yip yip tele-phoon

[dragonlady7]

Have been trying for 2.5 hours now to make Gl. and Ec. behave badly. They refuse to behave in any fashion at all. (I've made four attempts and have not come up with more than a line each time. I can't even get to the scene. It's ridiculous.) I believe this is a scene I need to sleep on. Bummer; want to write now. But it's kind of like pooping, to be crude-- if you're not ready it's just not going to come out and sitting here grunting isn't going to do any good. Have instead been reading back issues of people's livejournals, rather stalkerishly, but you know, sometimes it's just fun to kind of go back and remember the strange things others were blogging about.

I feel like I've been doing much more consequential things. This is a natural side effect of the fact that I have the attention span / memory of a small pet fish. I cannot honestly truly remember what I was doing half an hour ago, beyond a vague impression (Gondolin? Tolkien? Shiny things?) and so, in my mind, it becomes much more important and worthwhile. So I feel like I haven't wasted my evening.

My evening is prevented from being a total loss by Fiona having phoned up. Little sister who is the one just younger (well, two years) than me, for any who can't keep all the Kelly girls straight.
So the Kelly Girls, in order, with highly subjective defining characteristics. First Katy = 27 wait 28?, brunette, very bossy, married, trained killer, currently in Baghdad, and is also Scout's mommy; then me which I don't think I'll explain; then Fiona = 23, dark blond, just graduated with B. A. in econ, has sponge boyfriend and anxiety/depression issues [sort of] and like way too many cats and is currently somewhere in Central New York working for Old Navy and making my dead-end job look way, way high-powered (at least I get paid better when I do well); and then last Ann, who will be 20 in April (holy crap), is dark blond or sometimes dyed red, is a sophomore at Cornell, is suddenly this vegetarian eco-freak outta nowhere (well, outta Cornell), and is somehow the Heartless One who never cries at, like, anything.

No, there are no brothers or I would have mentioned them. Why do people always ask that?

So anyway, Fiona phoned up and it was amusing and surreal, as it is with any family member with whom I haven't spoken in a while. What's funny is that this is sort of universal, not just my immediate family-- I speak like this with all family members. Not just the other Kellys, but also Morlands and the cousin-Kellys. And to an extent the DeAngelos. (Don't worry about the surnames-- they're the last names of my dad's married siblings.) It's... I dunno, Dad's family was close when they were young but I grew up barely knowing Aunt Judy or Aunt Allison's kids, or even Uncle Brian's, and yet we all kinda understand one another. (Grandma's funeral kept being a kind of surreal but awesome party as we kept inadvertently having fun and then pausing because dammit, Grandma would've loved this, and this just goes to say, I'm going to throw myself a funeral shortly before I die because that was just a bummer.) On the one hand it's reassuring to me, as my own formerly-very-close nuclear family becomes a kind of, well, yet another Kelly diaspora-- at least there is something universal to it-- but on the other hand I really miss the six of us under a roof and the four-girls-on-the-undersize-love-seat annual Christmas Eve tradition. But I've whimpered about this on numerous occasions since I realized in 1996 that we were all eventually going to go our separate ways, and won't now.

So Fiona has a cat that is the devil, her shiftless boyfriend quit his job but his new one is better and they can almost afford to pay all their bills every month, which will be a first, but also poor Fiona has had her hours cut at Old Navy after 2 years (Oh yes, dear, they have loyalty to you, so QUIT NOW they don't deserve you! God my job is so good and I just made more in my 7 hour shift today than you will in 30 hours this week and I'm not counting my hourly wage)... what else? I laughed a lot and made plans to end the conversation about 14 times and got distracted every time. I miss my siblings.

But I won't get into that.

Another funny thought: when there are four, there is always a strange dynamic. Three [girls] is always bad, i remember the house warden telling me at St. Leonard's Fields (one of St. L's six houses)-- three is always two against one, and while the one is never the same, there is usually one who is always one of the two. Well, when there are four, there is always two against one plus the pivotal uninvolved outsider who can either make things for the One terribly awfully bad, or can form a new alliance of Two with her. But it is never truly three against one. (And often, the outsider will form a secondary alliance with one of the original two, which can have the effect of leaving the other of the original two suddenly an outsider or the One the others are against.) In short, things are interesting with four. Especially when there are no favorites. (My parents have always been very good with this.) And so the relationship I have with each of my sisters is very weird and different. Ann and I were always paired because I was older enough to be interesting, but not so much as not to be interested-- when I was sixteen we were inseparable and I read her Lord of the Rings. Katy and I were paired because we were the old ones, old enough to know better and old enough to be in charge and old enough to fight over it. (And we went to the same college, and overlapped there.) But of late, in my mind, Katy and Ann have been paired: they are both overachievers, despite the fact that it is Ann and Fiona who were their respective classes' valedictorians. You see, at the moment, Fiona and I are both the underachievers. And so we are fairly unambiguously On One Another's Sides, in this stage of life. (I also have sided with her sponge boyfriend to defend him to Mom, on the grounds that since she's been with him Fiona has stopped having anxiety attacks. She's started having reasons for them, but has stopped having them. That must mean something. But i don't like him-- among other reasons, because he told her she was fat, when she was in dire need of self-esteem boosting. Also, he's a sponge and an asshole. But I can still be relied on to defend him to Mom, who dislikes him for the wrong reasons.)

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I really liked both the discussion about 4 girls vs. 3 girls, and the reasons why you and Fiona are siding together and defending her sponge boyfriend. But I am left with one unanswered question. What are the reasons (the wrong reasons) why your mother doesn't like him?

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

It's not even important. I'm just offended that with so many reasons not to like him, she has to pick the least appropriate ones that are based on subjective criteria etc.