Guest Post: 6 things you may not know about Ashley.

I'll be leaving in a few hours for a trip down to Columbus, Georgia for the annual School of the Americas/WHINSEC vigil and protest.

While I brave the loooong bus ride and being in charge of six teenagers for three days, a few generous souls will keep you entertained!

I'm really excited to kick things off with my little sister, Melanie (I wrote about my four siblings here)! She has known me almost 21 years and wrote about it. (It may have made me giggle and then get a little misty-eyed. Maybe. And I may be obsessed with the video she linked to. Maybe.)

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6 things you may not know about Ashley:

1. She has the tendency to overeat. Always.

It wouldn’t be a meal with Ashley without her moaning afterward: “I’m so full, I’m never eating again!” (recognized in our family as her catchphrase). The funny thing is – she never actually eats that much, and is usually hungry again within the next hour. Whether it’s my similarly small stomach, or the fact that I’ve constantly imitated her behaviors, I’ve somehow adopted the same tendency. Luckily, she has taught us all a very useful strategy: if you massage your stomach in small clockwise circles – allegedly it speeds up the digestive process. Try it sometime!

2. Though 25, she is still afraid of our parents.

And I am too. (No, I’m not talking about the political tension in our family.) Rather, Ashley and I frequently want to ask our parents for favors, mostly food related (ie. “Can we go to Vegeteranian?” [to which the answer is always no, by the way. The owner once insulted Akron.] or –“Will you pay for us to make copious amounts of cheese fondue and tiramisu?”) Anyways, we always summon Emmie, our 17-year-old sister, to go ask Mom and Dad for us. I’m not sure why we are so afraid; since we’ve never been turned down (Dad loves food too).

3. She was quite the devious older sister.

Ashley crafted a number of interesting lies as a child, to which Tara and I were subjected, as her younger sisters. She once sat me down to give me a serious talk about how she had just learned she was adopted (she’s not) – but I wasn’t allowed to talk to our parents about it because they would get very mad at her. That puts a lot of pressure on a 6-year-old! Tara tells of similar memories of Ashley telling her she was an evil alien, or telling Tara she had to perform a number of tasks in order to receive a hamster from our parents.

4. She narrated many a movie to me.

We have a stringent rule in our family that one cannot see a PG-13 movie before they are 13. So when Ashley would go to the movie theatre to see a PG-13 movie with her friends, she would immediately come home and lock us in her room and relay the plot to me in excruciating detail. So when she was terrified at night from seeing Joyride, I was too, though I had never seen it. When I finally watched The Sixth Sense, 7 years after it came out, I was already aware, thanks to Ashley, of the crazy plot twist.

5. She is shamefully obsessed with the band Switchfoot.

When we went to see them in summer 2006 at the Alive Festival, after every single other concertgoer had left, and the concert area was just a mess of mud where a crowd had once been, Ashley was still latched to the fence screaming “One more song! One more song!” in hopes that Switchfoot would hear her demands and play an encore just for her.

6. I have always wanted to be just like her.

Ashley is the favorite sister of all of our four siblings – and it’s not hard to see why. I could go on and on about her quirks and idiosyncrasies (all of them lovable) But the bottom line is, she is without a doubt the person I look up to most in the world, and with good reason!


Oh, and this is my boyfriend – jealous?