Life Listed - Chronologically

I take everything back from the entry below. My younger sister is not the level-headed thinker I had pinned her as. She is just as scatter brained and crazy as I am and I have real proof. While she may be able to give me a straight forward answer or solution because she has a no-nonsense policy towards drama, she can be as stupid as the rest of us.

One morning I woke to find her purse drying on the edge of the sink with the lining pulled inside out. I thought possibly lotion or another liquid-like girly thing carried in purses had leaked and did not dwell on it further. Later in the night when we were planning our weekly eat-out on Friday plans, she confessed to me that she had a simply hilarious story to share with me. I interrupted, convinced that the crazy situation in my day that involved confusing a bloody booger for chocolate had to be better. But I was wrong.

When she was getitng ready for work that morning, she put cereal in a bowl and then realized she needed to get her purse from upstairs. She retrieved it and placed it on the counter, putting in her cell phone and cigarettes. She then opened the refrigerator and took out the milk. She glanced at the bowl of cereal on the table while taking the cap off the milk and then proceeded to pour several inches of milk directly into her purse. She poured milk in her purse! She actually watched it fill up, like you watch milk going into cereal, making sure you have a balance between wet and dry. She was contemplating having enough milk for the amount of things in her purse until she realized "this is my purse, these are my things, they do not need to be covered in milk! Milk goes in cereal!"

While shopping with my mother for bed linens this past weekend, I asked her if my sister had told her about the milk incident. My mother said, "Yes, she came over with a pink canvas purse and when I asked her if it was new she said that she wanted to save it for the Spring but she poured milk in her purse as if that was something people did all the time and dropped the subject." My mother then started to laugh so hard that she said she wasn't sure if she could make the left turn because through the tears she couldn't tell if cars were coming or not. My mother hadn't laughed at my sister but when she finally got the chance to think about it, she completely lost it.

I can't recall a situation when I did something so idiotic that it caused my mother to laugh to the point of crying and dangering our lives because she couldn't see to turn the car. Then again, my mother informed me that she saved up this outburst as to not offend my sister. For all I know, my sisters and she talk about the stupid things I do when I am not around and laugh until they crash into poles.
Thursday, February 3, 2005

Living with my younger sister has its benefits. The primary one being that I have someone around who can give me a dose of common sense 2,000 times a day since I completely lack it. I may be able to get a 4.0 in grad school without really trying, but I make some of the stupidest judgement calls on a day to day basis. Our typical day consists of conversations such as the following:
"I'm cold" I say.
"So turn the heat up" she replies so matter of factly that I must be brain dead not to have thought of this first.

"I wish I had some coffee."
"Make yourself a pot and stop wishing."

"I feel so nauseous and tried, why must I feel like this?" I whine while lounging on the couch.
"Maybe it has to do with drinking nearly a bottle of vodka by yourself and staying up all night. Go have some crackers and you should feel better."

The truth is, no matter how "smart" I am on a transcript or in an office setting or in a witty debate, I do not think of the most simple obvious things. People have said that Albert Einstein used to walk around this his shirt misbuttoned and the hairdo wasn't intentional style but what happens when you forget to brush it. While I can try to draw comparasions to me and Mr. Einstein, I am not as smart as he is so there is really no excuse for me to sit shivering, wondering why I am so cold when the thermostat is less than 5 feet away and can just be turned up. To me, such statements as "turn the heat up" are truly genius.

I just looked at my last paycheck from 2004 and, while I didn't earn a tremendous amount, I realized that if I add in the ,000 of tuition that the school paid for instead of me and the ,000 grant for my unpaid summer job, the total would be more than I made when I was working full time. Granted, I haven't had health care in 6 months due to my funding this year and no one is putting away cash in a retirement account for me, which puts it in better perspective. But still, I am supposed to be a graduate student surviving on intellectual curiousity alone and not living in a place where actually have control to turn the heat up once it is pointed at to me that it would be a good way to solve the fact that I am cold.
Monday, January 24, 2005

"I wish I had some coffee."
"Make yourself a pot and stop wishing."

Epiphany
A Christian feast celebrating the manifestation of the divine nature of Jesus to the Gentiles as represented by the Magi.
January 6, on which this feast is traditionally observed.
A revelatory manifestation of a divine being.
A sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something.
A comprehension or perception of reality by means of a sudden intuitive realization: “I experienced an epiphany, a spiritual flash that would change the way I viewed myself” (Frank Maier).

I was born on the Epiphany. I suppose that makes me as special as 1 in every 365 people on this earth. But at the same time, there is something different about January 6 than any other arbitrary day in the year. Maybe now that each pasing year does not cause excitement but rather ambiguity, I am chosing to reflect on my birthday as an larger and greater event that I had previously. I did not get to drive, vote, drink, "really be in my 20s", "be well into my 20s", but ratther am now hovering around 30. It's like going only a little bit over the speed limit, not in danger but surely not in a safety zone of 24.

My place in this world in connected to the Epiphany, by no doing of my own, or at least no actual awareness or intentional action to be born on January 6, sometime before 1980. (I must add that when I see that people were born in 1984, 1981 or what not, I instantly see infants and small people who never had to wear bell bottoms over diapers. Even though I know plenty of people with jobs and adult responsibilities that were born in this year, when I look at a my younger sister's driver's license an see 1981, I have trouble believing that she is an adult.) I have always known I was born on the Epiphany and considered it to be special like those born on January 1, July 4, December 25. However, except for in Hispanic families, my birth date had no large celebration attached to it. Jesus got his gifts on the day I was born and I get gifts even though they aren't from kings walking through the dessert to give me myrrh.

Maybe if I was born on the fifth or seventh of the month, I wouldn't constantly be searching for a deeper meaning to everything around me. Maybe if I had been born on another day I wouldn't see the world as a great mystery ready to unfold. I wonder each day what epiphany may be may be realized, brought to me or uncovered. I have yet to solve whether this has to do with the day I was born and if I was born o this day because I was destined to be this type of person or if being born on January 6 made me someone who searches the sky for a bright light to I can track through the dessert with frankincense.
Friday, January 7, 2005

I began writing this several weeks ago. Then I got caught up in this or that. Now it's finished.

In mid-October, I attended a large birthday bash for a lady who used to look after my sisters and I when we were little ones. There weren't a lot of day care centers in 1978, just older ladies that wanted to make extra money in addition to their unpaid jobs as house wives. Sarina was our "nanny" of sorts, but not in the way that rich kids have nannies these days; except for the fact that she was an immigrant, but an Italian immigrant. We all learned a little bit of Italian from her and her husband. Apparently, my sisters and I would speak in Italian when we didn't want our parents to know what we were up to. She had three adult daughters, or maybe they were in their late teens but my 2 year old perspective saw them as adults, who were around often. Mama Sarina, as we called her, helped us learn to walk, talk, eat with utensils, and would make us the most awesome homemade Halloween costumes.

She watched my youngest sister for the longest, from the time my mother went back to work after having her to the time that my younger sister was ready to enter kindergarten. When Sarina saw my sister, she burst into tears as if she was on Oprah and was finally reunited with the daughter she put up for adoption 23 years ago. I was told that I look exactly the same as I did the first day she saw me over 27 years ago and I "never change" except, in my dress, I was clearly a bit less tomboyish than I was at age 4.

I always say that I have no memories of my childhood. I honestly don't recall much of my life before age 12. When my sister's girlfriend asked me what Kasey was like when she was 3, I didn't know because I don't recall being 7 particularly. Sometimes, I think I remember things, but that is probably because I have pictures of me hugging my first Cabbage Patch Kid in Georgia outside of the Cabbage Patch Hospital, wearing a windbreaker and smiling up at my uncle who lived in Georgia and made this important moment in my life possible. But I don't really recall that day, and the further back in time I go, I recall less and less about my childhood. So while Sarina and her three daughters walked up to me like I was a long-lost friend, I remembered very little at that moment. But then so many things came back to me.

When I hugged Sarina, the way she smelled reminded me of being young. I saw her standing over the stove as I sat on her husband’s lap. He would talk to me while we watched her cook. When her middle daughter, clearly the most beautiful of the three, hugged me tighter than I’d been hugged in years, I recalled how she and I used to play with the wigs she brought home from cosmetology school. I learned how to braid hair at the age of three and was the only female in my household growing up that had this skill, my older sister’s braids were bumpy and my mother’s were malformed but I would spend hours making complex perfect french braids until my arms ached from holding them over my head for so long.

I recalled being a small child in these waves of recollection that came to me again and again. Suddenly, I remember that I was once a small child and could remember things, really good things, that happened to me. Until then, a lot of what I recalled tended towards negative memories like my older sister singing Beatles songs to me when another caretaker insisted on me napped and me refusing until I burst into tears, or my mother leaving me, or when I held a mushroom in my mouth because I didn’t want to offen the lady who gave it to me and continue to dislike mushrooms to this day, or wetting myself in school in the third grade, or so on to memories that had different degrees of pain in them. But for whatever reason, at that party, I was able to recall all these events which lead to more memories of a childhood that wasn’t as entirely bad as I had previously remembered to come to me at odd moments. It was as if part of myself and my childhood has come back to me in the past few months. I can remember times now that were rather nice and comforting and can see my childhood as a mix of happy and bad times rather than the rather bleak childhood I believed I had. I still can’t say what my younger sister was like at age 3, but I can remember playing with my father, having adventures in my backyard and the smell of an old lady who used to kiss my cheeks as she told me in Italian how beautiful my face was.
Friday, January 7, 2005