted, -to do girl and obviously I took it to heart. You believe the people you look up to (we would all do well to remember that).
But then there are friends like the ones I hung out with last weekend. They just make me feel better. Even when they tell me past judgments of me, I truly find them endearing. "When I first met you I thought you were a bitch" so and so said she thought you were a hippie. Sure those things (to me) are a bit of a compliment. But I think in the revealing of those things there is a comfort, a closeness. I am comfortable enough around you to tell you the truth.
I admit I have said things about people behind their back, but I never said anything I wasn't willing to (and often did) say to their face. Isn't that what friends are? Wouldn't you tell your friend they had something green in their teeth? Wouldn't you tell them they were being: taken in, drunk, stupid? Aren't we past laughing at people; with toilet paper stuck to them, skirts tucked into pantyhose, rambling on inanely about some politician but never attributing it to the right person, and still calling them friends? Don't friends stop friends?
If they don't, most likely they never were friends anyway.
And I'd rathar be a friend than a pet any day.

Thunderous Falls

Summer I hardley even knew you. The heavy storms that pre curse fall have already begun. So, soon summer will be gone. I don't actually know what happened to it. I went to Door County. I spent some time in New York and in D-town, but watching the storms roll in reminds me how soon it will be gone. That is one of the reasons I miss gardening. Thats how backwards I am. I keep track of time by the seasons in nature. When to plant, harvest and cut back are huge seasonal markers. Here in the city I have lost that marker of time. Sometimes I wonder if this is how a potted plant brought indoors feels.

Everything runs together for me here. I'm just not use to it perhaps. You might mark the seasons with street feasts or vacation time or the latest band release (tour) or the influx of tourists (I'm getting better about recognizing that season) but I just haven't caught on yet. It's all marking time on the vine (as it weren't). I do the same things every day. Nothing changes but my wardrobe. I still have not figured out how where the time goes. But I am simple, of simple folk. I watch the weather. I smell the change in seasons. I observe the subtle changes from behind the pain of my window. Domesticated and transplanted.