6 posts tagged “family”

I was tagged.  It reminds me of chain letters, which reminds me of how much I used to hate chain letters.  This time though, I'm participating:

1. If I had no family, I would be volunteering my time and money to the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa right now.  (My certainty comes from a dream I abandoned four years ago.)

2. My middle sister is my best friend and inspiration.  Her life is a memoir waiting to happen -- and she's barely into her 30s!  Supporting her while also learning from her defines my own coming-of-age story.

3. I love spicy food so much it's masochistic.

4. The only bone I've ever broken was my tailbone.  It took me four weeks to go to a doctor about the pain, by which point my left leg dragged when I walked.

5. I wore the standard religious school uniform (Oxford, pleated skirt, and penny loafers) for only 6 of my 25 years, but I still miss it in the mornings.

6. The first and only time I ever truly loved a boyfriend, I never told him.

7. Discounting numerous design jobs and internships, I worked as a boutique assistant, retail chain cashier, indie bookstore shelver, organic grocery clerk, pub bartender, and bookstore barista until graduating from college.  In that order.  I've never not had a job!  That is, not since the summer before I turned 14.

8. The first thing I do after a trip to the grocery store is peel all those ornery stickers off my produce!  Reminds me of my mother, and how she immediately rips the tags off everyone's checked baggage.

9. When I lived in New York, I babysat for the most glamorous couple every Thursday night.  I learned so much more about healthy relationships from them than I ever did from my (now divorced and remarried) parents.

10. Three months after I learned to ride the bike my mother bought when she was pregnant with me, I cycled across Spain along the Camino de Santiago.

11. I believe in humility the way others believe in a higher power.

12. When I was 16, I nearly drove off a cliff called Devil's Slide.  I was very sober at the time, though I hadn't been for the six months previous.

13. I've only been in that one car accident, but I've been in four bike accidents.  (And I know I should, but I don't wear my helmet regularly.)

14. I haven't touched a washing machine since I moved to San Francisco.  My first job here involved commuting 4-6 hours per day, so I discovered the corner Wash 'n Fold ...and never went back!  Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out on meeting cool neighbors at the local laundromat.

15. Unless you count running gear, I haven't worn pants since August 2007.

16. I like to take myself to the movies ...alone.  It started when I was a teen, hiding from my peers and parents.  Now it's just a comfort, a way to check in with my old self.

17. I live above a chocolate shop on Haight Street.  And if you can't tell, I really like to tell people that.

18. Though I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I graduated from college, I was sitting on the local train station's bike lockers when my best friend's boyfriend's best friend kissed me.  My first kiss!  I wasn't expecting it and I didn't enjoy it.

19. I cannot wait to be the AYSO referee for my kids' soccer games.  So much so, in fact, that I'm considering joining a local league now...

20. A couple weeks before I left for New York, I told my parents that I was spending the weekend in Tahoe with a friend's family.  Instead I drove myself down to San Diego, where a girl I'd recently met on the Internet introduced me to her world of high school drop-outs.

21. I'm easy-going, but not that easy to get to know.

22. I know that some day, I'll be sharing my life with a man and a dog and some number of children.  So I play the cello to carve out a part of every day that's just for me, no matter what happens when.  (My Aunt Sue plays the harp every night.)

23. I miss walking in New York.  Walking in San Francisco just isn't the same!  10 miles in New York feels like a skip and a jump, while 10 miles in San Francisco feels like a day.

24. In case you missed it, I live with one very small, very feisty rabbit.  She makes me a more patient and forgiving person.

25. ...25 years from now, I'll have just turned 50.  I'm hoping that by then I'll have cycled across all 50 of the United States.

How do you raise a child to want to feel alive?

Every day I come home to a fresh crop of street kids lingering outside my building.  It's never the same group, so I'm routinely asked for spare change.  One will call out with their demands while the rest gape with boredom.  Another inevitably carries a piece of cardboard with a message you've seen before, like:

FAMILY KILLED BY NINJAS
SAVING FOR KARATE LESSON

which I don't laugh at.  Not anymore.  I prefer the ingratiating ones, because when these kids start heckling I find myself reverting to the person I was in high school.  Submissive.

Then I remember that these people aren't so different from you or me.  They come from families who put them in school and made sure a roof hung over their heads.  Somewhere along the way drugs were introduced and moderation was lost.  Now you can find them on Haight Street, with a stench of booze so thick it's sickening.  Why do they devalue their lives while you do not?  I relate to their self-inflicted ostracism and the way they numb themselves.  I get that life's overwhelming at times.  But at the end of the day, I have a roof over my head and a job to do tomorrow.

So how do you prevent a child from a life on the streets?  Or better, how do you establish the meaning of life?

I was vegan in high school.  When that proved too difficult to maintain in college, I went vegetarian.  Then I got to know my second cousins in New Hampshire, who posed a lot of questions about raising kids vegetarian.  Would I feel that's the healthy way?  Would I want to stop my child from hanging out at burger joints?  And every time I'd come, there'd be some special veggie meals made just for me, like a healthy vegetable soup made from beef stock.*

In short, I found it a lot easier to be vegetarian whenever I wasn't in New Hampshire.  What kind of vegetarian is that?

Now I'm back in San Francisco, living with a rabbit.  (She can smell when you've eaten meat and she's reminded of being prey.)  I tell you, I'm still not thrilled by meat.  Nine months ago, I was swayed back into eating it by bacon lovers and someone who can grill a steak better than my dad.  But last night I was taken to a Brazilian restaurant where it's just every kind of meat on a stick.  Delicious!  But overwhelming.  The negatives clearly outweigh any of the positives.  The most unexpected being, I didn't sleep at all last night.

So meat, we had ourselves a fantastic send off party.  And cousins, I'll be sure to stay on top of my meat cooking skills.  Y'know, for the kids.

* I couldn't love them more for this.

My sisters aren't speaking.*  In all honesty, I can't tell you how long it's been going on.  But if they're ever near each other, in close physical proximity, they'll use their words.  They're not completely immature.

It's just that Megan isn't giving Molly a chance.  Molly had her first child, a baby she ravaged her insides to get, six months ago.  And now her younger sister had her first child, a happy accident, just two weeks ago.  You'd think they'd be on the phone every day, swapping stories about nipple creams.

I've always been closer to my middle sister Megan.  So you could say the conflict begins with the fact that I know why she isn't calling Molly back.

And when I'm hanging out with Molly and she's asking me, almost desperately, for updates about our dear sister in the Caribbean, I know what to say.  I don't tell her what Megan's been saying.  Because even when Megs lets me know how the breast feeding is going, it's singed with competition and bitterness.

* The ones that can speak.  Keira just turned one last Friday, so I can leave her out of this.

Do you like surprises?

So much so that the ones in my life who love me the most really do try to set up big surprises for my birthdays, graduations, new jobs, etc.  Only, with their surprises, it seems like there's nothing planned and no one actually cares enough to eat cake with me, so they end up having to reassure me that I am loved and of course I'm more important than [insert mundane task like toe-nail clipping].  Which means, no surprises in the end.  God love 'em for trying, though.

My birthday was just two days ago and there was supposed to be a "Surprise!" birthday dinner the night before.  It was seeming just a little unreal that my family had flown in town to visit our newborn niece and were flying out on my birthday without having just a little bit of cake.  So, as usual, I found out about the "Surprise!" a few days too early... Really, I find it more quirky about my family than disappointing for myself.

What's maybe more disappointing is having to sleep in the hotel bathtub because my stepdad was snoring like a french horn in the room on the other side of the door.  Waking up that morning, my actual birthday, was a little too much like Sixteen Candles...