i’ve recently realized that my sister is way cooler than me. okay, not that recently, i guess i’ve known for a couple years now. but really though, she has now published a book. i’d publish a book, but it would probably be samples of the thousands of crossword puzzles i’ve half finished. and i don’t think that would be that interesting. 

my sister is 5 1/2 years older than me, and we were very different when we were growing up. she was old enough to make fun of me constantly, and i was young enough to not understand that she was right. for example, she used to yell at me for wearing a headband for 3 years straight. i said it was cool, but it was not, and now i have a permanent dent in my head from where the headbands used to sit. maybe i was just jealous of her perfect child-actor haircut when i was a baby.

jenny and me, 1986?

when i was in middle school, i was great at baking pies. but i always let my sister cut them. why? because when i would do it she would stare at me with such intensity and i would know she was disappointed that the slices weren’t exactly the same size. this is the life of a perfectionist art student. for my 12th birthday gifted me a scrapbook because i used to like hers. she was interested in watercolors and charcoal. i was interested in the backstreet boys, but avoided cutting out pictures of kevin (who was obviously the best one) and pasting them into my scrapbook because i knew she would not be impressed. that one scrapbook turned into 15, one per year through senior year of college (two were needed for freshman year, because we took A LOT of pictures, thanks 7A). they actually turned out pretty well.

the nice thing about the difference in age between my sister and i was that we never competed with each other like many siblings do. it also helped that we were polar-opposites as teenagers. while she was enrolled in a summer program at the chicago art institute and wore my grandpa’s corduroys that he tried to throw away, i was wearing glitter eyeshadow and attending poms camp (spirit sticks DO exist, it’s not a movie legend, and mine never hit the ground).

guarding spirit sticks and champion trophies, sister not featured

my sister went to college at rhode island school of design, one of the best art schools in the country. the thing about graduating from art school is that the standard rules don’t apply. there are caps and gowns, but you don’t have to wear them. you just have to ‘interpret’ them. my sister opted for never taking her’s out of the bag and turning it into a purse. 

graduation purse, barely featured.

after graduating from college she was hired to design websites for lawyers (or something equally boring) while her boyfriend, matt, created bat-mitzvah center pieces. this was short lived, and they quickly quit their jobs to start their own company, also online. i thought this was a temporary attempt at freedom, but as it turns out, the company has made quite a name for itself over the past couple of years (the news section of the website is not up to date, as they win a new award each month - most interesting of which is the young guns award). and they’ve made quite name for themselves as well. if you google “matt and jenny’s house,” the first hit you’ll see is the contagious Design*Sponge blog, with a tribute to their renovations. if you google my name, you get this. or less embarrassingly, the official report i wrote after my study abroad experiences to advise future students of what to do. fail.

so as i said, my sister is cooler than me.