Summer Family Vacation

"We never laugh about anything real. We just make up a bunch of hypothetical bullshit and then laugh about that!"-my brother

My brother said that about my family as we walked back to our car following his three-hour-long campus graduation ceremony. I think at that exact moment we were laughing about a particular professor who had spoken during the ceremony and imagining how funny it would have been if, following the ENORMOUS post-ceremony fireworks display, they showed the professor on the video screen looking all scorched and disheveled with his glasses hanging off the end of his nose and his hair standing straight up in the air as a result of the fireworks. My brother is absolutely right. That's what my family does. We get into a situation and immediately turn the entire thing into a big joke. Any situation at all can become hilarious to us, and then we tell the funny stories from that situation over and over again for the rest of our lives. But it's only funny to us because most of the time, well, you had to be there.

I thought I'd be able to write a great post about the week Penn and I spent with my family, but now I'm realizing that even though I was laughing pretty much non-stop from the moment we got off the plane on Thursday night until the moment we got in the car to head to the airport the following Thursday, only about 10% of what happened on the trip would be funny to anyone other than my family. That's just how it is with families, isn't it?

The whole trip was great. It was the first time Penn spent an extended amount of time with my family. Prior to this trip he had had one dinner with my parents and had spent a day with my brother, but he had never met my sister or my grandparents. The best part of the whole trip was that we have all finally met each other. My brother has a girlfriend now (they've been dating since January) and I'd never met her, and I'd only spent a few hours with my sister's boyfriend prior to the trip, and I don't think any of the significant others had ever met each other. So it was great to be able to hang out with my entire family, including my grandparents, and add the people we're all dating to the mix. This is the first time that my siblings and I have all had significant others at the same time, so it was kind of interesting to have that little peek into the future when we'll be a family of eight (at least!) instead of a family of five. I really like my brother's girlfriend a lot. This is the first girl he has dated seriously (seriously enough to introduce her to the family, anyway) and she seems smart, pretty, and fun and she has a good sense of humor. They're only 22 so it's probably too early to assume that this is the girl he's going to stay with for the long run, but if she is the one I'd be happy with his choice. Not that my opinion really matters; you love who you love, after all. Still, it's nice to see that he has picked such a classy girl. My sister and I used to joke about him bringing home some floozy, so I'm proud that he has such good taste. Now I understand why Penn's older sister awwws so much about us. It's just so shocking and amazing and cute to see your baby brother as an actual adult in a relationship. As for my sister, I still don't really understand her relationship on paper (He's 40! He has four kids from three different women! They've been together for a year and a half now and its hard to get beyond those facts, despite my best efforts) but seeing her with her boyfriend makes me realize that, although her relationship would never be my choice for myself, it really does seem to be working for them. He seems happy, she seems happy and seems to be thriving in the role of stepmom (his 7- and 11-year-old sons are with them often) and when it comes down to it, that's what matters. They seem to be making a good life for themselves despite the obstacles. And despite the fact that I think her boyfriend has made some mistakes and I still don't entirely trust that he won't make the same mistakes with my sister, I can't deny that he is a nice guy. My sister and I are very different people. I love her like crazy and she's one of my favorite people to hang out with. She's a hilarious person with a big heart and I never want her to change. But I realized recently that for our entire lives I've been having to remind myself, "Just because she doesn't do it my way doesn't mean her way is wrong," and this is just another, more extreme reason for me to use my mantra. It's not what I'd want for myself or my future daughter, and it's not ideally what I would want for her, but I can't control her life and I'm not going to try to do that. She's happy. Until that changes, I won't interfere. Anyway, who knows what will happen in the future. She and her boyfriend may happily be together for the next fifty years and Penn and I may crash and burn despite our best efforts and easier start. There is no "right" way to have a relationship, and I'm going to continue to be as open-minded as possible about my sister's choice. After all, the only other option is rejecting her choice and therefore rejecting her (because there is no way she'd choose me over him) and I'm not going to do that.

Anyway. Family time was awesome. And loud. We spent three nights in the city where my brother and sister are currently living hanging out with them and attending my brother's graduation. As I mentioned, my grandparents came to town, too, as did my brother's best friend from high school (I think I've mentioned him here before, I call him my Adopted Mexican Brother. Whenever my siblings and I are home he does family dinners with us, he's usually over on Christmas and Thanksgiving, and he traveled with us to Vegas last year.) Add my sister's quasi-stepsons to the mix along with various aunts and uncles who met up with us for some meals and my brother's roommates and, well, let's just say I think at its smallest point the group consisted of ten people and one afternoon there were seventeen of us at lunch. Penn always jokes about how loud my family is, and now that I only see them a couple of times a year I realize exactly how loud we really are. Good lord. At one point during the trip we were eating lunch, all of us shouting up and down the table to each other as usual, and Penn grabbed my wildly gesticulating hand and said, "Ssshhhh, you're so loud!" I said, "Really? Oh, come on, we're not being that loud, are we?" and at that exact moment my Adopted Mexican Brother turned to my brother and said, "Stop yelling in my ear!" Point taken. Actually, Penn had a great time with my loudmouth family (and I'm not just saying that, he told me it was one of the best vacations he has ever had). We may be deafening, but we're fun people. I think it's just going to take him more than one trip to acclimate to the decibal levels we can produce.

The highlights of the graduation weekend? Well, restaurants, for one. I got to eat at a lot of the places I've missed since I moved away from this particular city two years ago. I also got to revisit some of the bars I used to frequent when I lived near there and would go out with my sister. We had a great time drinking and dancing. My mom was doing more dancing than anyone, of course.* We also had a really nice hotel room with feathery pillows to crash on after said drinking and dancing. Now that I'm thinking about it, that's about all we did other than go to the graduation ceremonies: eat, drink, dance. It was pretty perfect. Oh, and we got to see my sister's new house (yes, my sister owns a house now! It's really nice, too. Other than my family, the cheap real estate is the only thing that could even remotely tempt me back to my home state) and Penn and I went swimming with her and her boyfriend and the kids at their community pool. My favorite part of that day was when the 7-year-old looked at me and Penn and said, "Do you two kiss each other on the lips?" I hemmed and hawed for a second and then decided "Sometimes..." was the best answer. To which he replied, "No, you can't! He has a big mustache and a beard!!!" I thought that was hilarious.
Oh, and I also took Penn for a quick drive to see the school where I did my MA and the little town where I lived for two years. It was so weird being back there. Penn said he couldn't imagine me living there, and now it's really hard for me to believe that I ever lived there, too. It's just so...small. It was never a happening place, but I guess the economic downturn has hit the town hard because so many stores and businesses have shut down. About half of the bars in the town square appear to no longer exist, and the Target and Best Buy I used to frequent are gone as well (I assume they moved somewhere else in town and didn't shut down entirely, but maybe they did). When I think about the time I lived there now (August 2005-May 2007) it seems like a different person's life. There were a lot of good parts of life there--it was great being close to my sister and brother and I have a lot of fond memories of hanging out with my sister and our dogs, that's where I met Maddi and those two years were worth it even if all I had gotten out of them was our friendship--but I also associate that place very strongly with my horrendous breakup with Phil and I hate the way I let myself behave during that whole ordeal. I was pathetic. And yet I don't know how else I could have handled it. Maybe a bit more foresight and faith in my ability to have a good life on my own and a bit less pleading and sobbing would have helped, but I worked through that breakup the only way I knew how, and the way most people work through breakups, I think. Everyone I know has a story of a breakup during which they behaved horribly or pathetically. In my case, a lesson has been learned and if I ever have to go through another breakup I know what not to do (of course, I'm really, really, really hoping I'll never have to go through another breakup, but if I do I won't make the same mistakes...probably just different ones). At any rate, I spent many months of my time there feeling not quite myself as I went through that breakup, and now unfortunately a lot of good memories from that time in my life are tinged with memories of crying a lot over someone who, despite my best efforts to continue to try to remember him in a good light, seems determined to prove himself to be a petty jerk (in his dealings with me, at least. I'm pretty sure that even though I try to say a friendly hello once a quarter, we are not the sort of exes who are ever going to be friends). Oh well. We get older, we learn things about ourselves, we move on. And I know life moves in cycles but it definitely feels like I've moved on to something much, much better.

This is getting long so I'm going to have to talk about the Florida portion of the trip in another entry. This also got a bit heavy at the end, so let's end on a lighter note:
My Adopted Mexican Brother has an iPhone and one night as we were walking back to the hotel my brother called him to figure out where we had gone. When the phone rang, my AMB was like, "Hey, look what pops up when your brother calls!" The picture he has chosen to symbolize my brother is a cat wearing a tophat and a monacle. And I can't explain why because it's not logical, but for some reason the picture is a perfect representation of my brother. If you know my brother you know that you wouldn't immediately associate him with a pencil drawing of a distinguished-looking cat. He's a boy's boy whose main interests are beer and baseball. And yet the picture is so, so perfect. It just captures his essence somehow. My Adopted Mexican Brother showed the picture to my brother the next day and he was like, "What?! Why?! Why am I a fucking Mr. Peanut Cat on your phone?!" And my sister laughed so hard when we showed it to her that she spat out a mouthful of refried beans. And I realize no one finds this funny except for those of us that were there, but, seriously, there is nothing as fun as family time, especially now that Penn is getting to be part of the family.

*Want to see something funny? Go to YouTube and search for "Pamela Anderson+too much to drink." The first video--the one that is not actually Pamela Anderson--is my mother dressed up as Pam, shaking it a bit too hard at a celebrity costume party for her friend's 50th birthday party. The Kid Rock in the hideous wig is my dad. I love my family!