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.... +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+