Day 47: My Little Barbie Centaur

You like? It's a new toy I'm going to be pitching to Mattel. I think they're going to sell like hotcakes!

Not really. Last weekend after Marisa's birthday party my sister and I sat down to go through her (Marisa's) closet to make room for new stuff. First off, simply opening the closet is risky enough; it's waist-high piles of clothes and toys. But we made it through, with minimal refereeing from my mother. See, my sister has a paycheck with which she buys things. I do not. I make things.

I've been thrust into many situations with my sister this summer and I'm trying to understand how we ever came from the same family, let alone the same planet. I don't think I will ever have an answer to that, but I have come to a very basic definition of how we differ:

Nicole: works all day = paycheck = money = buys things
Stacey: work all day making things = no paycheck

I've simply cut out the middle man, that doesn't mean that I'm above having money. I would love to have money, but right now my main commodity is my time. For instance, we brought in a nice harvest from the backyard today so we don't have to go to the store and buy that food. That's because I'm home during the day to maintain the garden. My sister has to spend money to buy those things.

It's a simple equation, but neither of us understands the others' lifestyle. At all. And that's where things fall apart.

Anyway, the whole point to this crazy looking animal is that when we were going through Marisa's closet my sister pulled out things and announced they were for the garbage pile, and I either screamed, "Nooo, RECYCLING!" or "Noooo, I can make something out of that!" or "Nooo, I can FIX that!" Seriously, she wanted to throw out everything, including perfectly useful stuff and I was freaking out because I don't understand why it's so difficult to recycle something instead of dump it. She'd rather have been done with the whole project because she had to go to work in the morning.

So to be funny I took this Barbie head (actually from a Bratz doll) and the body of a My Little Pony out of her garbage pile and said I could make something with them. Then it came to me that they would go perfectly well together. I got out the hot glue gun and viola. And now that I've written about my sister and me and our differences, I see this hybrid doll as a metaphor for our relationship. We are two completely different people, and when we are together we make about as much sense as this freaky doll.

And now that I have gone and assigned the centaur a metaphorical meaning I must call it art and keep it forever. Great.