circus

[yhirata] Have to write about my sister joining the circus. Because that's just /weird/.

[Flamingo] Oh, /this/ is where you start calling what she does weird? You have to reach "circus" before you call out the word "weird" to us?

Sad, isn't it? So, yeah. My sister joined the circus.

This wasn't what the entry was going to be about, mind you. I have other things, other stories, other issues, but while I was out buying lunch yesterday, I got a bunch of instant messages from my sister.

She joined the circus.

My sister is a carny.

"Well, not really," she wrote after that misdirected bombshell, misdirected because I wasn't at my desk to reel and clutch at my throat with gobbling sounds of horror. "There's a show in town. It's here for five days. They needed people to rappel off the big top. I'll be cleaning. Love you, bye!" --and then she was gone, popping offline just in time for my, "You joined the what?!" to disappear into the black hole of internet space.

The Guy, who as yet has no familial relationship to her and therefore finds her antics entertaining, amusing, and in a curious way, gratifying, instantly started to sparkle with delight. "Your sister's a what?" And then, inevitably: "'Small hands. Smell like cabbage.'"

My coworkers were entertained by this development in the ongoing saga of madness that is my family. "You don't have normal problems with your family, do you?" one asked. "Other people, they have drug addicts, abortions, alcoholics, abuse--"

"They do?"

"--and you have a mother who wants to feed you cactus, and a sister in the circus."

I think I'll choose to be grateful about that.

My family is, I think, starting to reach mythic proportions to my coworkers, in much the same way they've inspired expressions of disbelief from readers of my journal. One of the purple monkeys made dark comments about fictional boyfriends and fictional sisters as she marched out of my cube this morning. A picture of my sister failed to appease her, consisting as it did of a completely black profile of my sister dangling by a rope off a precipice, flanked on one side by massive stalactites of ice.

"You could have photoshopped anybody there," she pointed out, which is true enough. And anyway, many people have a hard time believing in my sister until they actually meet her, at which point they decide they no longer believe my stories. It seems unfair that an absent sister allows people to believe -- however tenuously -- in my stories, if not in her existence, whereas a corporeal one validates her existence while simultaneously making the tales seem wildly fantastic.

She just seems so, I don't know. Ordinary. And yet, I defy anyone to ask her about the stuff she's done and think I'm making anything up.

She's so pleasant. So normal.

Just like my mother. "I'm not sure I believe in her, either," quoth the purple monkey.

Birds of a feather, those two.