Another one for the roll

I've been meaning to add this link for a while now, but as so often happens, life got in the way...

This is the beautiful blog of my beautiful almost-cousin Angelique. I call her my almost-cousin because she, her brother, and her parents have always felt more like family than just the family friends that they are. Our dads are best friends. Actually, my dad was briefly married to her aunt when they were both younger than Angelique and I are now (a fact that weirded me out for a bit when I first learned it years ago).

Growing up we lived too far apart to really be very close, but we spent quite a few holidays together and have always kept up on each other's lives through messages relayed by our parents. The family albums contain several shots of the four of us opening Christmas presents or setting off firecrackers on the 4th of July. And I'm not sure if she remembers this--in fact I didn't really until about 3 seconds ago--but 7-year-old Angelique is actually the one who told me everything a 6-year-old could possibly ever need to know about where babies come from.

The day after that midnight conversation, she and I stole every book containing the word "sex" in the title from my parents' rather sizable library and holed up in my room looking at awkward line diagrams and reading descriptions until her mom walked in and caught us. The next year, when my own mother decided it was time to have "the talk" with me, I didn't even bother pretending that this was new information. "Yeah, Mama," I said. "Angelique actually told me all this last Thanksgiving..." I think she was both disappointed and relieved as she left me alone with what was to be the first in my own rather sizable collection of books on the subject.

Over the past couple weeks, Angelique and I have reconnected a bit thanks to our parents and (I begrudgingly admit) the Soma-like pages of MySpace. It seems that we've both been going through relatively similar situations lately, and now that I'm back in Jersey, I'm actually excited to get to know her again. We got along very well as little girls and seem to have led fairly asymptotic lives until now, so I'm eager to see if this could prove to be a great new friendship for the both of us.

I direct you now to her blog, Drama Purge. I found it while checking out my site stats to see who links to me and instantly fell in love. She's an incredible writer--honest and clever, and has a way of cutting straight to the heart of it with a sarcasm that manages to be both equal parts biting and tender.