#mishpokhe

[librarycards]

vhs! but if there was an option for "i wanna be in your hypothetical book club" i'd pick that

YAY book club time!!!!! Let’s read that freak shit!!

[librarycards]

trick or treat!

Hugs and cuddles hippo for you!!!!!

[ecology-torah-project]

[karrakazz]

im just rly glad to be out to my cousins R and S??? and technically, out to their daughter nugget, even tho she’s 2.5 adn it means nothing to her??? b/c i fit turns out nugget is queer, this means she’ll have an older, openly queer family member to say “welcome to the team” and thats awesome. i woulda loved to have one of those. and if nugget needs one, i’ll be there. friednly neighborhood bisexual, always around, mentioning my girlfriend or the cute nonbinary person i might be in love with. makin it all normal and stuff. she’ll hear that growing up, and she maybe wont hate herself the way i did if she starts gettin queer vibes. maybe she’ll just go “hey, im like my big cousin, cool.” i love that. maybe nugget can be happy. im so excited for her.

[karrakazz]

so i think i mentioned my cousins are in town? the ones with the two year old i call nugget? anyway, we had dinner tonight, adn afterwards, we were talking about the family, and family in general, and how weird it was that they wereresponsible for a small human, and because these people are crazy they asked me if i had any advice for child rearing. me. a 20 yr old fuckup with no business advising anyone on anything. i told them as much, adn they insisted, so i gave them the one hunk of advice im comfortable giving anyone about anything: don’t tell nugget who she is, let her tell you. see? sounds useful, but vague enough that they can;t hold me responsible for anything.

anyway, nugget herself was present at the table, so my cousin S asked her who she was, just for fun. she resonded succinctly: “something else.”

i think the kid’s gonna do ok.

[karrakazz]

ladies and gentlefolk, i have been working my whole damn life to avoid picking up a new york accent. i thought i was home free: grew up in texas, where the accent is arguably the exact inverse of new york. always thought that i mostly sound like my solidly midwestern dad rather than my mother, who has a mild squint-your-ears-or-you'll-miss-it ny accent. I mean, i guess that wouldnt be too bad. it just scares me because its the first step toward sounding like, god forbid, the rest of her side of the family, who kind of sound like new york jew cartoon characters.

family dynamics, accents, and procrastinating an overdue essay under the cut because i honestly have no clue why anyone besides myself would care.

so anyway, i've been sitting here saying the word "coffee" to myself for the last 20 min, and im kind of scared that my usual, nondescript "COUGH-ee" has started to ranged toward the dreaded "CAW-fee" in some bizarre psychosomatic gesture toward holiday homesickness. i am not amused.

now that im thinking about it, is this some kind of weird ingrained class thing? i dunno. if this were 40 yrs ago, i woudnt hesitate to say that. my grandparents, both of whom grew up way lower class in 40s/50s brooklyn, have exactly the accents you would expect from that. grandpa's is a liiiittle bit stronger than grandmas, but i've read thats kind of a documented phenomenon - women adopting mildly aspirational speach patterns in a way that men often dont. FUNNY ENOUGH grandma's brother, my great uncle M, who went to columbia, has barely any accent.

my mom's generation (born in brooklyn, moved out to middle-class south shore of long island) is where it gets interesting. she's got two sisters - i'd say that they're all pretty intelligent, but due to various shit, they've got suuuuper differetn educations, and it kind of directly corresponds to how they talk. my mother went to the ivy leagues for both undergrad adn business school, and she's got barely anything. my aunt D did state school for undergrad and ivy for grad school, adn she's got a little more. my aunt L, who bounced around to a bunch of schools and took forever to complete grad school somewhere not-very-notable, has the strongest. i mean, it also kind of corresponds to how they feel about leaving long island - my mother's lived in a few different places, aunt D really hasnt, but she's done some travellying, and aunt L doesnt even like going into nyc.

my generation: consists of me and my sister, and aunt d's 3 sons. i dotn have any strong regional accent. my sister's...mmm, maybe she's on par with mom? very little bit. my cousins (J, N, and S) basically correspond with their mother, maybe even a little stronger. we'll have to see how education pans out. at the moment, it's only me who's in university - a pretty prestigious institution in montreal (im drawing the arbitrary line at telling you directly what it is - you could honestly probably find out which wit 30 seconds of googling). cousin J and my sister arepoised to pooossssibly get into an ivys, or maybe something on the tier directly below. N and S are too young for speculation.

i dunno, i obviously havent tread any new ground here, this is just something that really interests me. if you know any good reading material about regional accents, especially america, i'd love to hear

[karrakazz]

i've been thinking a lot lately about my future, adn its getting weirdly domestic???

like, listen, i've always had stupid big ambitions. always seen myself as a celebrity, a literary legend, a pulitzer-winning journo. globetrotting. never settling down. 

but in the past few months...i've just been thinking about how nice it would be to settle down in like queens or jersey city with a significant other and a kid or two and several pets. comfortable, but not crazy rich, my sister jenna and my parents living nearby. my kids growing up with jenna's the way we did with my cousins, over at each other's houses all the time, running around in a slightly destructive, cohesive gang. we just do a lot of cooking and arguing together. big noisey family dinners, comfortable arguments, gossip. just dumb little things, like how my dad always says that he wants his grandkids to call him "marty," because he thinks that'll be hilarious from two feet off the ground, and how it would break my mother's heart if they didnt call her "grandma."

and everyone makes fun of my interior decorating, because its too colorful and cluttered, and jenna tells stories about her patients, and we talk with aunt lisa about celebrity gossip and my cousin scott about essential movies for every kid to watch.

(of course in this scenario, everyone knows im queer adn they've  gotten over it)

i've just been thinking about how we choose our families a lot lately. even within our families. all those people i just mentioend are from my mom's side, my new york family. i've got a whole other side in michigan, but other than my aunt judy (who is not in this scenario because she doesnt like to leave mich. that much), they're really just not part of the family i've chosen to think of as my family.

when i think of family, i think of warmth and mess and humor adn gossip. dad's side...there's just not a lot of warmth there. i'm sure i talked about this before. the folks over there...they're very formal. visiting them as a kid was about either sitting quietly or walking slowly and looking at things. grandma's house was like a museum. clean. full of thigns that rattle and creak and break. that's not hte house i want. i want what i described above and i want it so bad and im scared i'll never be stable enough to have it.

[goodgriefmp3]

zikaron is highly upsetting