My sister and I had a few very harsh fights before I went to my dad's, we actually started saying 'I hate you' to each other, I've never faught with anyone so passionatley. I should be the nice grown up but in some way that would cause me to be more sterile detatched from her. I love her so for some reason that unleashes to animalistic sibling drive in me, I never had a violent sibling relationship growing up. I feel like all of my friends who didn't grow up only children have that agression to fall back on in extreme circumstances. The thing is, we had a huge, horrible arguement and stella said she hated me because I was horrible and then we just stood apart for a few seconds and I asked her if she wanted a cuddle, then we both said sorry. We've started doing that regularly after arguing, having a cuddle and saying sorry, it's definatley a much healthier thing to do I think.
I'm learning more about how uncharted, improvised and tempestuous love is from my sister than I have any other person in the whole world. It's an insane love, I'm not sure how sisters of very different ages should act around each other, or what sort of relationship they are supposed to have. I suppose for that reason we are just acting as though we are both children, I find that I am put in that category when we are together. The adults go in the kitchen to drink coffee whilst I get dragged off by my sister to play.
I feel terrible for her, she's so young and everyone is ganging up on her because she is loud and naughty. I know that she's bored, because she has nobody to play with exept when she's at school. I can't remember whether I was bored as a child, I suppose I don't really have a personality which requires constant attention and companionship, so I was better suited to being an only child for so long. My sister craves attention, constantly, she gets violently jelous of any that is diverted away from her for a second. I hate it when other people talk about her, or say that she's bad, it feels like I'm being hurt too.
It's wierd because I can say all manner of horrible things to my sister but I feel fiercely protective of her when others critique her.
I want her to stop having a hard time and for her life to get easier and more bearable, I want her to turn into a lovely, happy person. Sometimes I feel upset or worried that she won't turn out ok, like my life depends on her being happy and it wouldn' be worth it if she wasn't.
Anyway thats enough family stuff for now.
I've been buying some amazing clothes in the january sales, I just hope I have enough left in my bank account to pay for my student accomodation next year, whoops!
Sleep tight my devotchkas
xxx
Saturday, 29 December 2007
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Playing
Whenever I come home my sister hoards me, harrases me constantly asking me to 'play with her' she has a very particular notion of play, it does not include watching a film, chasing each other around or me pinning her to the ground and smothering her with kisses. Although I've tried to convince her otherwise in an attempt to gain some time to myself. She demands actual role playing with barbies/ baby dolls or playmobil, everything else is just, in her eyes an attempt to prolongue not playing with her, something which I attempt to do constantly, even if it means sitting in the lavatory (the only room with a lock) for five hours reading my mum's private eye back copies.
The awful truth is that I dislike playing I find it a chore because it takes up so much energy, my sister doesn't allow any latency on my part during play. If I attempt to fallow, backing away from the Barbie box and settling down on the sofa for some tv watching she uses some form of coercion to prevent me from enjoying anything that separates me from her. She'll scream at me, hit me or simply looking up from her dolls, do a running body lunge at me and flinging her whole weight at my neck.
This combined with the almost fourteen year age gap that my sister and I have between us, giving us totally different biological clocks, mine tells me I have to sleep until two in the afternoon or suffer a headache or shit mood all day; hers tells her to get up at seven every morning and jump on my bed until I wake up and play with her.
It seems a strange thing to not want to play with a child, everyone wants to play with children! Exept people who don't like children or don't feel comfortable with them, but I'm not one of those people! I love children! I've had baby relatives plonked in my lap since my weight exeded theirs by a stone, I minded a small baby for three months, why do I find this so bloody difficult? I literally think about it constantly! It's fast becoming the bain of my life! Am I so ego centric that I can't put my own needs aside for an hour a day to play with my sister? The prospect just seems so daunting!
So I talked to my mum a few days ago and finally plucked up the courage to tell her that I disliked playing with my sister, even though it like a completely rediculous thing to say, it was true and I had to get it out. To my surprize my mum was quite sympathetic, infact she agreed with me, playing, properly playing with a child is hard, it is a chore because it is much more complex than we realise. She said that people often think that children are these simple, cute little things that can just be shoved out of the way, when they bore us, but they aren't you need to talk to children ad play with them all the time because they are constantly learning. She then said that I find playing so hard because my sister is using the act of play as a way of bonding with me and analysing me as a person, not just because she thinks it's fun. The same reason why she asks so many annoying questions, she needs to know things, shes constantly trying to soak up every little bit of information from any source. I can see why the Victorians had that 'children should be seen and not heard' ideology so firmly established. It was probably written by some poor parent who wanted their life back.
So the next day I played with my sister, we played with Barbies and my mum was right, it was very draining but so interesting to observe.
The game
She, a six year old, played with one of her miniature barbies that she called Lily, but before the game she chose the most attractive blonde barbie that she was going to, at an unspecified point in the game 'grow up' into. I, a 20 year old univeristy student played with my favorite woodland nymph barbie with long red hair and fairy tattoos down both arms that I called 'Puck.'
Lily's parents had died in a fire and Puck had found her, an orphan, wandering through the woods. (sub plot: Lily secretly has a sister that she didn't know has survived, who later turns up) Puck takes her home to live with her family, the adoption process was almost unmentioned, lily just sits at the breakfast table with Puck's brother's and sisters and just sort of blends into the sibling dark matter. For comedy value, various brothers and sisters run in to the room, arguing and sometimes naked, asking the mum where their clothes are because they can't go to school naked. Lily had similar aged children to play with and Puck gives her dresses as a present, she also likes to keep changing her hair length and style, to the slightly hammed up stupefaction of Phoebe, I mean Puck.
Lily is still clearly in mourning from the recent death of her parents so Puck attempts to comfort Lily by walking her to school and letting her look after the family dog. My character wasn't the most abstract of creations, she is an unspecified 'young adult' who goes to Univeristy. Although I got alittle creative with her image, the fairy tattos inspired me to turn her into a bit of a beatnik, she only wears Ken's 'prince charming' clothes, exept occasionally at parties (like on her birthday when her friends get her to drink two tumblers of wine, she gets drunk, throws up violently for a minute and then passes out all night in her puke. Lily is the one who drags her out of her puke pile in the morning, dispite Lily's efforts to 'have a lie-in.') In terms of character, Puck is an angry young female pariah who has a boyfriend at university whos always trying to get her to marry him, even though she isn't that into him. She also regularly gets kicked out of the house for fighting with her mum or calling her sisters 'wenches.' Although she is a bit of a bastard outcast, she holds a fierce sense of obligation to Lily and always has to make sure she is ok. Eventually the promising appeal that our game held at the beginning began to drain away, the plot died and we sort of lost interest. Although like the true publicist, my sister did attempt to 'jump the shark' and keep the viewers watching by suddenly turning her character into a woman and having two babies, thats when we had a tea break!
I felt a little guilty because usually the games aren't this riveting or personal because I havn't been doing it properly, I've been duking out and skulking off, distracted with everything else in my silly little adult world.
It wasn't really playing at all, it was sort of us in a way, playing out our personalities through these avatars of what we would prefer to be, what we wanted to be. In our ideal worlds my sister wants to be a Disney princess and I want to be tank girl, so that's exactly what we were, tank girl and a disney princess as sisters in our ideal imaginary world.
I'd forgotten how good it feels to get away and play pretend games, they don't damage your liver/ lungs or corrupt you in some way like grown up fun and games tend to do. I should just ignore it all and go play with my sister more often, even though children's games are far more complicated than adult ones, believe it or not!
Good night my little devotchkas
Always merry and bright
xxx
The awful truth is that I dislike playing I find it a chore because it takes up so much energy, my sister doesn't allow any latency on my part during play. If I attempt to fallow, backing away from the Barbie box and settling down on the sofa for some tv watching she uses some form of coercion to prevent me from enjoying anything that separates me from her. She'll scream at me, hit me or simply looking up from her dolls, do a running body lunge at me and flinging her whole weight at my neck.
This combined with the almost fourteen year age gap that my sister and I have between us, giving us totally different biological clocks, mine tells me I have to sleep until two in the afternoon or suffer a headache or shit mood all day; hers tells her to get up at seven every morning and jump on my bed until I wake up and play with her.
It seems a strange thing to not want to play with a child, everyone wants to play with children! Exept people who don't like children or don't feel comfortable with them, but I'm not one of those people! I love children! I've had baby relatives plonked in my lap since my weight exeded theirs by a stone, I minded a small baby for three months, why do I find this so bloody difficult? I literally think about it constantly! It's fast becoming the bain of my life! Am I so ego centric that I can't put my own needs aside for an hour a day to play with my sister? The prospect just seems so daunting!
So I talked to my mum a few days ago and finally plucked up the courage to tell her that I disliked playing with my sister, even though it like a completely rediculous thing to say, it was true and I had to get it out. To my surprize my mum was quite sympathetic, infact she agreed with me, playing, properly playing with a child is hard, it is a chore because it is much more complex than we realise. She said that people often think that children are these simple, cute little things that can just be shoved out of the way, when they bore us, but they aren't you need to talk to children ad play with them all the time because they are constantly learning. She then said that I find playing so hard because my sister is using the act of play as a way of bonding with me and analysing me as a person, not just because she thinks it's fun. The same reason why she asks so many annoying questions, she needs to know things, shes constantly trying to soak up every little bit of information from any source. I can see why the Victorians had that 'children should be seen and not heard' ideology so firmly established. It was probably written by some poor parent who wanted their life back.
So the next day I played with my sister, we played with Barbies and my mum was right, it was very draining but so interesting to observe.
The game
She, a six year old, played with one of her miniature barbies that she called Lily, but before the game she chose the most attractive blonde barbie that she was going to, at an unspecified point in the game 'grow up' into. I, a 20 year old univeristy student played with my favorite woodland nymph barbie with long red hair and fairy tattoos down both arms that I called 'Puck.'
Lily's parents had died in a fire and Puck had found her, an orphan, wandering through the woods. (sub plot: Lily secretly has a sister that she didn't know has survived, who later turns up) Puck takes her home to live with her family, the adoption process was almost unmentioned, lily just sits at the breakfast table with Puck's brother's and sisters and just sort of blends into the sibling dark matter. For comedy value, various brothers and sisters run in to the room, arguing and sometimes naked, asking the mum where their clothes are because they can't go to school naked. Lily had similar aged children to play with and Puck gives her dresses as a present, she also likes to keep changing her hair length and style, to the slightly hammed up stupefaction of Phoebe, I mean Puck.
Lily is still clearly in mourning from the recent death of her parents so Puck attempts to comfort Lily by walking her to school and letting her look after the family dog. My character wasn't the most abstract of creations, she is an unspecified 'young adult' who goes to Univeristy. Although I got alittle creative with her image, the fairy tattos inspired me to turn her into a bit of a beatnik, she only wears Ken's 'prince charming' clothes, exept occasionally at parties (like on her birthday when her friends get her to drink two tumblers of wine, she gets drunk, throws up violently for a minute and then passes out all night in her puke. Lily is the one who drags her out of her puke pile in the morning, dispite Lily's efforts to 'have a lie-in.') In terms of character, Puck is an angry young female pariah who has a boyfriend at university whos always trying to get her to marry him, even though she isn't that into him. She also regularly gets kicked out of the house for fighting with her mum or calling her sisters 'wenches.' Although she is a bit of a bastard outcast, she holds a fierce sense of obligation to Lily and always has to make sure she is ok. Eventually the promising appeal that our game held at the beginning began to drain away, the plot died and we sort of lost interest. Although like the true publicist, my sister did attempt to 'jump the shark' and keep the viewers watching by suddenly turning her character into a woman and having two babies, thats when we had a tea break!
I felt a little guilty because usually the games aren't this riveting or personal because I havn't been doing it properly, I've been duking out and skulking off, distracted with everything else in my silly little adult world.
It wasn't really playing at all, it was sort of us in a way, playing out our personalities through these avatars of what we would prefer to be, what we wanted to be. In our ideal worlds my sister wants to be a Disney princess and I want to be tank girl, so that's exactly what we were, tank girl and a disney princess as sisters in our ideal imaginary world.
I'd forgotten how good it feels to get away and play pretend games, they don't damage your liver/ lungs or corrupt you in some way like grown up fun and games tend to do. I should just ignore it all and go play with my sister more often, even though children's games are far more complicated than adult ones, believe it or not!
Good night my little devotchkas
Always merry and bright
xxx
Monday, 24 December 2007
infatuation
Oh Debbie Harry/ Bjork and Aretha Franklin, you know what it's like to be mad about the boy!
No boyfriend, just an imagination and cool female artists with voices I could never match.
*Long, heavy sigh*
Merry Christmas my little devotchkas!
xxx
Sunday, 23 December 2007
technological determinism vs the santa myth
'I hear babies crying, I watch them grow, they'll learn much more than I'll ever know'
-Louis Armstrong
One of the worst things about growing up is that you see the younger generations, that contain your cousins, siblings and sibling of close friends evolve and abandon the values you subconciously grew up with. Technology for example, my mum is thinking about getting my six year old sister an i-pod shuffle, I got my first radio/tape player combo at ten. My sister has never seen ren and stimpy, are you afraid of the dark or Sabrina the teenage witch, the fond memories of my childhood that were played on the only two children's cable channels. Now there are at least fifty that churn out half-assed computer animated capitalist propaganda with no distinctive characters, good God I sound like an old fart, or a middle aged Guardian columnist. I don't want to be accused of technological determinism or anything, every generation is just an epoch in the perpetual lineage of 'man' and his 'tool' running parallel with one another in development, but you can't help but find yourself supporting the liquidisation of some rather lovely traditions.
Which leads me to the bizzare transcript of my reaction to my sister's first logical questionings of Father Christmas' exitence
Sister: Father Christmas isn't a real person is he?
Me: (thinking: oh fuck!!! How the raz did she work that one out so quickly? and so calm? Why is she not having a nervous breakdown like the one I had when I asked my mum and screamed at her that she ruined Christmas. Oh God this child is too clever for me, I hope I will have buggered off back to uni by the time she starts asking about sex) Yes he is Stinky( Thinking:bad, bad weak adult, don't lie to her, why did you just lie to her? she has already worked it out, stop reaffirming the lie, she's much cleverer than you, just tell her the truth and get out of the way of her quest for knowledge, she has the right to know!) what makes you think that?
Sister: (Doing her adult impersenation, young face contorted with sceptecism) Well, I don't know how he can be all over the place all the time, he'd need to go back home sometimes, otherwise how would the elves know what to make?
Me: What do you mean, he only has to give presents one night a year, he has plenty of time to tell the elves!
Sister: No, when he sees me, that wasn't father Christmas, that was an actor!
Me:(Thinking: Ofcourse! The grotto! Thank fuck, she's only worked out that the father christmas in the grotto isn't real, that isn't a problem, she still believes that father Christmas is coming to our house in three days! Besides, grotto father christmas is shit and unconvincing, I worked out years before I found out about the real father Christmas didn't exist and I don't believe the first event provoked the second, to my knowledge.
Ok, childhood innocence still in possession of my sister, father Christmas conspiracy can be prolongued for at least another year. I suppose it should be my mother who tells her that he doesn't exist, she did it very tenderly with me. However, as her only sister, I think I can handle the responsibility of explaining the grotto conspiracy without any emotional scars.)
*Kneel to my sister's eye level, look at her seriously in the eyes*
That's right, the father Christmas in the grotto isn't the real father Christmas, those are people that Father Christmas asks to pretend to be him so they can find out what they want in their stockings. Those are actually father Christmas' brothers, he has lots of brothers all over the world who look like him and every year they work in the grottos, note down what the girls and boys want and then e-mail all their names to Father Christmas. (Brothers?? E-mail?? are you trying to turn your sister into a social reject? What if she walks into the play ground repeating what you said to her friends? Yesterday you told her that she couldn't hang the stockings up early because Father Christmas will think you are trying to cheat and not leave you anything, why??? remind me, was it because you couldn't be bothered to get off the sofa and help her find the stockings? You are the worst adult role model in the world!)
I can see the subliminal advertising begin to lure it's way into everything, even my speech!
E-mail, it makes perfect sense, all that information being sent so far in such a short space of time. Logically E-mail is just what Father Christmas would need to cope with that level of data, but fuck, it's not supposed to make sense! It's supposed to be magic!
I can see the imagination of Children at Christmas becoming charred into unreadable blackness like a letter to father Christmas going up the chimney, where, for all I know, it gets burned as soon as it's out of a child's sight. Now it's going to be replaced by something totally different and scary, like a toy mobile phone.
On the plus side, perhaps it will be technology that prevents the Father Christmas plaster from being ripped off too early, it certainly makes a few angles of the myth more plausable than they appeared to be in my day!
Good night my little devotchkas!
xxx
-Louis Armstrong
One of the worst things about growing up is that you see the younger generations, that contain your cousins, siblings and sibling of close friends evolve and abandon the values you subconciously grew up with. Technology for example, my mum is thinking about getting my six year old sister an i-pod shuffle, I got my first radio/tape player combo at ten. My sister has never seen ren and stimpy, are you afraid of the dark or Sabrina the teenage witch, the fond memories of my childhood that were played on the only two children's cable channels. Now there are at least fifty that churn out half-assed computer animated capitalist propaganda with no distinctive characters, good God I sound like an old fart, or a middle aged Guardian columnist. I don't want to be accused of technological determinism or anything, every generation is just an epoch in the perpetual lineage of 'man' and his 'tool' running parallel with one another in development, but you can't help but find yourself supporting the liquidisation of some rather lovely traditions.
Which leads me to the bizzare transcript of my reaction to my sister's first logical questionings of Father Christmas' exitence
Sister: Father Christmas isn't a real person is he?
Me: (thinking: oh fuck!!! How the raz did she work that one out so quickly? and so calm? Why is she not having a nervous breakdown like the one I had when I asked my mum and screamed at her that she ruined Christmas. Oh God this child is too clever for me, I hope I will have buggered off back to uni by the time she starts asking about sex) Yes he is Stinky( Thinking:bad, bad weak adult, don't lie to her, why did you just lie to her? she has already worked it out, stop reaffirming the lie, she's much cleverer than you, just tell her the truth and get out of the way of her quest for knowledge, she has the right to know!) what makes you think that?
Sister: (Doing her adult impersenation, young face contorted with sceptecism) Well, I don't know how he can be all over the place all the time, he'd need to go back home sometimes, otherwise how would the elves know what to make?
Me: What do you mean, he only has to give presents one night a year, he has plenty of time to tell the elves!
Sister: No, when he sees me, that wasn't father Christmas, that was an actor!
Me:(Thinking: Ofcourse! The grotto! Thank fuck, she's only worked out that the father christmas in the grotto isn't real, that isn't a problem, she still believes that father Christmas is coming to our house in three days! Besides, grotto father christmas is shit and unconvincing, I worked out years before I found out about the real father Christmas didn't exist and I don't believe the first event provoked the second, to my knowledge.
Ok, childhood innocence still in possession of my sister, father Christmas conspiracy can be prolongued for at least another year. I suppose it should be my mother who tells her that he doesn't exist, she did it very tenderly with me. However, as her only sister, I think I can handle the responsibility of explaining the grotto conspiracy without any emotional scars.)
*Kneel to my sister's eye level, look at her seriously in the eyes*
That's right, the father Christmas in the grotto isn't the real father Christmas, those are people that Father Christmas asks to pretend to be him so they can find out what they want in their stockings. Those are actually father Christmas' brothers, he has lots of brothers all over the world who look like him and every year they work in the grottos, note down what the girls and boys want and then e-mail all their names to Father Christmas. (Brothers?? E-mail?? are you trying to turn your sister into a social reject? What if she walks into the play ground repeating what you said to her friends? Yesterday you told her that she couldn't hang the stockings up early because Father Christmas will think you are trying to cheat and not leave you anything, why??? remind me, was it because you couldn't be bothered to get off the sofa and help her find the stockings? You are the worst adult role model in the world!)
I can see the subliminal advertising begin to lure it's way into everything, even my speech!
E-mail, it makes perfect sense, all that information being sent so far in such a short space of time. Logically E-mail is just what Father Christmas would need to cope with that level of data, but fuck, it's not supposed to make sense! It's supposed to be magic!
I can see the imagination of Children at Christmas becoming charred into unreadable blackness like a letter to father Christmas going up the chimney, where, for all I know, it gets burned as soon as it's out of a child's sight. Now it's going to be replaced by something totally different and scary, like a toy mobile phone.
On the plus side, perhaps it will be technology that prevents the Father Christmas plaster from being ripped off too early, it certainly makes a few angles of the myth more plausable than they appeared to be in my day!
Good night my little devotchkas!
xxx
Saturday, 22 December 2007
My first blog
My sister and I have been biting each other, she's six and has been begging me to play with her every second of the day, so I tried alittle reverse psychology on her by pinning her down to the floor and not letting her go to the toilet because I loved her so much my heart couldn't stand the absence, she lasted about five minutes.
My cheeks are burning, their surface ringed in scores of pink six year old teeth marks, I'm home, yeeha!
Three days to go my devotchkas
XXX
My cheeks are burning, their surface ringed in scores of pink six year old teeth marks, I'm home, yeeha!
Three days to go my devotchkas
XXX
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