A few weeks ago, I got an email message from my eldest sister, out of the blue, telling me that her mother-in-law had passed away.  I sent my condolences back, via email, and meant to send a card, but things came up that week and I never did send the card.  I was not really all that close with her husband and his side of the family, having lived in California for most of their early marriage years, and I can only recall having met my sister’s mother-in-law twice, if that.

But not sending a card was inexcusable.  It really was.

Somewhere in the middle of my sister’s email message to me was buried the fact that her son was having his graduation that week as well.  My nephew. 

My nephew is a wonderful guy who makes my heart sing every time I look at him.  He’s got big brown eyes, long eyelashes, a beautiful smile, and a heart of gold.  He works hard, he loves his girlfriend, and he sends me silly questionnaires over myspace.com all the time.  Every time I see him, I just want to hug him close -- but he hates that sort of mushy stuff.  He just wants to be hugged by his girlfriend.  I know this because he’s a friend of mine on myspace and I check in on him regularly.

In the back of my mind I knew he was 18 and therefore this year was the year he’d be leaving high school and moving on to college, but somehow with everything else going on, I missed the date of his graduation (not that I was ever given an invitation or any other head’s up except for that one brief line in my eldest sister’s email that I didn’t catch until much later) and I missed it.  I let it pass without a card or acknowledgement, let alone a gift.

I am, of course, making up for this huge oversight when I see him next weekend, with a sincere apology, the gift of a book all about his favorite hobby which is also his career goal:  photography and video, film-making, and the entire industry in general.  Money, of course, too.  Of course.

Will he get over it, and read the book?  That’s my hope.

I’m not much of an aunt.  I am an extremely self-centered, self-contained single woman with no children of my own.  For some reason, my nieces and nephew seem to love me anyway.  For this, I am extremely grateful, but bewildered.  If I was one of them, I’d say, “Yo.  The money is nice, but get more involved if you really love us.”  They don’t do this, though.  So either they understand me and don’t mind, or they just consider me the laughingstock family asshole but cash my checks anyway.

All this being said, I am making an effort to broaden my horizons and get more involved.

Not just with my family, mind you, but in the political arena.  Most specifically, with the media and its reporting.  I hate miscommunication and resentment.  God knows, it has run rampant in my family through the years, to nothing but bad ends.  To see it running rampant nationally, even globally, is sheer heartache, to me.  That’s why I hate watching Fox News.  Which is why I didn’t realize until recently that the mainstream media is more biased than I had thought, and Fox News is not alone in being able to get away with it.

Thanks to raider99, I have found a group with a common cause, called SCAAMD:  Sudden Citizens’ Action Against Media Distortion.  Here’s the link explaining the group:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/07/sudden-citizens-action-against.php

You can find more about them in any post that starts with SCAAMD here at TPM, until they get their own page.  Oops, wait.  I joined this week, so I can say us.

My nephew won’t be joining the group, I’m sure, but my nephew is not as overlooked as my eldest sister thinks, either.  In between my political activities and work and home, I do indeed check in on her two youngest via myspace, where I was befriended by them both a long time ago. 

This is not to say it’s okay to miss a graduation, or forget what year of school my nephew’s in.

Had my Republican sister informed me that an upcoming graduation was coming and had she invited me, or at least reminded me, I would’ve had a gift and acknowledgement at the ready.  That’s what a good but weird Democratic spinster aunt does, no?

Pile on, peeps, with the harshest of criticisms about how bad an aunt I am.  I deserve it.

But at the same time, I hope you pile on the media for what it has become, which is, in a nutshell:  Far worse than I.

J, I love you.  I promise not to miss your first film’s red carpet premiere.