On Family

While I dearly love my brother, I have to admit he is at a loss being a boy and all. I think I already wrote on him, so I wont go on about him. I actually was going to talk about my sisters.

We came in pairs. First there was me and Camille. The two extremes that you could have using the same pairs of genes. I mean, really, there aren't two people more different than me and Camille. And I love her for it. But the age thing, that is really a big thing because it means we shared a) the same parents b) the same teachers c) the same schools d) the same groups of people (we managed to have different friends for the most part). And in talking to Makayla, I think it all comes down to an observation: comfortability doesn't mean close. Being around Camille isn't comfortable. Comforting sometimes, but hardly comfortable. And yet, Camille and I are close-because we came in a pair.

Then there was Miriam and Clarissa, who are also opposites, but not in extremes. They are a captivating pair actually. And if Camille and I are extremes, these two are the opposite of that. As liberal as I am, Clarissa is less so. As conservative as Camille is, she is matched by Miriam. Ironic, that they are the most mixed pair, the most intertwined.

Then there was Rae. And Rae, though part of a pair, is very very distinct. Her other is Ben, and obviously he doesn't really count as being part of the group of girls. Not only that, their pairing is as distant as the space between Camille and Miriam. So in actuality, they just coexist as separate factions. But Rae is the moderator. She sides with nobody and relates to everyone. She, in her being the youngest, has inherited the insight of both pairs of sisters. While she is attracted to my distinct eccentricity, she also is admires Camille's class. While she laughs with Miriam, she can run with Clarissa (or play ball as is normally the case). She not a fencesitter, but the point. The point that is both included in the group, but is not because she is alone. And it is that strength to be alone that I admire. While it takes strength to recognize your pairing and make it work, it is far harder to be alone. Far far harder.

But Rae will never be alone, because we will never leave her. None of us will, because she completes us. She is our center.

And the even more important thing to note, besides our differences, is the fact that we act as a family. We are a unit that exists to build and sustain the others. Is that not so? It is an empowering notion, when it works. And it is one that depends on our individuality. Because all our smiles are not the same.

To see what Camille said about the sisterhood, check out her blog, at http://cacacamille.blogspot.com/.

The lack of a brush

At 3 in the morning, my cup of paintbrushes sit by the lamp, not being used. I knew they should be. That's exactly why I was up and I knew it. I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint so badly. Yet here I am, in front of a computer, typing away about Marvell.

Colin met me on the train. Just paint, right? he said. I laughed and took the can he was holding out to me. It's just paint. Colin shrugged and we passed into the burbs. I tucked the can gently into my bag, hoping it didn't make too much noise. It's just paint.

Carmen was in China that week. They didn't catch her, again. They never did, the dumb kids. Even I knew that the Nile was in Egypt. I sighed and picked up a book.

Camille's flute got stolen yesterday. Matt stole it and hid it in the lab. She loved him, or would, I knew. I knew the moment I met him. I hope he never meets her I told Javier in the workshop over diagrams of cardboard chairs. Javier laughed as he picked up a can. I looked at it. It's just paint, he said, handing it to me.

I looked at the canvas in front of me. You know, I said to Mully, all painting is is pushing chemicals around on a canvas. It's all about illusion. This isn't anything but cloth and chemical right here. Crazy huh?

She looked at me like I was stupid, but I was right. It's just paint.

But not at 3 in the morning. At 3 in the morning it is my heart's desire, and that is exactly why my paper is only a page and a half after five hours of doing absolutely nothing.

Thoughts to my Counter

The new extension is the embodiment of the corporate world, and I have never felt more out of place. Which, if you think about it, is an odd sensation for me, since I usually love open space. But the granite. The geometric leather sofas. The mountings for plasma tv screens that haven't yet arrived and hung on the walls for NASDAQ scores. There is no paper.

And it is my world all the same. The part that I do not belong in. Because it is her space. Her chosen space.

We've been paired for so long, that hate of our own togetherness festered into all-out brawls. And yet, in my dismal hours, since I was five, I cried for her, for her company. And she came and rolled her eyes. What? What? Emma, I want to go play.

And I reluctantly let her go. And I harbored my pain, mooring it while the storm passed. Her and her gap toothed smile. Her good grades. Her charm, her work ethic, her good behavior. Everything I was not. And yet her space was my space. We were the same.

One birthday I remember the fights. At that point, all you want is for it to stop. We hid in our rooms, with the lights off, the doors closed, hoping that if we closed our eyes, if we held our ears, it would end. The pain washed over me, the embarrassment. Then it happened on hers.

Rage filled me for the first time at them, they who would dare mar her happy day. My happy day was gone, ruined. But hers, hers could be, couldn't it? Why would you have to hurt her too? Isn't my pain enough? I gave my day so that it would pass. I stripped myself of hopes for well wishing, the joy that a birthday should be. But why would she need to as well.

I remember her tears and my own bitter despair at seeing them.

I forgot them soon.

Years later I found myself in the granite space, staring at a row of flags and a stair case. Her granite space, that meant nothing else to me other than something that was not mine. And I thought of her and her black cardigans and her pearls. I thought of her goofy grin when she told a really dumb joke.

I thought of myself, displaced. My university hoodie and jeans, trainers that would be threadbare and showing sock before they were replaced. The books that lined my walls, the ink stains that appeared on everything I would ever own. Never would I walk these granite halls for an hour lunch break between meetings about numbers. I would probably never wear real pearls.

I smile and wonder, after all these years, are we really the same? I am bound for a university lifestyle, a profession to which calls to my ambition like a siren. But are you not as well? Everything I am, you are not, and everything you are not, I am. Were we not meant to be exactly as we are?

Saussure says that words only have meaning in the context of other words. One could then extend that idea to value, which is another definition of meaning. What then would be my meaning, without you? I am, because you are.

We will never be the same. We push apart from each other even as we cling to our sisterhood, our bond. And we will forever be a pair, as we always have been, as we always are, from one eternity to the other, eternally anti. Mirroring. Parallel. Opposites. Bonded.

Rivalry is a petty description for emulation.

A twelve-year-old tender mercy

He's about 4'10" with brown hair and dark skin. He's a clear petite Filipino build with Camille's face and a nice big set of front teeth that I assume he will grow into. His voice is cracking even though it will probably not drop lower than it currently is. He gets his hair cut about every two weeks and likes to play video games and baseball. He's a catcher.

When he was about four years old I was packing for girls camp. I took a length of chain--the kind you wear dog tags on--and wrapped it around his wrist. I told him that if he took it off I would never come back. When I got back a week later, my mother scolded me and he presented his wrist, with the chain in the same condition as I had left it. I unwound it and never second guessed his love for me again.

When he was eleven he asked for a sketchbook for Christmas.

"I didn't know you liked to draw," I said.

"I do" he answered. And he isn't that good at it...yet. But he likes to do it and somehow I'm content with that.

Then on Sunday night he told me something odd. "What have you been up to?" I asked him. The usual answer to this question is 'nothing' or 'just hanging out.'

"I picked out my books for summer reading."

"Oh! What books?"

"Antony and Cleopatra and Much Ado About Nothing." The answer took me back. He was going into eighth grade. Did they actually assign those books? Are they nuts? "They gave me a list of books I couldn't read, so I chose these" he offhandedly answered. No, they weren't nuts, my brother was.

"Do you want help?" I asked him.

"Yes" he answered simply. So I volunteered to call him every night around midnight and we would read together. He used to like hearing the stories of the books I read. We would lay in his room late at night while the rest of the house was sleeping and I would tell him of my travels through literature while we both waited out our insomnia.

It still surprised me when he agreed. It surprised me more when I suggested we start then and his eagerness to read the entire first scene by himself.

He was never a good reader. In fifth grade we made fun of him for being stupid. He couldn't read well, and most of the time he didn't know what he had read. I was a freshman in college then, and it bothered me. Why didn't he read more? I wondered. When my mom pulled him out to do home school that year, I volunteered to teach him English. I looked back on the books I had to read as a fifth grader and assigned them to him, then I wrote comprehension questions for him and vocabulary lists. It took him a month to get them back to me because he had to do it through email and he is really bad about doing homework. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and I think it has something to with my Dad.

Since then, we would discuss the books he read. But Shakespeare at 12? That was pretty hefty. And it did prove to be a challenge for him. He stumbled through most of it, but then he would take a deep breath and keep plowing through it. Then he would stop and reread it silently to make sure he understood it, and ask if there was something he didn't understand, even with the footnotes on the bottom of the page. It surprised me a lot.

What surprised me the most was when he asked if I was still going to call again the next day.

"Do you still want me to?"

"Yes"

"Yeah, I'll call."

"Ok. I'll see you tomorrow. Well, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Ok."

"I love you" he said simply.

"I love you too" I answered before he said goodbye and hung up. I don't think I had thought about him loving me since he was four, but it felt good to hear it. And then I realized how to him, I wasn't his parent, or his teacher, I was his sister. His favorite sister. The one who baked cookies with him in the middle of the night and told him stories. The one who he could talk to when there was no one else willing to listen. The one who told him secrets, the one who asked what he had spent his day doing. The only one he openly loved. The only one he missed.

I am convinced that he is my brother for me.

Meeting Mr. Dickens

I remember when I first met Mr. Dickens. It was, in fact, dearest Pip who introduced us. My mother gave me a copy of Great Expectations when I was 15 years old. That was the beginning of my library. I collect books. I collect lots of books. They contain worlds that I will always escape to.

Gaithersburg, Maryland is a suburb of Washington D.C. It is not a ghetto. It is not inner city. But it wants to be. Because there is no money in it. Well, there is no clean money. Bethesda has money. Rockville has money. Silver Spring even has money. But Gaithersburg has no money. It had money, once upon a time, which is why it can never be a ghetto, but it wants to be, oh, so badly. I lived in a neighborhood called Laytonia. Laytonia was the essence of Gaithersburg—families who have lived in those houses since they were built never learned to upkeep them. The houses are old and junky, including the one my parents bought when I was eight.

I’ll admit, my parent’s house is in a better condition than some. But it is slowly being eaten away by the wear and tear six children tend to inflict on it. It wasn’t destined to be the war zone it became when it was built. But it was all the same. “Someday,” I told my sister’s ex-fiancé, Paul, “she is going to have to explain why there are holes in the walls the perfect size of chair legs and no locks—save the front door—actually work.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” he asked.

“Acknowledgment wasn’t going to save your relationship,” I answered with a shrug. And who really knows why Camille doesn’t ever tell the men she dates that she is inviting them into the midst of a raging battle. I certainly don’t. It is better, I think, to not invite them home at all.

There was a boy I loved, and I loved that he had never seen his father hit his mother. I loved that he had never lost a classmate at the hands of another at the local McDonalds. I loved that he had never had to sacrifice a grade on a group project because his partner got expelled in the middle for drug possession (it wasn’t even his deal that time—he was framed). I loved that his closest friend since Primary did not have a restraining order from his daughter’s mother because of anger management issues. I loved that he went trick-or-treating every Halloween until he was 16 years-old because there was never a drive-by shooting to be afraid of. He had never even heard a real gunshot. I loved all of that, and I loved that when I was with him, I didn’t have to say I had experienced all of that. It wasn’t real and I didn’t have to say it was. I could simply read and play and go to school.

School is a safe-haven. It is removed, like books. It is an alternate world where Mr. Dickens tells me of people who have life way worse than I. A worn copy of Great Expectations rests on my shelf right now, offering the same escape I used as a girl. I have other escapes now. More escapes, a wide variety, like Thurber’s Walter Mitty or Allen’s Kugelmass.

But at night, when I would talk to my mother in the dark, none of that is real. Gangs are real. Fights are real. Holes in walls are real. And someday I too will have to explain their existence. But for now, isn’t it enough to merely say they exist?

After a long absence

I may take a moment to explain a few things. Just as Calvin may have crashed a golf cart into a tree last night.

"I'M TIRED AND I'M MAD THAT I HAVE TO DEAL WITH YOUR INAPPROPRIATE CHOICES EVEN NOW WHEN YOU ARE AN ADULT. IF YOU DON'T LIKE BEING LDS DONT CLAIM TO BE ONE BUT IF YOU DO, START BEING NICER, CONSIDERATE OF THE FAMILY AND RESPONSIBLE. I APPRECIATE YOU SERVING MIRIAM BUT YOU DO IT GRUDGINGLY SO IT'S NOT TO YOUR CREDIT, WHEN YOU FACE JESUS HE WILL ASK YOU WHY YOU DIDN'T DO BETTER AND I WILL BE THERE SAYING I TRIED TO RAISE HER BUT SHE MADE HER OWN CHOICES."

I may have copied and pasted this from an email my mother may have sent me last week. I may have cried because of it. I may have printed the whole thing out and may have handed it over to Dan Muhlestein in the hallway of the JFSB the next morning. I may have been angry and yelled and screamed. I may have vented to my brand new roommate on her second night.

I may have made Camille mad. I may have been rude. I may care less for her than I may about the roll of unprimed canvas leaning against my bed. I may know that it may make her cry, and I may feel that crying is good for a person. She may have caused me more tears than I may have her.

I may have taken an alcoholic to a grocery store to buy food where he may have bought beer. I may have gone to a coffee shop with him and may have let him smoke a cigarette while discussing religion, faith, agency, and reactivation efforts. I may have listened when he told me about going to counseling with a group of porn addicts. I may have invited him to church with me.

I may have texted Calvin the other day while I may have been sitting in a basement to give me an excuse to leave after I didn't leave when I may have had the opportunity. When I did leave, my friend may have been mad that I felt I may have had to make up an excuse. I may have not wanted to tell him it was because I might have known I shouldn't have been there.

Calvin may have told me something like "You gotta do this on your own" and he may have really meant it. I may have known he wouldn't bail me out, and I might have known all along why. I may have known I would do it myself even before I may have asked him.

I may have actively decided to fail Whalquist's class because it may have been a waste of time. It may be the most worthless class offered, and BYU may owe me tuition money back for it. I may be morally opposed to busy work, and I may not really have cared to go to class. I may have felt I had no other option but to go. I may have struggled to get out of bed every single morning, I may have pretended to care. I may have given each and every one of my teachers a fraction of an effort. I may have read a newspaper in the back of Tuttle's class. I may have learned absolutely nothing. Cronin may have told me that that was not an option for me anymore. She may have demanded that I retake her class in the Spring, and I may have taken that as an answer to prayer. I may have asked specifically where to start in my efforts of putting things right. I may have felt the Spirit.
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I may have gone to see my bishop. I may have gotten a blessing. I may have scheduled my life as an attempt to fix it. I may have said I was sorry. I may have bruised my knees kneeling on tile when I prayed. I may have called on God to take care of my problems so that I didn't have to deal with them anymore, and I might have gotten a no. I may have gotten a trust me and you may get through them.

I may have spent my day working and reading and gaining my intelligence back. I may have written all over my copy of All The Pretty Horses as I read it, which Dr. Cronin may have told me to read instead of The Road. I may have spent the last couple hours at the library atoning for my lack of concern all of last semester.

I may have said I'm sorry, and I may know that for the most part it falls on deaf ears. I may be writing to a specific person knowing that I may have made them angry. I may be perfectly willing to face God for this post, and I may know that I might be better off if I leave it alone and let it be buried by silence. I may know this post unearths years of secrets that may all have been buried by silence.

I may just have needed to tell someone, and no one at the same time, because I may feel like I am betraying the trust of multiple people by yelling to the world "I HAVE A PROBLEM." I may be going in for counseling on Monday.

Or I may not.

Over Burnham Park

It was 3 in the morning. Someone's crew was walking down the street below; I could see them from the balcony of the rented apartment my dad had found. It was right across the street from the park my dad grew up playing in.

"This place has changed so much" I remembered him saying. "Dirtier, poorer." He had planned the trip for two and a half weeks, and was ready to go in four days. It just wasn't the same. He tagged along on our adventures anyway though.

For some reason, Camille really wanted her hair straightened while we were there. She spent a week trying to figure out who would do it for under $60, which was a couple thousand pesos. Not much, considering we were American. My dad asked if I wanted mine done too.

"Sure" I said, wondering if he was serious. He was though, because the day came and we followed him through and around Burnham Park, through a shopping center. There was a big sign for a recording studio just over the overhang bridge that was just about as busy as a metro station platform during rush hour. Filipinos like to sing. I could even hear someone performing just at the end of the bridge for the money I didn't really want to give them.

We wound through the run down shops and into an alley, then came out in front of a condemned building, which we cut through in the back stairway. At the top, we were approached by a security guard who spoke a few words in Tagalog to my dad that I didn't understand. He nodded and let us by and we found ourselves in what could have been the second story of a mall, except for the windows that were boarded up with cardboard.

They weren't all like that. There was a store that carried shoes, one carried bags, another carried fake Gap clothes. There were three salons, spaced between them, and my dad went straight to the one in the middle.

The receptionist was a very skinny, tall, feminine guy with bleached orange hair. That's what happens when a person with black hair bleaches it. It turns orange and looks damaged. He also was a shampoo boy I later realized. There was a man in a red t-shirt with the sleeves cut off who's English was better than the others. He did Camille's hair mostly, though he rinsed mine once. A girl did my hair. She had a low voice and when she spoke to me it was in broken English. She was tall, which is one of those things that makes people over there stand out. Filipinos are small naturally.

My hair isn't as thick as Camille's so I got to leave earlier. What I found was the main floor of the building was a market. There were tiny stalls set up with homemade goods, from shoes to rugs to some kind of battle ax my dad thought was cool and brought back to my mom as her present, claiming them as decorations to the customs official when we got back to the States.

Clarissa was particularly good at getting good prices on everything. That means she's a good liar...by Filipino standards anyway. Or it means that they were willing to play the game and pretend so she would come back more often and they could sell more things.

Camille showed up three hours after the rest of us had finished and gone back to the apartment. We were watching some Disney channel rerun when she walked in.

"When did you finish?" she asked me. She had fallen asleep while waiting for the chemicals in her hair to set the during the second cycle.

"A couple hours ago"

"Did you remember to give that guy a tip?"

"Dad tipped him, and I had a girl"

"No, it was a guy" she said, a smile creeping over her lips.

"No, it was a girl" I said. She shook her head and insisted that it was a guy. My dad chimed in an agreement.

"Lalakway" he laughed before heading up to take a nap. Transvestite, I translated in my head.

I wondered, as those boys passed on the street below me, if that had been one of those things that had changed too. There was one lone street light in the area. A taxi drove by, it's motor loud in the still summer air. I went inside and turned on the t.v.. I wouldn't fall asleep for another hour or so, I knew.

Burnham Park, Baguio, Philippines, 2006 in the daytime from the apartment balcony.