it’s tami’s birthday today. happy birthday little pookie!
there is this girl i went to first grade with who i now internet stalk. she has a blog on which she always praises her family and friends effusively at every possible occasion. i find it almost uncomfortable, like behind all that good will lies a bitter but repressed heart and she is going to lose it one day and knife murder them all. but anyway, it is nice of her to say all those flattering things. i am going to try it.
though now sadly over the hill, tami is cute and adorable because:
she is a woman of many passions. first it was jimmy stewart movies, than she was obsessed with harry houdini, a little later she got really into smokey robinson, now she is consumed by– and a voracious consumer of– organic and local foods. what lies ahead, only time will tell.
she studied abroad in scotland and now holds semi-annual burns suppers complete with vegetarian haggis.
she is skinny like a string bean and looks rather breakable.
she writes cute pithy articles for the philadelphia city paper.
she is nice to everyone and is pure of heart in a mind-boggling yet refreshing way.
she is not a big mouth like her sister.
she harbors only a small amount of resentment for all the crap i put her through over the years. she forgives easily.
not only does she love her family devotedly, she also likes spending time with them. she told my parents they were not allowed to move away from her, although now she is likely to move away from them. her biggest concern about moving is not seeing them every weekend.
she is the only one in the family who expresses emotion openly, honestly or at all. it can’t possibly come from nature, and it certainly didn’t come from nurture, so where the hell did it come from?
when she was little and we shared a room, i would wake up to the sound of her having conversations with her stuffed animals in bed.
she is easy-going and agreeable.
she is an emo and indie music maven. she appreciated the cure at eight, loved the smiths at eleven, listened to blur at twelve, and introduced us to belle and sebastien at the tender age of fourteen.
while i was doing my best to convince her that girly was the way to go, tami was challenging gender norms in the most kick-ass way. she cut her hair short, played football with the boys at recess, and refused to wear a skirt, and that’s just the standard stuff. she also wanted to be called tommy and claimed to have a penis but we won’t get into that here. too bad i was too young at the time to realize how cool it was to have a non-conformist sister.
she let me be the mom every time we played house, even though every single time that i convinced her to be the dad i promised her the next time she could be the mom. i am probably responsible for her gender ambivalence to tell the truth.
she has silly yet sincere ideas about health. she assessed my food intake for a week to figure out why i always have stomach aches. she dreams of becoming a nutritionist. and she is now bugging me to go eat already because eating after 8pm is bad for digestion. whatevah, i guess her list of cutenesses will be cut short… i could have continued for another year and a half.
