Lana feels

Dammit. More waiting. Today we went and got school supplies to be shipped to CRMS and went to the supermarket to buy groceries so that the kid could have a week of nutrition before I go back to school and she's reduced to eating french fries for dinner again. I have to fix my computer, because every time I open Microsoft Word it freezes and that will not do when I have to use it for school. I have to put the guest room back together because we installed the new computer up there and there are guests coming tomorrow and it's all in a shambles. I'm already living in school - I talk to Cesca and she tells me that she, Chris, Heather and Ben have been building a pool in the river that flows past the dorms and that we'll go swimming when I get back. Then my sister needs something and I'm reminded of the need to live here, because while I'm here I take care of her. The Random French Woman was watching as I put the new computer together and Brynne fetched and carried things for me. She watched me give orders and the Kid follow them, as the given order of things between my sister and I was carried out in this interaction towards the fufillment of a task, and she said in great surprise that she had never seen Brynne listen to anybody before. She's right. It's always been that way. I've always been there, and always been up to something more interesting than anybody else in Brynne's world. I was going through a bunch of pictures of us as little kids, and there are so many, taken in various places, of the two of us together. Of me looking at the camera, or off into space, or at the action, or being the action, and Brynne looking up at me as if to see what it is she should be doing. And that was our childhood. I'd come up with something to do, she'd take her cues from me. Chris and I were talking during scholarship work day about the roles we hold in childhood with our siblings and how those carry over into our interactions with people through the rest of our lives. He says he tends to end up playing the goofy little brother with other men. I tend to end up mothering people, and coming up with schemes and plans and imaginative worlds, and I think maybe this is where it came from. My little sister always needing me to provide her with a world to exist and play and live in, and to teach her how and help her to do it. I was the intrepid leader, the experienced and brave one, but when she was hurt or tired she would turn to me for a band-aid or hot cocoa or a piggy-back ride home. And now she's growing up and we're talking about boys and girls and sex and friendship and bras as well as sleds and dolls and climbing trees, and now I'm almost all grown up and I'm making her eat vegetables and restricting the amount of sugar she can put in things, but the basics are the same. I wish she'd hurry up with this adolescent thing, because it can make her a real pain in the ass sometimes, but for the most part she's turning out okay. Like somebody I could really get along with as well as love to pieces. It's wierd with siblings, that it has to work that way. You love them because they're there and because you've known them since one of you didn't have teeth or hair, no matter what you actually think of them, and later on you get to like each other, if you're lucky. I think I'm lucky.