Sinister: The Boy from the 'Bay responds to No One in Particular....

[aale002 at xxx.nz]

I made one of Rachel Fruitloop's uberposts!  Yay for me!  I'm almost 
faaaaamous, now; though not quite in the same league as the irrepressible Ken 
Chu, the lluverly Laura Llew, and the erudite, vicariously satisfying Stacey 
Dahling!  I think I deserve a kebab and a beer to celebrate......

I'm just sitting here, listening to some old skool Van Morrison and feeling
fine.  As you do.  And I must admit it's taking me back; at least as far as
last week, anyways. (Have you noticed that I'm participating in the recent 
resurgence of semicolon use?  I though you might.)  Particularly, I'm 
remembering some of the exchanges between myself and two young charmers on 
#sinister, Kirsten Kenyon and Andreea.  

It may sound odd, but I constantly forget that other people find my family 
unusual.  But really, who _ever_ thinks of their family as being unusual 
without intensive effort?  Family is the soil from whence we bud and grow, and 
have you ever heard of a plant questioning the normalcy of the soil it arises 
from?  I thought not.

Statistically, my family history is unusual; moreso than you might first 
suspect.  Yes, even as suspicious as you are.  So, to play my part in our 
vision of an indie utopia, overflowing with shameless self promotion for the 
purposes of pulling as often and as well as possible, (and because I have 
another essay due) I shall henceforth proceed to provide a sketch of, what must 
surely be, one of The Most Unusual Families.

I cannot begin at the beginning, for the beginning is a place with no memory. 
Memory always comes after.  OK, here goes:  my stepfather is gay and used to be 
a sailor, my mother's a widow, and I have a Maori sister and a step-brother 
and -sister who are half Malaysian. 

Confused?  You should be.

My father was an Italian immigrant, twenty years older than my mother.  They 
adopted my sister, Kat, when I was five.  Eight years later he died.  After 
that, my mother moved up here to Auckland, soon followed by her friend, Pete. 
He had been married to a Malaysian woman, PG, and had two kids with her, Kim 
and Carl, but the marriage become increasingly strained, and they soon 
separated.  Pete came out of the closet later that year, during their 
particularly messy separation (Kim went with her father, Carl stayed with his 
mother.)  Then PG was diagnosed with cancer.  She died within the year, and 
Carl, after much shuffling back and forth between PG's relatives, eventually 
made up with his father.

Like my mother, Pete is a nurse, and he found work up here, moving in with 
her.  They quickly went from being good friends to best friends, getting into 
all sorts of trouble.  :)  Kim and Carl moved in with them and my sister soon 
after.  Then, last year, they finally achieved their dream of buying their own 
home here in Auckland, which they own together.  Although Pete's gay, they 
share the same bed (too much information, I know!) and Pete's now unofficially 
my "stepfather".  Kim is now living over in Australia with her boyfriend, Carl 
is still at home, studying to be a chef, and Kat lives with them, doing a 
little as possible and generally bringing disrepute to the already disreputable 
Alessi family name.  :) 

So, there you go.  All very The State I Am In, I must say.  :)

Right-o, that's me,

Cunning Andre

P.S. Has anyone yet found an answer to why on earth I can write the crappest 
essay in the history of the universe (for example, "Visual Attention and fMRI", 
which contained 12 pages of introduction in a 15 page document; or a discussion 
of St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God which was 
effectively a paraphrase of the lecture handout we were given, written by the 
lecturer) and still get the second highest marks in the class!  Honestly, it's 
almost enough to make me want to go to the lecturer and complain.  Almost....  
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