Oh man, I didn’t realize how brain dead I was from the five days entertaining my sister. Apart from a few phone calls, including one to the recruiter about that job thang (waiting on HR and the reference checking), I did very little today.

Let me put it another way, I embraced toilet cleaning as the right level of emotional and intellectual involvement.

The weird thing about staying with a family member, I think especially if you come from a big family, is realizing how different you are, and even more so, how your adult choices magnify those differences. I have a friend and fellow weblogger who has written about nervousness of planning a trip with a Mormon sibling. (If he’s anything it’s a godless, soulless, groovalicious Unitarian.) My sister ain’t a Mormon, but, man, our choices and experiences are almost as foreign to me.

Interestingly, one thing I’m taking away from the week is the thought that where you choose to live and among whom is a kind of activism. (Granted it’s a wimpy, passive, kind of flaccid form, but, hey, I’m fucking lazy.) I absolutely choose to live in places with all sorts of diversity, skin, religion, money, artists, capitalist, whatever. My ideal weekend probably involves a street festival, full of crowds, booths and maybe some kind of food of which I’ve never heard. (Like, if you ever end up in Japantown, SF at a Cherry Blossom Festival, try the little treat that is essentially two pancakes sandwiching a layer of bean paste. Quite lovely.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally racist and narrow minded. Just ask my boyfriend who I torment. And, I certainly lack in cultural literacy, although maybe I do alright for a chick from a Clorox white Boston ‘burb.

I can say this, though, one thing I absolutely fucking hate about my hometown, always have and always will, is it’s homogeneity. When I lived there, I found it stifling. I was too curious about all of the other junk out there in the world from curry sauce to books and music and geo-political systems. I wanted to know how it felt to be Jon Feldman, the only Jewish kid in my grade school, or hear the stories about Boston neighborhoods from the METCO kids with whom I played half court and listened to Parliament Funkadelic.

I never told my mother when my junior high friend, Ronnie Valentine, got stabbed a couple of blocks from her Dorchester house and missed some school. I knew that would mean my world closing back to only the kids on my own block who were just like me.

I think music has always had a lot to do with it. The early taste of reggae and funk with the kids from the city and the records of my older brothers introduced me to shit outside of my view. Later, in high school, it was punk, a loathed and disdained music by the vast majority of my peers who memorized every lyric from Seeger, J. Geils and Meatloaf. I still hate listening to Seeger and Geils, although Meatloaf at least entertains me. (And, there’s the punk crossover fun fact of Clash girlfriend and collaborator Ellen Foley’s vocals on “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights.”)

By contrast, my sister moved from New Hampshire to Wyoming, where the deer, antelope and Republican white boys roam, and I don’t really know what kind of music really yanks her crank. I once found a Celine Dion CD in her possession, which I think speaks adequately.

She enjoys and lives in places I don’t think I could. I can appreciate the mountains and Yellowstone and wildlife for a bit, but ultimately I would need the fix of city streets and color. Afterall, an elk is pretty much an elk, but different folks and strokes can liven up the week.

Besides, if I were surrounded by outdoorsy Republicans for too long, I’d probably get mouthy and end up on the wrong end of a high-powered hunting rifle (intended to preserve and protect the herd by thinning them out and getting some good eating in the process). No doubt I would at least attract some negative attention in Mayberry, RFD.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just finding bullshit theory to cover the little kid aspects that always live in any family. Some of the same stuff still hurts my feelings and makes me all teenage angst-y and misunderstood even at 41.

I mean, when the fuck will I no longer have to listen to siblings rag on my weight and athleticism (or lack thereof)? (I’m a normal weight, but to a section of my family I’m positively bovine by virtue of hating sports. However, since there’s a whole lot more people like myself who roll over stiff into a pile of catatonic boredom when faced with golf, I believe my hatred (which is only melodramatically strong) entirely rational.)

Only a sister or brother would say at the end of a trip something like, “Oh, I’m really surprised that we ended up doing a lot of stuff, I figured visiting you would mean a lot of sitting around.”