What if No One's Watching?

I just spent several days with my two favorite cousins, Randi and Jessie. My maternal cousins and I grew up very close, and we still are, but we are very, very different. Spending a concentrated chunk of time with two women who are both so very much like me and so very different from me is such a strange experience. It's kind of like looking in a fun house mirror, you know? You see how you would be if you were different, and it's both fascinating and disconcerting.

Jessie is the next female cousin down from me. She's two years younger than I am. She's sort of on one end of a spectrum--she's very athletic, kind of politically conservative, likes high-end clothes, doesn't like school. Among other things, she introduced me to designer jeans and Anthropologie this weekend. She texts a lot, and is in a relationship with a dude who wants to be a basketball coach.

Randi is the next down from Jessie, another year younger. She's the other end of the spectrum. She got married last year and is now pregnant with her first kid. She and her husband own a bike shop, where one of her major roles is making custom wool bike hats and jerseys. She can't drive a car, but has traveled all over the world via her bike. She lives in a communal house with a composting toilet, doesn't generally eat meat, and claims she couldn't work a desk job.

Neither of those really sounds like a description of me, does it?

And yet, they are also both like me in so many ways. We think the same things are funny. We love to eat and love to laugh and after a few days together there was some sentence-finishing happening. While there was definitely a certain amount of each of us putting up with the preferences of the others (as when Randi and I agreed to go outlet mall shopping, or Jessie toughed it out at the Goodwill, or Jessie and I accompanied Randi to bike shops), we all got a huge kick out of going to a honky tonk and watching people dance; all enjoyed walking around the Austin Zoo, and were all bummed when we couldn't get tickets to see the local Mystery Science Theater knock-off troupe make fun of Forrest Gump. Most of all, we were all way too excited about Austin's Airstream trailer cupcake stand (but we each chose a different type of cupcake there).

It is always a little bit disorienting when your family members, who you associate so strongly with one setting, interact with you in another setting (especially when you have gotten used to living 1500 miles away from them and only seeing them once a year). This is something beyond that, though. I watch them, and talk to them, and see myself so clearly. But not the myself I am, the one I would have been if something had been different. But what? What in me would need to change in order for me to wear designer jeans and consider voting for John McCain? What about to ride a bike everywhere and refuse to make monetary compensation my first job priority? From where do those differences come? We grew up so similarly, how did I get like I am and they like they are? And how am I, anyway? If they were to write a post like this about me, what would the markers of my difference from them be?

Howdy Stranger indeed.