Incoming!

The problem with being an only child is there's nobody around to remember your childhood for you. I have two sisters. We're all adults now, all more or less functional* and busy ineffectually hovering over our late-millennial children, preparing to send them out into the world as adults still living in our houses. So we're busy. We don't, like, do stuff together. Part of that is the scheduling thing and the rest of it that I'm not into whatever dumb girl shit they're into** and they are definitely not down with my preferred hobbies of crafting dreamcatchers or Mal/Wash slashfic.

When we do talk to one another, on holidays or when they remember to mask their outgoing cell number, the conversation has a very familiar structure:

SISTER***: This reminds me of the time you [performed/perpetrated/suffered] [Act or Consequence X]

ME: What? I never [did/started/endured] that.

SISTERS (together): Yes, you did.

ME: Fuck.

And scene. Now, it's very possible all of these conversations are very small components of an epic 40-year commitment to a gaslighting scheme they've been working on since before one of them was actually born, which I wouldn't put past them as it fits the unspoken but understood credo of our family: comedy first, healthy human emotional stability... I don't know, eventually? But these are also two people who have never finished a full game of Monopoly. Not sure about the attention span.

The higher likelihood is that they just happen to actually remember this garbage and I don't. There's probably a complicated mind-body explanation for this positing the construction of memory engrams as prioritized by the subjective emotional or developmental value of the actions in the moment, but more simply (and probably not unrelated): these are memories I've purged or suppressed because they are humiliating to me. And my sisters have retained them, again and specifically, because they are humiliating to me. And thus we have all of siblinghood, summarized in a single idea: keep your powder dry.

What I'm trying to say is I can't really imagine what the emotional state of Brian Williams is right now. Not really sure how you can conflate the ideas of being in a perfectly fine helicopter in one place with the experience of being in a totally different helicopter that is knocked out of the sky deliberately by enemy-fired exploding projectiles, but I guess nothing's impossible? The whole experience has to be crushing, dizzying, frightening, nauseating, mortifying, scary... not shot-down-in-a-helicopter scary, but you know, like I-may-have-to-retire-early-with-tens-of-millions-of-dollars scary. Luckily he's got a wife and a daughter to stand beside him. Hopefully his daughter's support will be genuine because if she has to pretend at human emotions, she hasn't yet publicly demonstrated the ability to reasonably pull that off. He'll also have the rest of his friends and family I'm sure. But not his siblings. Oh no. If they're anything like mine, they find this hilarious.

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*One of us does live in Florida, so stay tuned on that one I guess

**For my sisters, this means football and beer

***They have separate names I'm almost positive, but they look very similar. It's not easy