Why The Inability To Choose Our Siblings Is Truly Tragic

David has a girlfriend. A real one, who he met in real life and has actually spoken to. I don't know what happened to WOW girl and I don't care. I don't talk about his life unless he suddenly makes it relevant to mine, which he has lately. Repeatedly and with no mercy whatsoever.

The problem is, he keeps asking me things about her. Not awkward and scarring things, thank God, but mysterious and perplexing things. Things like, "What should I get her for Christmas?" "What should I do for Valentine's Day?" and, this morning, "Her birthday is coming up. What should I do?"

Dude, I don't know. I am the very last person in the world you should be asking about relationships, as I have never had one and really shouldn't anyway, given that some days I think I am only pretending to be a woman. I may be the least romantic person in the world. If a man gave me roses, it would only piss me off, as it would mean he wasn't paying attention. If he gave me a book on recognizing leprosy in the archaeological record, I would probably sleep with him.

Unfortunately, I know perfectly well that David has even less of a clue than I do, and his only other option is to ask our mother, and just thinking about that makes me die a little inside from sympathetic embarrassment, so I do the best I can. But I feel like this poor girl deserves better than I can do. I haven't even met her and I like her. She gave David a copy of the Silmarillion for his birthday (a book! That he will actually read! If he doesn't marry her, we should adopt her) and apparently her celebrity crush is James Dean, so obviously she has better taste than I do (I have to be drunk before I can even think about thinking about my current celebrity crush, it's that bad. They keep going downhill. Stupid hormones.) And she is dating my brother, who is getting his relationship advice from a girl who spends her Friday nights in her room, reading forensic taphonomy textbooks. When I meet her, I feel like the first thing I should do is apologize.

So, yeah. David can cook (the men in my family can cook, and the women generally can't, although I am very good at spice cookies and rum balls) so, as a general rule, I told him to make her dinner. Presents, though? I don't even know. I mean, if you bring me books I am thrilled, but apparently most people don't like that, so I'm kind of at a loss. I think for Christmas I told him to get her a pashmina and some Thorton's chocolate, and at that point I had exhausted my repertoire of generic "girly" presents. The best I remember being able to do for Valentine's Day was "no jewelry, but no stuffed animals either," so I have no idea what happened, but if they are still dating, it can't have been too bad. This morning David, probably sensing that I am running out of ideas, suggested that he could get her a James Dean poster, and I couldn't think of any reason why not. But then he said he wanted to get her a DVD, too, and I have to wonder if he's ever even looked at my DVD collection, because I sure wouldn't trust me to pick out a decent movie. I own Radioland Murders, the 1997 horror version of Snow White, and the Dinotopia miniseries, for heaven's sake. My parents won't even watch any movie I bring them without looking it up first.

This is why I feel we should get to choose our siblings, because it is totally unfair that David should be stuck asking me for advice about these things. He could have a nice, normal sister, one who bothered to learn the generally accepted relationship rules and who knows what movies other girls like. Instead, he has me. Tragic.

Stuff

I'm currently procrastinating on writing my mini-dissertation. I have nearly all the research done and a week left of my spring break, so I should have it done before I have to go back to class, anyway. The problem is that my mother is salivating at the prospect of reading it, because it's on a facet of paleopathology, and I get my appreciation for the gory details from her. So she keeps Skyping me and demanding that I send it to her, because I promised her it would be done sometime around last Friday. I have yet to write a single word of it, because I made the mistake of picking up Dumas, and every time I do that it takes me days to pry my brain loose. I'm still in the middle of The Count of Monte Cristo, and it won't let go. She's reached the point of 3 exclaimation marks per demand, and I estimate that we have about 24 hours to go before she deploys the interrobang. Help.

I want a helix piercing. I've been thinking about getting one for a while, and now would be great, because I might be seeing my parents again in September, and then again I might not, so it'll be a while before I have to face the inevitable disapproval. Only, I need a job soon, and there will probably be interviews, and I already have four extra earrings to take out before each interview. Dammit. I'm also beginning to despair of ever getting my tattoo. I designed it three years ago, and I was going to get it after waiting one year, around the time I finished my undergraduate degree. The problem is, either I have no money, or I have money but I don't know any tattoo artists good enough to do it. Right now, not only do I not have money, I don't even have anyone to ask about tattoo artists. (I got a recommendation from my ceramics professor while I was still living in LA, but at that point I had no money. Then I got another one in New Jersey, but again - no money.) And no one in the archaeology department appears to have tattoos, so I don't know who to ask. Darnit, someday I will get this tattoo, I swear it.

Also, right now I do not like my figure. It may be that I'm not used to looking at it, as I've worn 3 shirts and a baggy sweatshirt for the past 7 months, and before that I ran around in oversized t-shirts. But it's like Southern California out there right now, and I obviously can't go around in giant sweatshirts when it's 60 degrees and sunny out, and I'm trying not to dress like I stole my clothing from the nerdy brother I do not have, so I've been wearing fitted t-shirts. I don't like it. My figure is so ridiculously Victorian that I feel like I should be wearing corsets and low-cut gowns, not jeans and t-shirts. Every time I see my reflection I want to run back to my room and hide under the bed. I feel like I look absurd, and I've been cranky lately anyway, and it's not helping my state of mind.

And, Warner Brothers? I will cut you. NephthysWrath is visiting me in July, and we're planning to visit Paris, and London (I still haven't been, which is incredibly frustrating to me, as it's literally right over there and I don't have time to go) and see Half-Blood Prince at midnight. At least we were, until they went and changed the release date from Friday to Wednesday, messing up all our careful plans. For one thing, now we won't be in Paris for Bastille Day, which is not cool. I am irritated.

Finally, whose genius idea was it to have my exam from first semester in June? I have basically forgotten everything that ever happened in that class, and now I am trying to remember everything and it isn't working. I'm going to have to go track down the professor and make a total nuisance of myself, asking her to reexplain everything. This wouldn't be happening if I were somewhere besides The Department of Random Insanity.

So my cousin had a baby.

And this gives me an opportunity to talk about the overwhelming creepiness of my mom's side of the family!

So. We are talking about my oldest cousin, on my mom's side of the family. (I have 6 cousins, 4 on one side and 2 on the other, and all of them are girls. This is just a fun fact that has nothing to do with anything.) She's the first one in this generation to reproduce, since the rest of us are still preoccupied with college or grad school (on both sides of my family, if you do not go to grad school, you bring Shame upon your parents. Seriously. I have one cousin who is not planning to go, and she is, like, the black sheep.) Also, no one in my family reproduces before the age of 30. I don't really know why, probably because of the grad school thing, but it means my parents can't harass me about my refusal to date for at least another few years, which is fine by me.

So my cousin has the baby, and it's a boy, and all is well. And then my mother tells me what she named it, and I am floored. I obviously cannot tell you what she named the poor thing, but trust me, it was bad. Apparently they decided to give it a surname from her husband's family for a first name, and a surname from ours for a middle name. And it was not a good combination. Because the surname from our family is an actual first name (somewhat archaic, but I've come across it) and the surname from her husband's family is nothing that could ever be mistaken for a first name from any time period. It's really unfortunate. I don't she why she couldn't at least have switched them, but whatever. My mom was telling me all this, and she didn't know why either, because her siblings (my aunt and uncle) don't really talk to her (I don't know, they didn't approve of something she did or didn't do. I don't really bother to keep up.)

Actually, there is quite a lot I could write about my mother's relationship with her family. I try not to know the details, but I can't help having a general outline because when I was at home, every time my grandfather called, she would take his call with gritted teeth, then complain to me for an hour afterwards about what a misogynistic jerkwad he is, and how she has a career and can't keep the house immaculate like some goddamn 50's housewife, and how her parents used to make her polish all the silverware before their dinner parties, and meanwhile I'm all "Yes, yes, terrible, look, I think I have somewhere else I'm supposed to be right now." I don't know why it was always me. I think my dad and brother deliberately fled the area. And now I live over here and she still does this, but over Skype.

But anyway. All this happened, and I was suddenly reminded of the Creepy Embroidered Family Tree, and I cannot believe I've never talked about this before, because it's so marvelously weird. (Okay, actually I mostly just pretend my mom's side of the family and everything associated with them doesn't exist, but you know what I mean.) My mom's side of the family apparently used to be very well off (they aren't anymore) and apparently they kept close track of their genealogy. So, someone embroidered this family tree, which has, I think, everyone in the family starting from when they came over from England, and is pretty big. Which is, you know, a little obsessive, but not all that bad, until you consider that some of us aren't on it. Like, two of my cousins are on there, and my uncle's wife, who married into the family, but my dad isn't on there, and David and I aren't either. I remember being totally offended by that when I was little. I'm okay with it now, because I prefer that people not be reminded about my middle name, but now the fact that we even have The Embroidered Family Tree creeps me out. I blame J. K. Rowling. (Incidentally, this would be even funnier if I could tell you what my mom's maiden name is.) Anyway, I'm now wondering if my cousin's baby is going to be put on there, because that is seriously not a name I would want immortalized if it were mine. Poor kid. And also, you see why I preferred to spend the summers in the empty house that belonged to my dad's side of the family, rather than get dragged to visit my mom's relatives, who are all kind of terrifying.

26 weeks?

I was out for a walk this evening, and it occurred to me that, as of this morning, I've been here six months.

It doesn't feel that long. I mean, I know that's a long time. And if I think about all the time between September and now, I realize it's been a long time. But it doesn't feel very long. And it's weird to experience subjective time this way. In California I was only away from home for three or four months at a stretch, and it seemed to take years because I was miserable all the time. Being here is more like being at the coast house - it isn't technically home, but it feels like it is. It doesn't feel like I'm suffering in a tiny apartment and desperately wishing for my next break so I can get away. Here, time just passes normally instead of dragging excruciatingly along. And it's very weird for me to experience time normally at school, because all my previous time in college has been spent in a haze of "God, why am I still here in this awful place? Make it stop!"

I'm aware that that probably didn't make any sense to anyone but me. Anyway. Six months. That's kind of impressive.

Hair

I wear my hair in a ponytail a lot these days. It's easy to do, and my hair is short enough right now that it stays in without migrating down the back of my head (by "short", I mean "merely 3 inches past my waist, as opposed to where it used to be, which is 3 inches past my butt") or pulling excruciatingly at the hairline. But today, I looked in the mirror, and I noticed that my henna is grown out to the point where it looks like I scraped all my brown hair back and attached a fake red ponytail.

Sigh.

An Apology To My Nose

Yes, that's a picture of me. No, I don't know how I got it to be so flattering, (yes, even with the breakout and the circles under my eyes, this qualifies as flattering, because I can look at it without wincing) but I kind of want to bottle my success and sell it.

I've been trying to get back into portraiture lately, mostly to decompress from my archaeological illustration class. And although I was never very good, I at least used to be better than I've been this past week. The problem most people have is with being too self-referential, so that your picture of someone else ends up with your own facial features, because we're all most familiar with our own faces. So I kept drawing people with huge eyes and long noses and I couldn't make myself stop it no matter what I did, and I thought maybe if I drew myself I could relearn which features to be careful about, exorcise my problem, and move on.

So this afternoon I took a bunch of pictures of myself, without putting on makeup or fixing my hair or anything, because I am way too lazy for that, and I was trying to avoid looking in the mirror too much beforehand, because when I do that I start to make "mirror face" and my pictures come out looking nothing like me (this one kind of doesn't either, but that's mostly because I have no expression at all.)

I would now like to apologize to my nose, and to all the people I have ever subjected to whining about my nose. Because, as you can clearly see, my nose is quite acceptably in proportion with my eyes and the entire upper two-thirds of my face. It is, in fact, my mouth that is causing all the problems here. It's like someone hit the lower third of my face with a shrink ray.

So, I'm sorry, Nose. And Mouth, you are now the one on my shitlist.

Driver's License

So I was doing that thing I always do where I plan things 20 steps in advance (I can't help it, and most of the time I wish I didn't do it, but there you go) and something alarming occurred to me.

I'm planning to put in my application for a post-study work visa during the spring holidays (I'm not going home, because I have too much to get done, so I won't need my passport. And I want to start applying for jobs before everyone else does.) And I went through all the points-based stuff for that - I have enough money in my bank account and everything, so that's all okay. And then I started going through everything else that I have to do within, like, the next year (I know, shut up), and I remembered about my U.S. driver's license. I'm allowed to use it to drive with up until September (I do have an international driver's license, but that expires at the same time, I think) and I figured I could stick the driver's license to the bottom of my list of things to care about, because the idea of driving here makes me break out in hives anyway, but then I looked at the license itself and it expires in January 2010. And, you know, I don't know if I'll be going back to the States before then. I have to write my dissertation this summer, and then by fall I need to have a job, and my parents are probably going to want to come here for Christmas again, especially if they can stay at my apartment, and really there isn't any excuse I can come up with to get them to fly me home just so I can renew my driver's license. (That's really alarming all by itself, isn't it? I don't know the next time I'll see home again - and I kind of don't care.)

So I took a look at other things I can do, and it turns out that instead of going home to renew it I can just exchange it for a GB driver's license, and that way I would be able to drive here after a year (you know, if I wanted to) and also I wouldn't have to go through all the hassle of going back home. But - wow, that kind of freaks me out. It's so alarmingly permanent. Getting visas and going through the stages of getting citizenship and all doesn't seem so permanent, because even once I get them there's no reason why I can't say, at any point, "You know, suddenly I really hate it here," and leave immediately with minimal hassle. But once I give them my driver's license...well, what would I have to go through to get another U.S. license? They already want more ID for those than they do to get a passport, for heaven's sake. It would probably be a complete nightmare. I guess before this occurred to me I was kind of meandering happily along, going "Yeah, I'll follow the path to citizenship, live here for five years, it'll be fine...WHOA, WAIT, BACK UP A MINUTE, I DON'T KNOW ABOUT THAT."