This is a conversation me and my bff lals had today on yahoo messenger i thought it was blog worthy
jillana: ok so on sunday i was going to go to this church with danielle...
jillana: and i was kinda nervous about it cause i would have to ride the shuttle alone...but i could feel that God really wanted me to go
Melissa: mhm
Melissa: um, are you continuing? cuz i wanna know
jillana: oh sorry, yeah
jillana: ok so i was like "ok God, I'll go if u send me someone to go with, like a cushion, to do the whole shuttle thing with"
jillana: bad idea, you dont really negotiate with God..
Melissa: lol
jillana: so anyway, I was like really not wanting to go alone, so finally I asked my roomate to go, and turns out she had heard of it, had a flyer and everything, and was willing to go with me
jillana: so i thought God had heard my proposition and was sending me my cushion
jillana: BUT
jillana: there's a big but
Melissa: yeah?
jillana: Stephony (my roomate) didnt know if she wanted to go out that night...she was contemplating
jillana: so i was like, ok, let me know, she thought that she might come back in enough time to go to sleep to go to church with me
jillana: so then, i was layin in my bed, it was like 1:00 am and i text stephony to ask her to decide now if she was going to go with me and to not wait for her to get home to decide, cause i wanted to go to sleep
jillana: so she was like "yeah, i dont think i'm gonna go..."
jillana: then i went to sleep, and i didnt turn off my alarm, can't remember if that was a conscience decision or not, but i knew that i didnt want to go without her, so at that point i wasnt really plannin on going
jillana: then, my alarm goes off that morning, and i was faced with the decision to go alone, or go back to sleep.
jillana: i was leanin on sleep...i did stay up late waitin for stephony...stupid.
jillana: but then i felt God telling me to go, but i was still fightin
jillana: so i called my mom, cause i had some strange incorrect feeling, that my mom would be worried about me riding around downtown alone, but she told me that i was a big girl, and to go
Melissa: haha.
jillana: so, then i had no more excuses, and i went against my will...not before embarassing myself by telling Danielle that i was nervous about the shuttle
Melissa: lol
jillana: but she was pretty helpful
jillana: so when I went outside to go wait for the shuttle, and there were other students there, and i sit on a bench....OH WAIT!
jillana: i forgot the most important part of the story...ok so the whole morning, for some reason I was singing "part of that world" or whatever it's called, from The Little Mermaid, and i didnt know why the heck it was stuck in my head
Melissa Hyde: :)
jillana: so i go sit on the bench, and this girl introduces herself and stuff, asks me if it's my first time going, and I say yes
jillana: then i look down.....(climax coming)
jillana: and SHE HAS A LITTLE MERMAID STICKER ON HER BIBLE
Melissa: omg.
jillana: under normal circumstances, i would have been like "huh, little fifth grade, but I like Ariel"
jillana: but i was like freakin out on the inside
jillana: so i kept it to myself, i didnt want to like freak her out and be like "OMG UR MY
CUSHION"
Melissa: haha
jillana: so, we were talkin and she's a journalism major too, she's a sophomore, and it was also another reminder not to judge people by like their appearance, you know how u have like a set idea of what ur potential friends should look like?
jillana: so we didn't really click, I mean we talked a little, but I was open minded, I'm not sure if she liked me a whole lot actually
jillana: but I still had a cushion and the message was on the importance of having friends and stuff and how God didnt design us to be alone, another message i needed to hear, so overall a good day
So, today was my 19th birthday...it is officially over. Sad. I feel kinda old. But it was over all a good day. I can officially say "I'm pushin' 20." heh. My last year as a 'teenager' by definition at least. Cause I really don't feel much like a teenager. I've been legally an adult for a year..but now I'm finally feelin it.
The two and a half years of my life before my younger sister was born don’t really exist in my mind: I just don’t remember them. I guess they weren’t very eventful. My older sister, Jannelle, can remember some of the year before I was born, probably because her whole world was turned upside down. She went from being the center of my parent’s universe to having to share that universe with a smaller, cuter version of herself.
Being the second child, there was no time where I was the center of anything. So for me, the arrival of my younger sister, Julie, was a welcome one—or at least an indifferent one.
Ever since I learned of her upcoming arrival into the world, I was trying to be a good big sister. I sacrificially gave my mom my security blanket to put up for the baby, because now that I was going to be a big sister I had to grow up and stop relying on it for comfort. Once I realized though, how much of an attention hog babies could
be—especially Julie, she cried ALL THE TIME—like a crackhead to her crack, I was too stressed to go without “Blankie,” and rescinded my offering to let Julie keep it.
Julie and I had a weird relationship the first year or so. We didn’t have much to do with each other. As she got to her toddler years, and started to try and push her way into the love-hate sister relationship Jannelle and I had created during the years prior to her life, she couldn’t fit. So for the few years before my mom had another baby, Julie pretty much did her own thing. Once the boys were born she became a floater, flipping from annoying us, to terrorizing them.
But she really didn’t have any other choice.It’s like we formed our groupings by default.Jannelle and I were close in age so no matter how much we fought, she was my go-to when I wanted to talk or play. MJ has the whole ‘male’ thing in common with Mitchell. So even though they’re three years apart, their relationship resembles the one Jannelle and I had, and they’ll always be an alliance against the estrogen in our house.
That left Julie smack in the middle. To retaliate, Julie formed her own special alliance with our dad. She became the ultimate daddy’s girl. Being that she was the youngest girl, it came easy to her and she played the “baby girl” card every chance she got. It used to bug the crap out of me. Why couldn’t I have that kind of pull? I was cute. I was his daughter too, so what was his deal?
It did come in handy though, whenever we would ask for something and our Dad would say no to one of us, we would just send Julie to ask him.
She was our secret weapon, and we milked it.
If we wanted pizza? One of us would dare to ask him before we would send in “the chosen one,” just in case he was in a good mood. If he said no the first time, we’d retreat back to our camp to finalize our automatic plan B that was sure fire to work.
It wasn’t until the ninth grade that Julie would start to become more than a secret weapon to me.
It all started when Jannelle decided she didn’t want to room with me anymore, betrayed our twisted alliance and made a deal with Julie to switch bedrooms. She deserted our “teen suite” that we had created in the back room of the house, so that she would have a room to herself and I would have to share with the annoying pre-teen Julie had become.
She knew how sharing a room with Julie could be, sleepless nights, endless mindless chatter about how old Big Bird was, and why he’d been six for so long.
In our minds, sharing a room with Julie was like the plague, unwanted, and definitely something to be avoided. Which is why she didn’t even give me a chance to fight with her for the other room. She went to our parents, presented her case, and sense Julie was afraid of sleeping alone anyway, the decision was made.
The first night when Julie moved in, I realized that she’d moved past the point of keeping me up at night with stupid questions about Sesame Street, like she did when she was five. I was expecting the same annoyance, but with a different juvenile subject that I was bound to be too mature to tolerate.
But she surprised me.
She still kept me up with stupid stories. But they were more welcome. They were
about the trials and tribulations about life in middle school. That I could handle. Or at least I wanted to think that I could.
“This girl at school automatically doesn’t like me because her boyfriend has a crush on me,” she’d say.
“Whoa, that’s rough. You should really ignore girls like that, what is she gonna do, hit you?” I’d say, as if I really had the experience to back up my ground breaking advice.
But I would still give her the best advice that I could—being the wise freshman I was. Then, I would revel in my older coolness and dispel any rumors she had heard about horrific seniors. It amazed me that the spinach diapers story had made it all the way down to the 6th grade.
Without realizing it, I’d gone from her, always-annoyed-with-her, older sister, to mentor, to eventually her friend. She slowly became my ally, when Jannelle went further into her angsty teenage years, and became too cool to relate to me anymore.
I was reluctant to classify her as one of my ‘friends’ in my mind. It’s weird with sisters sometimes. When you describe one of your friends as your ‘sister’ it means that you’re so close, ‘friend’ doesn’t really cover it anymore. But real sister relationships are often not so friendly. And when two sisters get to a point where they can 'love' and 'like' each other, than that's a real accomplishment.
So slowly, Julie was becoming my friend, one of my best friends. We were growing up, and half the time I didn’t even notice that she was three years younger than me. I liked that she’s quick witted and smart—she’s really always been that way, but I guess I’d always been too preoccupied to notice.
We really have the kind of relationship that is so rare, if not impossible between friends that it had to be influenced by genetics.
We’re different enough that we compliment each other, but alike enough to finish each other’s sentences.
Julie is someone that I can have fun with by doing pointless time-fillers, like coming up with impromptu duet routines.We both love to sing, so when there’s nothing else to do, why not a little karaoke?
Julie was born an alto. Her voice has always been an octave lower than mine, even when I was six and she was three.
So naturally, whenever the duet calls for a boy and a girl, I would give her the male part. It wasn’t me being bossy, no, definitely not.
Not like when Jannelle forced me to pretend to be her dog and eat dry Froot Loops out of a bowl on the floor. And I only did that because I was young and naïve and thought that my whole identity rested in being Jannelle’s playmate.
But this was definitely not the same thing. I can’t sing as low as she can, so that’s why I demand the better part. Not mean, practical.
At least that’s what I thought until we nearly got into a fight over who would be Chris Brown and who would be Jordin Sparks when we sing ‘No Air’ in the car when it comes on the radio. We rarely fight and when we do, it’s almost ALWAYS over stupid stuff like this.
“But you always make me be the boy,” she said
“That’s because you can sing lower than me, retard,” I snapped back, half kidding, half not.
I ended up letting her take the role of Jordin, while I, a soprano, suffered through the tenor bars of Chris Brown’s part. It was a sacrifice, but that’s just the kind of good sister that I am. I mean, I didn’t want her to develop some kind of identity complex from having to “be a boy” all the time.
I love the fact that our relationship has so much depth to it. Sister/ Best Friends are the best because you truly can trust the fact that they will always be there for you. At least I can with both of my sisters.I love Jannelle and Julie very dearly. Jannelle and I have had plenty of good times; it wasn’t always “Froot Loops on the floor” with us. But I guess we just never connected on the same level that Julie and I have been able to. Jannelle and I fight all the time, and I think for now, our relationship is stuck in the “just sisters” phase, but who knows? I heard when you get to be in your twenties, sister relationships become easier. We’ll see.
But right now, I’m enjoying my little Sister/ Best friend. Our TV nights when I’m home from school, most of the time are the highlight of my day. We watch a variety of shows, but the best brain candy is reality TV shows.
We sit together, collectively dropping our IQ’s while we watch The Hills,
“Did you hear what Spencer just said, he is such a b-word,” I’d say, “What kind of fool says that they want to make someone ‘un’ their sister…does that even make sense?”
“Prob’ly not,” She’d say.
Scream for joy when our choice for America’s Next Top Model comes out victorious,
“Yeah! We totally called that Saleshia would win, why are we so good at life?”
“I know, right?”
So, it’s fun right now. But just as quickly as we became closer, we could grow apart. But I doubt it.
Either way, we’ll always be sisters, and that’s suppose to mean that we have to love each other.I’ll always have her back, and she’ll always have mine. I mean, in the words of Spencer Pratt, I can’t make her “un” my sister.
