angela's blog

This morning while I was showering I was going over in my head what it will be like when JJ comes to Wichita in a few weeks. We're looking at around 3 weeks from now he's going to be in my hometown. I wonder how my friends will take to him, and I wonder how my family will enjoy having him in our house for almost 3 days. And while I was thinking about this, I suddenly remembered one of my cousins. One of my least favorite cousins, to be exact. Her Chinese name means "moon flower" but I think her American name is Heather. She and I have always had an interesting relationship. For one thing, since I was about 12 she would start our conversations or greet me with, "So, how much do you weigh now?" As a 12-14 year old I was seriously chunky. I'm seriously chunky now. But between the ages of 14-21 I swam like a mad crazy woman so I wasn't so much chunky as I was very compact and dense. And at that point when she would ask I would say something like, "Probably still less than you." For another, she was loud and would point at me in a crowd and say something like, "Oh wow, she's really smart!" if she asked me what classes I was taking and I told her I was taking high school bio as a 7th grader or calculus as a sophomore. Or it would be, "Did you hear that? She went to a dance last weekend!" if she asked me how school was going. This sort of thing drove me INSANE. My last encounter with Heather was the summer of 2002. I had just started "dating" Charlie and so when she asked me (as she did after I started college), "So do you have a boyfriend now?" and I said, "Yes, his name is Charlie," true to form she pointed and said at the top of her voice, "You hear that? She has a boyfriend!" but this time, the conversation took an interesting turn. We were with some other cousins and she proceeded to keep talking, "Man, you're 20 and you have a boyfriend. I didn't have a boyfriend until I was 27!" to which one of my cousins replied, "Well, yeah. That's because you're ugly." Dude. My brother and I (he doesn't like her much either) stared at each other. We scored and didn't even have to fire a shot. I haven't seen Heather for awhile but I thought of her this morning because I don't so much wonder what she would think of JJ. I'm sure she'd say something like, "Oh, so you're dating Angela??" at the top of her voice if they end up meeting. But I wonder what she'll think of the fact that her cousin, who's almost 23, not only has a boyfriend but has a boyfriend who's as great as JJ is. Heather might have mortified and embarrassed me for the last 10 years but this time around ... well, I think I've got the one up on her.

Posted by Mrs. Cooper on 11.01.2004 at 11/01/2004 10:36:00 AM | Permalink