My brother and I haven't talked in 5 months. Yesterday, I found out on his website that James Dean and I are his heros. This is the sweetest thing I've ever stumbled upon. I am relaying this bit when the following story from Kirky's newstyleasiangirlfriend is told.

‘There once was a little bird...’

‘And this bird wanted to stay behind and rest a little, even though his flock was leaving to fly south.
“Just a little longer here” the little bird told the others “I’ll catch up.”

…but the little bird didn’t catch up, and he found himself shivering in the cold,
and then the snow. The burden of the snow and cold weighed down on his delicate wings,and the bird fell down to the ground- hidden beneath the snow. There seemed to be no hope of being rescued…

…until a horse in the pasture took a big dump that landed directly on the little bird’s head.
Miraculously, the snow was melting and the bird was going to be saved!
Just then, a fox came to this place and began to dig.
The bird was amazed as his luck! Now someone was digging him free!

…instead he tipped his head down, scooped up the little bird, and ate him.”

Kirky is relaying this story to me. He summarizes Ming’s tale, by telling me that
sometimes, the person that you think is out to harm you, happens to be your greatest
savior and support. Sometimes, he says, the one you think is going to lift you out of harms way is only out for their own gain.

There is a quiet lull in the car as I apply this to my own situation.

“And sometimes,” says Kirk, “I just want to sit in my underpants, watch TV, and drink a beer. I want to tell her: ‘Would you shut up with that Confucious crap!”

This makes me feel better. Like I've somehow recovered a sense of identity. I was eskimo in a previous life.

The happy planet is perfectly sustainable. Our people do not turn lemons into lemonade or water into wine, but it’s so sweet of ya’ll to think so.

We’ve a taste for lemons and prefer water, and therein lies what you might suspect in us is divine and gooey goodness. On the outside, the pain looks the same, but internally, it’s grotesquely appreciated. We like it too much.

For chrissake, Mr. Hussein rots in an Iraqi prison enjoying Cheetos and gets emotional and put out when the pantry gets low and he’s got to substitute for Doritos. Shit. When he walked out of that hell pit with his hands on his head, his hair looked so terrible that I thought that he’d lost his friggin’ mind. Hell no! He’s one of the most powerful men of the 21st century, and I think that there’s something to his great of love of Chester Cheeta’s product. He’s okay with where he is. Sure, he fucked himself.

I fuck myself too.
The crummy part is, we can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.
That’s the toughest lemon so far.

‘They say’, ‘They’, that when you fall in love with someone, you begin to learn things about your own self that you never knew before.

I’d always thought this meant something about having the strength to get through rough times, or a beautiful sense of euphoria, ecstasy, and eternal youthfulness.

Actually…
I never knew that I speak with a whistle with words beginning with the ‘s’ sound.
I’m shocked, horrified, insulted, and now extremely self conscious—as though I’ve sprouted some sort of wooden teeth. He swears it’s precious, but I’ve just been told that I have an inherent speech impediment. Worse still, it’s quickly evolving from a whistle sound, to a softened muffled ‘th’ lisp as I try to compensate. In my suspicious mind, it’s certainly a most clever way to shut a chatty woman up. When I ask my family about this, they begin laughing hysterically, and Chris is a huge hit. I even see my father’s hand fly up and actually pat him on the back. (This has NEVER happened…)

“It’s not a tick really, it’s like, a head thingy, probably picked up from someone that you thought was cool’.
When asked what this ‘head thingy’ is, I see this weird valley girl head wobble that seems vaguely familiar enough to be mine. Perhaps, as he also suggests, I did pick it up from the gay; my little brother or something. Or maybe I’m overly caffinated, and this is just the physical manifestation of my perpetual coffee overdose. Maybe delirium tremors brought on from too much drinky-drinky in my college years. Brain damage suffered from anesthesia at the oral surgeon? Too much dodge ball at Saint Eugenes. A desperate cigarette butt I fished out of a foreign ash tray? An old friend that drove me crazy by talking too much?

I try to trick my accuser into feeling guilty in his revelation. “Listen, it is most definitely a tick, probably brought on by some severe imbedded stress and pain.”
“Like what? A WAR? Maybe the poverty you endured as a child? Oooo-ooo maybe the beatings and abuse you somehow managed to pull yourself through…I don’t know how you did it…”
So, there are trade offs to getting to know someone better than you know yourself. Tradeoffs in someone getting to know you better than you know yourself. To knowing that knowing someone else better is better than better knowing yourself…so, you don’t have to. They do.