I was reading Laris's blog, and you know, our family situation is so alike that it is scary. I, too, feel in the shadow of my brother, who is probably going to go to a much better college than me and in general make a lot more out of my life than I am. That's not to say that I don't have ambitions--if you know me, you know I do--I just don't care about going to a big-name college or getting a big-name job or anything of that nature.

I love both my parents more than anything, but sometimes I just can't stand the way my Mom talks to me. She blames it on my brother, and while it may be partly true, I think the reason I'm so neurotic about what everyone thinks of me is the things she says to me. Every other word out of her mouth is critical--'You need to lose weight.' (as I've said, I'm 5'4, about 140 lbs. Hardly thin, but according to every weight and height chart I've read, hardly over weight either, given my frame) 'Fix your hair.' (Excuse me if I don't want to waste hours of my life trying to get something as inconsequential as my bloody hair to lie flat) 'Change clothes. When you're with me, you'll dress decently.' (I wear dresses, people. All the time. These are apparently not decent enough for my mom)

When she's not doing that, she's complaining about my skin (like most teenagers, I have some acne, though it's actually mostly on my back...and it's much less pronounced than most), which I wash every day in addition to swabbing it with deep cleansing liquid and other such nonsense. Now, her complaints about my room are valid... it can get pretty terrible in there. But I do pick it up every week (just did, actually), although of course my idea of 'neat' (bed made, dirty clothes in a pile in the corner, everything else picked up and cleared away from the carpet) is still mom's idea of 'disaster area.' She just complains about everything. And, like Laris, my dad usually either stays out of it or only gets upset with me/Bryan to mom and not to our faces, unless we've done something terrible (such as take his stapler and forget to put it back.. things like that really piss him off). It's a little weird to have such an overbearing mother and such a lowkey father, but it's better than having them BOTH be overbearing, I guess.

OK, so maybe it's not THAT alike... but I definitely feel you, Laris. -__-

Now on a similar vein--
It's hard for me to label myself as an intelligent human being when I'm always surrounded by my brother and his friends--people who are, possibly, the most intelligent kids currently attending my school. So you have the problem of a person like me, who is by all standards definitely Above Average, and then you have people like my brother's friends (and in some areas, my brother himself), who are astronomically above average. My only saving grace is the way I wipe the floor with anything relating to English on standardized tests or otherwise, and even then I don't know if I'm skilled enough to get a 5 on the AP Exam. -_- Plus those good English scores are more than equalized by my abysmal mathematical abilities. I mean, it's scary--I get a 770 or something on the SAT in Verbal, and then, boom, 490 or something in Math. That is a HUGE discrepancy. -__-;

A lot of MY friends are insanely smart, too (Kai would be a prime example. 35 on her ACT. ARGH.), and if they're not all that adept at academic stuff, they're great at other things (such as martial arts and Dance Dance Revolution XD--and just generally being more well adjusted). But mostly it's my brother and his friends, most of whom are nothing short of brilliant (note that I say most. My brother, for some reason [he says terrible things about this person all the time], is friends with a guy named Justin, who, while at times witty, is more often than not an annoying theater cretin. We've disliked each other since we met in sixth grade. It's actually hard to believe he has a black belt in Taekwondo, given how much he's let himself go... but Justin could be a whole other blog entry...). For the most part (saying most for Justin again) they're pretty nice to me, too... pretty much the reason why I don't hate guys entirely. But I digress. The point is that while I'm--by no means--a STUPID person, I don't come anywhere close to the level of intelligence held by many people I associate with. In addition to regular academic intelligence, I just can't do a lot of things most people can do (I'm kind of a flake that way). I don't even have my driver's license yet (though one could argue that's just out of pure laziness). Hff. This is wandering off into nowhere, so I'm just going to stop now and go back to trying to Get Things Done.