August Letters!

So, I'm killing time at the airport by surfing the net @ the internet café, & I notice that Mom's posted our fam's August letters. Well, that's not exactly true--my Mom actually gets a web designer named Stephanie to help her with stuff like that. See, Mom's almost proud of being a technophobe, in some weird way. NEway, one time Mom asked Stephanie to install some spyware on our home 'puter 2 make sure I wasn't doing NEthing I'm not supposta. Steph told her I'm probably just doing harmless stuff like downloading avatars. Yay, Steph! BTW, when Mom's not around Steph does a hilarious impression of her.

Well, about the letters. . . .

I'll start with mine. I wanna explain this:

Duncan and Gerald are mad at Becky too, but mostly because she said we weren't good enough. I give up...it's so much work to keep a band together. Even the Beatles had problems, so what do we think we're trying to do? I just wanted it to be a fun challenge, and it was for two years. We had a rule - no egos! And Becky broke it, big time.

You see, Mom edited out the end of this paragraph, where I'd written, "But who am I kidding? We all broke the ego rule!" I don't know why my 'rents wanna make the whole Becky thing worse than it was. The amazing thing is I threw in the part about Gerald's soft kissing just to see what Mom would do about it. And she didn't do a thing. Weird that she'd leave that bit in and not the ego thing. NEway, Ger kisses OK & everything, but 4 all I know the muscly farmboys do it better.

Speaking of making the Becky thing worse, my Dad had to go and write this:

It's unfortunate that Becky is choosing to off with stars in her eyes and will be missing the most important part of life: friendship.

So, you can only wish her luck, knowing that if she does make it, she will likely not have a happy life. Sometimes it's a blessing to not be too good or too driven to succeed in something that you love, because such ambition takes all the fun out of it. Being a professional musician is a difficult life. Having a normal life, surrounded by friends and family and enjoying music as a hobby or as a passion is a lot more fun. That's an opinion from someone who gave up piano after the fourth lesson. I told April to let the hurt go. That Becky is young and selfish and will need her friends more than ever. Once you "go public", it's hard to tell who likes you for yourself or for what you can do. I said to leave the door open and wait for Becky to come back. She will!

So don't aspire for greatness, just be ho-hum, right Dad? U know, folks, my Dad once had a friend named Ben Horanium who became a famous model-train designer. Well, famous to ppl who are into the whole choo-choo thing. Every once in a while, my Dad sees him @ one of those train-guy gatherings, and afterwards, he mopes for about a month. He's a little bitter and more than a bit jealous, but when he comes out of his bad mood, he always says, "Actually, I feel sorry for Ben. He doesn't have this nice, normal life that I do, with family and friends and. . . ." Then he trails off and drinks some whiskey.

Mom would rather send me away than deal with me this summer, Liz was being pretty cool, Dee is back at work, Mike is hiding from his fam, and Gramps and Iris are still alive. Ooh, and Liz got stuck doing the pet letter this month! Ha! Oh, and you know that bit about Liz and Ma having all those great talks when they're out walking the dogs? Mom totally added that in. What Liz really wrote was that Mom insists on coming with her to walk the dogs, but then spends the whole time complaining. I guess she didn't like that version. And by the way, Mike is supposta be a big-shot editor, but he wrote this: "I take in an average of one big manuscript ever two months from a publisher I met, once again, through Josef Weeder." (I added that bold part.) So Michael "Editor" Patterson needs an editor! LOLOL!