If a cow ever got the chance...

Since I am off to the ancestral home tomorrow, and don't know if I will be able to write anything from there, I think I will take a minute now and introduce The Family. They are my mother (henceforth known as Mothra), my father (El Butcho), my younger brother (The Engineer), and my younger sister (the Pinoid). Also our dog, Mira, an extremely large Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and the cat, idiotically named Hootie by my sister. Because Mira and Hootie are strictly outdoor pets, they don't play as large a role in day-to-day family life as most people's pets do. Hootie in particular disappears for up to a week at a time... Mira does try to get into the house whenever she can so that she can eat from the garbage.

El Butcho

My dad is a farmer (see previous entry) and a part-time rural mail carrier. A friendly but extremely shy person, he is known and loved by all Dalton, despite his weird, vaguely left-wing politics. He is very into comparative religion and Renaissance art--especially Botticelli--and wanted to be an archaeologist when he was younger. When the students at UW-Madison organized a boycott of classes to protest the Vietnam War, he was the only agriculture major who participated by not going to class.

Mothra

My mom teaches second grade in the same horrible school district where I was tormented for years, but I won't hold it against her. She is an excellent teacher who loves her kids and really tries to make learning fun and challenging for them. As a result, she is at school, making lesson plans and redecorating the classroom, etc., from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Not surprisingly, the other teachers hate her. She is also quite religious (something for which I mock her in my immature way) and concerned with the intersection of Christianity and feminism... She is probably the sweetest and least sarcastic of us all, and is therefore frequently the butt of cruel jokes.

My Parents As A Single Entity (Which They Pretty Much Are)

How sick is this? They grew up together in the same town that they still live in, two blocks away from each other. Their desks were next to each other in the fucking ONE-ROOM GRADE SCHOOL they attended. No, I'm not kidding. They eventually got married (my mom was 19, my dad was 20) and produced my siblings and me. They have the happiest marriage I have ever seen or heard of, which is somewhat annoying because they tell each other everything, so if you tell one parent something in confidence, the other one always hears it. They are both politically liberal but personally conservative, if that makes any sense. I think they're kind of sheltered, but they make up for it by being really, really smart.

The Engineer

Although I have tremendous admiration for my brother and find him extremely witty, I don't know anything about him you wouldn't know if you hung out with him for five minutes, as we are basically opposites in every way. He's a mechanical engineering major, about to graduate from college. He's got a job lined up after graduation, working in the pit at NASCAR races. He likes Southern Comfort and hunting, and has five or six cars that sort of run, up on blocks in the yard. Although I think he can read, no one has seen him pick up a book since approximately 1988. His truck's bumper sticker says "Enjoy a Juicy Steak Tonight", which amuses me. The only things we have in common are alcohol and high school, so we occasionally converse about those subjects. He seems happy, stable, and well-adjusted though, so rock on.

The Pinoid (which is only one of her many nicknames)

the Pinoid is a freshperson at a small, kinda prestigious Midwestern liberal arts college. She is like Version 2.0 of me, what with the social phobia, sarcasm, interest in books, and extremely pronounced mean streak. I think she is way cool. She is also totally skinny and pretty. This differentiates her from the rest of the family; we are uniformly large, reddish, and balding. She wants to be a psych major but I want her to be an art history major, since I am trying to live vicariously through her college experience. We each got our right eyebrow pierced on New Year's Eve last year. When she was three years old she stood up during a birthday party and announced "I bite glass with big teeth!" and proceeded to do it, SHATTERING the dinner glass all over the table and the inside of her mouth. While my mom called 911 and everyone else fell into that hushed "I just witnessed an accident" silence, she and I were the only ones laughing.

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