ADAD June 15 - Father
"What do we have in common that we inherited from Dad?"
"You mean besides hating Dad?"
Georgia and George are half-siblings. Their father is named George. They're also only two months apart. Their father was two-timing both of their mothers! When they were kids their mothers hated each other, but fortunately they grew up getting along with each other even if their families didn't.
Remember when I was writing Jane’s diary? I wrote a whole huge chunk about Georgia that I never posted! So here it is, as written by Jane…
This is Georgia. She’s my best friend. Every year there’s this cooperative program between the art grad students and the creative writing ones, and last year Georgia was paired up with me! She sat around in my studio and we may or may not have had a lot of white wine to drink, and eventually she wrote this poem about drowning and I drew a series of line portraits of a little kid wearing swimmies, growing up into a woman wearing swimmies and then clutching them. I dunno, it was kinda corny, but Georgia is definitely my favorite subject to paint. She’s done her program now and she’s doing freelance editing, so she works in the studio on her laptop and half the time I draw her since she’s basically still anyway. I kinda wanna paint a series of portraits, one of me and one of her, and then have a bunch in the middle of us slowly blending together, and the one in the very middle is way abstract. Or something, I dunno. And when I get a real gallery show someday, I’m not having music, I’m just having Georgia stand in the corner reciting all the good soliloquies from Shakespeare. To the sounds of iced tea being stirred. She came up with it and then she did a bunch and I’m sure it’ll be great. She listens to audiobooks instead of music unless she’s writing because she says music manipulates your emotions too much, and I realized she’s right, so now when I do a painting I make a playlist just for that one, for the emotions, and then I only listen to talky stuff if I’m not working. I think it’s effective. That or illustrating Georgia’s poems, that’s another good inspiration.
The other thing about Georgia that’s neat is her name. It’s the best story and it’s so crazy she said she only tells it to people she really likes, but I asked if I could put it in here and she said yes. Georgia is named after her dad, who is George, obviously. See, when her mom was young she was dating her dad, but little did she know he was two-timing her with another woman! Georgia’s mom got pregnant but he was such a dick he didn’t break it off with the other woman. In fact, the other woman got pregnant too, like two months after Georgia’s mom! Well by like six months they found out about each other, but I guess they were both crazy, or pregnant-lady-crazy, that momma bear thing, because they both kept sticking with this guy and, like, fighting over him! Georgia was born and her mom named her Georgia to stake a claim on this guy… but then the other lady had a boy, and she named him George! So Georgia has a half-brother called George. And their moms were both hairdressers and they all lived in this town in Delaware called Bethany Beach, which is like a sorta snooty anti-beachy beach town (I went to visit with Georgia once and, like, you can’t even get alcohol after 11:30! It wants to be Cape Cod or some shit), and basically people in town went to one of heir salons or the other, and it was Hatfields and McCoys until Georgia was a freshman in high school. Then her dad slept with some new woman, and both the moms finally dumped his ass! Georgia is kinda crazy independent now because of that. Like, she obviously loves her mom, but at the same time, she watched her mom basically wreck her life and make herself miserable over this guy, so, yeah. I asked if she wanted to be roommates this year and she wouldn’t do it because she was afraid of us not being friends anymore. Hilariously, though, she gets along with her half-brother. Apparently they never met until sixth grade, and everyone knew who they were. Georgia walked up to him and punched him in the nose and said, “Your father makes my mom miserable!” and he said, “Well *your* father makes *my* mom miserable!” So they bonded over mutual father hate.