She is a silly college-girl when she's had too much wine, and I'm beginning to regard her as less of a mother-figure and more of a knowledgable college roommate. I mean, she does know about taxes and balancing checkbooks and job applications, all of which I still need to learn. She's absolutely NUTS on the fact that I am no longer Christian, and she refuses to look at me whenever I bring it up. Which is severely frustrating, since spirituality is, I think, the point of all my lives. She doesn't want to believe that I can be devout and happy as a non-Xtian. Other people, sure, but not me. Grrr.

She is a perfectly capable decision-maker unless my father is around. Then she has to look to him for the final word in any situation. She embraces her clearly-defined gender role, and I think she's not exactly the strongest female role model for me. That's okay, though; if all else fails, I can get another buzzcut and move someplace where people don't know I'm female. I easily pass for a male. Yes, my chest is that flat.

My father is a childish, 6'4" computer geek who has an oddly feminine way of eating, cooking, cleaning his electronics, and grooming himself. He has a curious obsession with washing his hands, brushing his teeth, etc. He's always been about as spoiled as I have been, but whereas I've recently learned to control my wicked temper, he hasn't. The slightest thing sets him off so quickly, and then 10 minutes later he wonders why I'm avoiding him. I think it has something to do with the male rate of adrenaline release, but honestly, he's such a frustrated, childish little penis. When my sister was getting into trouble with drugs etc. and he couldn't do anything about it, he just stomped around, slammed doors, and grew disproportionately cranky with me and Ma. He's always criticized me and my sister, always, and he thinks that whenever we use anything for our own purposes, be it a cardboard box or the last piece of cake, he seems a little flustered and calls it a waste. Thus, I'm a waste of every last one of his precious resources--except, of course, for the sperm he donated to make my prenatal self, and that selfsame sperm sadly encodes half my DNA.

My sister is a college dropout living with her bum of a boyfriend who, while he is quite friendly, gets little several-thousand-dollar inheritances every now and then, off of which he can live quite well. Thus, he has no job. My sister works at Burger King and lives with her boyfriend (as I said) and a few other people in a shitty apartment which she's trying her damndest to leave. She's definitely bitter, and often in a bad mood because of her money problems. But she is my sister, and fuck the world to ruin if I don't love her more than I love our parents. She loves horses and is supposedly kind of empathic. She has always delighted in criticizing me, as if when she was in fifth grade and I was in second, I was supposed to know everything a fifth-grader does. She's better about that now, maybe because we're older and don't live together anymore.

My mother is the epitome of the nurturing type, and even if she tends to overdo it, it has given me the support I needed to learn to dress myself, write my name, pump gas, etc. She also proofreads my school papers before I hand them in. She's currently making a serious and powerful effort to lose weight--successfully!--and because she is family-oriented, she reminds me that it's not such a bad thing to be at least on speaking terms with cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents, etc.

My father is highly intelligent (most of the time) and he is not ashamed of this. He will not pretend to be less than he really is just to avoid standing out or crushing his friends' egos. (Of course, most of his friends are just as smart as he, being computer geeks and all...) He looks like a big funny ape with his new beard and he'd thoroughly kick the arse of anyone who would dare attack any of us, unless of course he thinks we deserved it. He knows how to cross the street in a busy city without looking like a pothead or a skittish tourist.

My sister used to think she could beat me up. She couldn't. NOW maybe she could, but she still can't bite as hard as I can. (big wolfish grin) In retrospect I think I may have been crueler to her than she was to me in our make-believe days, but I'm only now finding out just how sensitive and receptive she truly is. She always used to put on a big tough-girl front for me, so I thought she was callous. I'm honestly disappointed the way she lets her boyfriend intimidate her--betrayed, even. Turns out I always played the hard-headed little bitch that she tried to be. Not that she can't hold a grudge. And I've heard that she was ALWAYS jealous of me, though I never could imagine why. She's just her. I'm just me. What's it matter?

And on your right, you'll see...

The bio page,
the blatantly boring bio of Background.

Labels
Such as I've been informed.

Past Lives
Such as I remember them, anyway.

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