Cousin: (n) a child of one’s uncle or aunt.

Family setups and things like lineage always confuse the hell out of me.

After mother, father, sister and brother, it all gets a little blurry.

It begins with aunts and uncles. And then, when we start talking about “aunt on your mother’s side” or “uncle on your father’s side,” honest to God, I need to take out paper and pencil and draw a map.

Or should it be a graph? Because then, the children of those aunts and uncles become my cousins.

So in a weird way, I am kind of related to them, which makes it very strange that when I was a child, over summer vacation, we often played doctor.

That means I was touching family members—experimenting and discovering my sexuality—with people who would be my brothers and sisters if they weren’t separated by one other person.

I’m not even going to talk about second cousins. I honestly don’t even know what that is. I never admit I don’t know, because there is always someone ready to explain it, and then I must pretend to comprehend so as to get him or her to shut up.

I must stop and think about these family arrangements because they don’t come naturally to me.

Maybe they’re not supposed to.

Perhaps the hippie philosophy is the best one for us as human beings. You know—where we’re all brothers and sisters.

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