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The Tale of Candice

Candice Chia Lin
Born: 21 February 1977
Died: 17 January 2000

(It's been a long time coming, but I'm gonna finally try to share a little bit of my life with my big sister, Candice. There's so much to say, so I apologize if things seem to come out randomly. The truth of the matter is that they will be coming out randomly.)

The two dates I've written up there seem so cold and say almost nothing about my sister's life. I have so many memories of what life was like with her that I know I can't say everything I want to say in a reasonable amount of space. I don't even know how I would begin to explain things.

I guess I'll attempt some semblance of organization by beginning with a broad, big picture type statement or two.

I've never known two siblings who did not ever fight. My sister and I were no exception. From my point of view, though, we never really had any really big fights about anything major. For the most part, we got along well with a good understanding of our roles in our family. She was my big sister and consequently she had to take care of me in innumerable ways. Try as I might to not be a bratty little brother, there are also innumerable times that I know I was a bratty little brother. On that note, I must also add that there are lots of things we've been through that I regret my actions about, but I've learned a lot from them now. I used to think that people didn't need each other, so I did the standard moody teenager type thing and kinda withdrew from my family cuz I felt like they didn't understand me. That sort of attitude continued into college, but then of course that idea was shattered. I'll have much more to say about this later on when I get to it.

As for the present issue at hand, I consider it a blessing that we were only 2.5 years apart in terms of age. This turned out to be a fairly good cuz with that sort of age difference, our interests weren't all that different (at times) while we also weren't so close together that we conflicted about things. You'll see what I mean as I explain further.

The Early Years

I suppose my earliest and clearest recollections of what we did together would be memories of playing together. Even then, you could see the beginnings of our future personalities. For instance, when we would play pretend type games, my sister would be the one who generally came up with ideas about what to pretend. I think one of the funnier things we liked to do was to pretend we were mice. We would run around and pretend we were being hunted by big, huge, mean cats. We built up little fortifications in the yard by barricading off small areas with various random things (e.g. benches, ivy, sticks) and using terrain features (e.g. trees, the gate leading to the backyard) to build up little hideouts. I even recall barricading off the gate to our backyard while my dad was doing yardwork once and him kinda getting a bit annoyed that we were in his way, but he's a fairly tolerant guy, so he just went about his business and we refortified after letting him through. heh.

I remember after my sister learned to rollerskate, she tried to teach me to skate too. She did a pretty good job too. She skated around while I skated to try to keep up with her while pushing this cart thing for balance. In typical big sibling fashion, one time she took the cart away from me and told me to skate, but I was too chicken to do anything so I just stood there and cried I think. In the end, though, I eventually did learn to skate, and we had years of fun skating around our yard. Even in more recent years, my sister hit upon the idea of learning to rollerblade once (once you've got the idea behind skating in general, it doesn't take nearly as long to learn to ice skate or rollerblade), so after a while of besieging the parents for permission, they bought each of us a pair of rollerblades (pretty decent ones too and for a good price), and we had plenty of fun learning to rollerblade. We've rollerbladed on the beach many times, and it's still one of my favorite things to do (even though I haven't done it recently).

As for more indoors types of things to do, we used to play pretend stuff with our stuffed animals all the time. Gosh, when I stop to think about it, I think we had as many imaginary worlds as we did stuffed animals, although there were certain stuffed animals that got along with each other better than others. heh. It would be a futile task to try to explain our stuffed animals, so I won't even try. One thing that I'm sure I'll regret admitting, but for some reason I feel like sharing (no I'm not drunk or something) is that for some freaky reason, I played with barbie dolls with my sister before. No, it wasn't even coerced in any way; I guess I was somewhat detached from all the social pressures on me to not play with girly toys. My sister had a whopping total of 2 barbie dolls (as in the legit kind), and one of them was really cool cuz it had a button on the back that if you pushed, it would wink. Believe it or not, we had to take turns playing with the high tech one that winked. heh. Yes, I realize by admitting this sort of thing, I've probably ruined my future political career. Oh well.

We weren't (read: I wasn't) completely strange, though. My sister had a cabbage patch kid and and an accompanying pony while they were fairly popular, and I didn't really like playing with those, while my sister really liked playing with them. On the other hand, I really enjoyed playing with legos (a positive sign of a future engineer), while my sister didn't enjoy it nearly as much. Consequently, we didn't always play together and I would play with legos and construx type toys while she would go off and play with something else (I guess I really don't know what she was doing since she was elsewhere). And once we were in school, our interests seemed to polarize a bit more in the culturally normal sense. I had some GI Joes and Voltron toys and stuff, while my sister collected girly stuff. If you don't know what I mean by girly stuff, I guess you're not familiar with the technical jargon of that age group. heh.

Along the way, there were random things that we were both interested in, like garbage pail kids. In case you don't remember, those were a fad while we were in elementary school that were collectible cards featuring sets of somewhat gross cartoons parodying the cabbage patch kids. My sister and I both started collecting them, so my parents used them as rewards for us while the fad lasted. Of course, after a while, we lost interest in them and I moved on to collecting baseball cards while my sister wisely escaped the allure of collectible cards.

My gosh, I'm starting to realize how hard it is to try to sum up years and years of experiences, seeing as how I've written this much and just barely scratched the surface.

[more to come soon]



Contact Info

I welcome rational debate and comments, so if something I've written has elicited a strong response from you, I would love to hear what you think. Since there are way too many spambots out there crawling around looking for e-mail addresses in order to sell them to spam advertisers, I'll write my e-mail address in human readable form: oom_cow at yahoo dot com.



This page was last modified on 27 August 2001.