Residing in this state, admittedly tiny and having less people living in it than the city I reside in most of the year, has been (maybe) not a hard as I had previously thought.
It�s been a lazy summer so far, and a lazy summer is exactly what I needed after a rather disconcerting year; but we won�t go there today.
I was considering heading back down to Puerto Rico this weekend with a slew of family who were going to descend on the house there. That of course was nixed when the weather did not cooperate, so for whatever reason, said family descended at least for a day or two here; they will disperse within a day for various location across the country but for tonight�fun times.
I spent most of today on a very large boat (yacht) with said family and a variety of other people. We were docked, playing poker, (bridge for some), eating and jumping into the water even though that is not allowed on dock. Of course it was not even warm today, so there was not much time spent in the ocean. It looked a little foreboding with the clouds and potential storms and we were all lamenting the fact that we were not in Puerto Rico. Although I imagine that it looked a little foreboding there today and, at least, the logistics of getting there this weekend were too complicated for most to deal with.
The most amusing of the guests here, except for my non biological Australian uncle who also happens to be the �skipper and owner� of the boat that we were on all day and whom we will get to one day, is my Aunt Pauline.
Aunt Pauline is a psychiatrist who used to be a dermatologist until, after ten years of practice, she decided she wanted to be a psychiatrist, so she sold a fairly lucrative practice and applied for a residency in psychiatry. Family rumor has it , as it is not all that easy to get a residency especially the age she was at the time, that she slept with someone in order to get it, most likely another crazy psychiatrist. The other option was that she paid for it. This is conjecture only and only among family when they are all sitting around making fun of each other drinking gin and vodka gimlets as they do on the rare occasion when they are all in one place.
Anyway, Aunt Pauline is quite entertaining and she is also as crazy and brilliant as they come. Pauline ( I've never really called her Aunt) likes to sit around and discuss finances as much as she likes to sit around and talk about the hazards and benefits of Prozac, and she likes to analyze family members behind their back, at least while talking to me; this is great fun especially when analyzing the the more conservative and respectable members of the family and my heavy chested but small brained cousin . She is not like this in public, she is very discreet. There are no worries about entrusting her with your deepest, darkest and most perverted thoughts; she is quite professional when it comes to her patients and in public she doesn�t cast shame upon us or humiliate her patients in any way.If I know a few things about some adulterous, sociopath, ax murdering, constipated, necrophiliac with a partial syphyllic dementia who happens to teach at the middle school in some no name town in Virginia no biggy , she never gives out real names.
One would never guess that she sits on a steps of the back patio drinking vodka and lamenting the crazy things parents do to their children and how it really �fucks them up for life� and how she knows because even though she was not seriously fucked up she hated my grandfather because when he caught her in bed with her high school boyfriend at age fifteen he sent her away to school,( ya like far way, I heard it was a whole fifty miles from home and she was home every weekend.) This, she said did irreparable damage to her self esteem and to her view on sex. It took her another two whole years to figure out sex was not really a bad thing and to understand that her parents did not hate her for what she did; I told you she is a little nutso, this is hardly some serious parent created trauma but my family has had very few of those and therefore tend to think that some very minor issues are of great significance.
Aunt Pauline insists it takes very little to fuck up a child or a teenager and therefore there is a great need for good psychiatrists such as her; she is a big believer in therapy but she admits it rarely works on adults without drugs unless the person has a high degree of self determination. She has been in therapy of some kind or another for years, she says most psychiatrists are, (in therapy), if just for fun; she then goes onto a tangent about past lives and reincarnation and how she believes she was most probably Egyptian in her last life as her dreams always have of an Egyptian theme; She also dresses in a remotely Egyptian way most of the time.
She was married once in medical school but I guess that didn�t work out and she never married again, until now. It seems she is getting married and not to another psychiatrist, which would seem to me to be her best bet, but to a plastic surgeon. Ewwww�. He is here with her this weekend and he is so���������������..plastic surgeony. I think all plastics surgeons look like they have had plastic surgery, he does. Supposedly he is seven years younger than she is but I am not sure about that. I hazard a guess the knife or at the very least the laser has been at work here. My Aunt is a pretty attractive woman for her age despite all that frizzy long flowing hair that never seems to be able to be put in its place; I hope he does not have plans to do all sorts of unseemly things to her face and body. He has a very rigid looking face and no overt wrinkles. He is also not very personable and appears to be totally lacking humor as so many of those medical types are; he is however very interested in money and spent at least two hours discussing land acquisition and development as a means of investment with my father. No surprise a plastic surgeon interested in money, hopefully not my aunts, as she has a lot of it as does most of our family. I don�t really care about money but I don�t like other people possibly marrying people in my family for it.
Anyway my weird aunt, whom I adore, is marrying this grotesquely non personable, money grubbing plastic surgeony man with no sense of humor and no wrinkles. I am hoping that she is going to come to her senses any time now. Why does a woman of her age have to marry anyway? Makes no sense to me at all; she obviously isn�t going to have children at her age. I think I will to go down and investigate this situation further, maybe even suggest to her that having a long time lover would be a better option for someone of her wealth and intelligence; certainly that thought has occurred to her.
Of course she will listen to me, with all my worldliness why wouldn�t she?
Anyway she�s great fun and Matt, my gay friend,( yes he is my gay friend and for those of you that emailed me and told me it was not right for me to call Matt �my gay friend�; I have only to say that is was part of the story and needed to be said the last time, and this time I am doing it to bug the hell out of you. I also want to differentiate Matt my gay friend whom I will never sleep with from my other not so gay friend(s) whom I could potentially sleep with, when my fear of germs goes away that is), is down there now with Aunt Pauline-out on the veranda or whatever the heck it is called- I think she is having an in depth discussion with him about his homosexuality and the fact that he still has not told his parents he is gay. He seemed to be really getting into in when I left.
As for now, yeah for my parents for again purchasing an abode large enough to allow this very bizarre family to congregate under one roof all at the same time if only for a few moments out of every few years. I�m only sorry I can only describe them to you one at a time.
I have graced you with an out, but feel free to peak behind the door.
