Miscellany, with added Cuba Libre

[bibliotrope]

This is going to be a post full of links, because I'm too tired* to post anything really intense.

Vinyl -- not dead yet.

The Disemvoweler -- TNH as action heroine!

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's blog.

Last but not least: On this day in 1962, John Glenn orbited the Earth. Three times. The first American astronaut to do so (Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin

Comments

[mmegaera]

My sisters are 12, 9, and 8 years older than I am. If I'm like anyone in those series, I'm Grace in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (who was a schoolgirl when Laura got married), but she's a very minor character. The girls (my parents always referred to us as "the girls and Meg" which begged the question, "but aren't I a girl, too?") all got married the year I turned twelve, in 1971, and started having babies in 1974. Over the next five years, between the three of them they had six children. If my dad hadn't been transferred 1200 miles away the summer after the first one was born, I'd probably have died from terminal babysititis.

As it is, I'm not quite halfway between my sisters' generation and my nieces' and nephews' generation, since I was an aunt at fourteen. Since I never had children of my own, and have probably spent a grand total of less than six months' worth of days with my sisters in the thirty-plus years since we moved away, they haven't been able to eradicate the obnoxious adolescent I was when we left from their memories. It makes seeing them awkward on the rare occasions that I do.

I've always been the perpetual outsider in my own family. There were three reasons bandied about as to why my parents had me so much later than the rest of my siblings -- I was a last-ditch attempt at a boy, I was an accident, and, the one my mother always used to insist on when I was a child, I was to keep my parents young. It was only on the last visit I made to see my mother that she finally admitted I was one last attempt at a boy [g]. I was definitely an honorary boy, at any rate. My parents had three June Cleaver clones and the one that didn't take.