i used to be a young james dean with a way with the ladies

All my life people have said that I am just like my mother. I look like her. I sound like her. We share the same voice intonations and I even make hand gestures similar to her's when I tell a story. Everyone says I am just like my mom, except for my grandfather. He insists that I'm just like my mummum (my mom's mom). We have the same legs, and we both twirl our hair in the same exact way when we are reading or sipping coffee or smoking. We both have selective hearing when children speak to us and we both get names and song lyrics confused. We also both drive the same, speeding up and coasting then speeding up again, but only when we're on the phone while driving.

I always maintained that I was like neither. That I was me and that I was uniquely different from both my mom and my mummum. Well, that all got shot to hell tonight.

My whole family and I piled into the minivan to go watch my sister's gymnastics performance tonight. But on the way over, we realized that we had forgotten a camera. Well, that simply would not do. So, guess who got sent all the way back home in the tornado warning weather? You guessed it, me. I grabbed both my mom's camera and my camera and then proceeded to misplace the garage door opener, so I ended up running around the outside of the house from the backdoor to get back to the car, forgetting that there was also a front door from which I could have exited. This is not what makes me like my mummum, this is what makes me me.

What makes me like my mummum is what happened at the gym. I was taking pictures of my sister for about ten minutes, but the lighting was all wrong. I stood and sat, angled and zoomed. Nothing helped the shot, and I said so. It was not until the last photo opportunity that I realized that I had not been taking photos at all. I had actually been taking video recordings of you know, people's feet and butts, the tops of heads, my lap, my feet and my brother's lap. There's a rather nice minute and a half long video of blank darkness with me in the background cracking jokes about camera users and little kids being as difficult to herd as cats. Some lady laughs at this, one point for me?

And this my friends, is what makes me like my mummum. I knew this day would come, and initially I was slightly disappointed about it. But now that the day has come when I've realized that I am just like my mummum and I'm actually young enough to not be senile and find the humor in the situation, and appreciate nice legs and embarassing moments; it's not so bad.