my sister's little sister

One of my sisters was born three years and one day before I was— August 10th and August 11th. Her birth was a couple weeks early. Mine was planned and induced. We’re different in a lot of ways like that. I’ve always viewed my sister as fun and invincible and dead-set on being in charge. I view myself as overwrought and specific in my personal tastes but more happy to be told what to do in a group setting. 

We disagree on what sort of vacations we want to go on— I’m not interested in laying on a beach or by a pool for hours, she certainly isn’t interested in my ideal day of four $8 coffees and two art museums. We disagree on drinks— my interest in gin makes everybody in my family furrow their eyebrows. I refuse to wear sandals and I refuse to stop wearing long pants in the summer and I can’t do my hair. My sister is trendy and beautiful and has at least four inches on my height.

My sister has lived in southern Illinois since transferring to a college down there after an unsatisfactory year at one in Chicago that had dorms a few blocks from the dorms I’d live in three years later. I might have never left big cities, but we’re not really so different in a lot of ways. We like the same TV shows. We have the same voice and the same eyes. We both chose cats over our family’s more usual tendency toward dogs. We both think too much about our dad dying. 

This year on the day before my birthday, my sister turned 30. Last year our older sister turned 30 and I made sure to be home from Philadelphia to celebrate with her, so this year I made a much shorter distance commitment to attend our beloved middle child’s 30th as well. I took the train from Chicago to Alton where my sister picked me up listening to the new Sabrina Carpenter album— one of the few current musicians me and both my sisters all fawn over. 

I think having siblings is one of the few ways a person can really experience interloping in a world that isn’t really their own. It’s not that I don’t belong on my sister’s birthday trip really, but it is a world on the outside of the Venn diagram I share with my sister and I play a role different than in my day to day life. I find just being someone's little sister a role easy to play. Sometimes it's a relief to just sit around listening to the gossip of people who play contextual roles in my life– my sister's best friends, my sister's boyfriend, his best friends– while we drive through places they live their lives.

I might go so far as to say it is the honor of my life to sit in the backseats of cars with my sisters and their friends listening to the playlists they put together for road trips. It was all Men Suck Anthems, late 2000s RnB, divorced dad rock and new gen pop stars between social updates and complaints about the boys all the way through Missouri. Femininomenon, Six Foot Seven Foot, One Thing by Finger Eleven– all the right vibes, until Big Sean came on. I find him unbearable, but I didn't complain. I didn't complain when I had to pee for the last hour of the car ride, either. Important not to impose your irritating particularities and personality on everybody too much as an interloping younger sibling.

Well, at least not until you're good and drunk and spending a bunch of money to play songs on the TouchTunes equivalent at a bar with a "Fallen Heroes" wall. If you're doing that then it's fine to pay 7 credits to skip the song queue and scream "THIS IS MJ LENDERMAN" at someone who was previously just a background character in your sister's stories.

I've decided for the rest of September I'm going to try to write something everyday in hopes of influencing myself both out of writers block and into doing more stuff so I have more stuff to say. This is your fair warning.

I wrote this on a train from Alton to Chicago while I mostly listened to the songs I had downloaded on my phone because I didn't have any service for half of that journey. I drank a canned La Colombe vanilla draft latte and ate Cheez-Its.