Pushing Blame

Do you know I actually have a sister?

Actually more than one! Probably enough Buffy-power to fill up the ranks of two quarrelsome cheerleader squads and more besides. Relax, don't throw the axe at my innocent dad yet - he wasn't foooling around way back when to produce an illegitimate daughter!

Though come to think of it, it would be kinda fun discovering a new sibling.

I actually call my first cousins brothers and sisters - from budding fashionista Lispy Lori to brooding Macho Mike. Hell, they are probably as annoying as true life sibs would be. Happens in the best of large extended families and Charming Calvin would attest to the fact that my hitherto unknown relatives are seemingly springing up from the cracks in every city he visits.


Come show us the goodies, babies...
He hasn't met Hard RocK Harriet yet though :) Closest in age to me - and the only one I can rightfully call big sister. Outwardly an otherwise serious-minded physician content with her academic pursuits - but behind those scientist glasses is a bad, mad woman on the run.

Don't see her all that often though since she's based in a lil upjutting peninsula at the edge of the Pearl River delta called Kowloon - stuck with the unenviable task of caring for projectile vomiting infants in the crib and hysterical parents as a neonatologist.

In the family e-mail newsletter, we occasionally take turns blaming each other for initiating the horrifying trend towards medicine in the junior family roster. Already 3 doctors in the family with another 5 in med school?! What the fuck! Obviously sanity's lost in this family.

Paul : You started it! Brainwashed the lot into trying out med school!
Harriet : Hey, I told them not to take up medicine. You were the one who made med school look damned easy!
Paul : Hey, I tried to look dead tired after work at least. You're the one jetting off after work to exotic locales!
Harriet : That was the one time! And so did you!
Paul : Those poor, poor fools. They don't know what they're getting into!
Harriet : What a bitter pill to swallow! Hope they blame their parents though.

And then to get over our shared dismay, we just had to drown ourselves in martinis at the bar. During lunch. I felt so decadent.

My grandmother says that it was one of God's ingenious preventive measures to have us separated at birth since relative mayhem ensues when we're within a ten mile radius of each other. Not that the world necessarily teeters at the edge of the Apocalypse when that rare event happens - but when we get together, we do tend to goad each other into the most impossible ( and occasionally unlawful ) hijinks from harmless charades to the occasional petty thievery. Then there was that forgotten summer when we decided one Haagen Dazs morning that we should go backpacking across England. I don't think the folks over there have recovered from that annus horribilis yet :)

Also that time we pretended to be a nauseatingly lovey-dovey couple just to score some tea and biscuits at Tiffany's.

I know. We should know better.

Well I'm younger so I hope that takes some of the blame off me. Harriet's the respectable paediatrician after all :)