I expect you'll be seeing much more of me on your rss feeds

I need to practice my writing, and so I'm making a goal to blog every single day. I'm hoping the practice will help me as I work on my thesis, write a proposal for a PhD program to which I'm applying and write personal statements for the other PhD applications I'm doing.

Since I'm thinking today about my writing I thought I'd write about one of my favorite people who happens to be a really incredible writer. I have two amazing and intelligent sisters who are my best friends, and each relate to totally different parts of my personality. I'll probably write a whole post about my little sister some day, but today I want to talk about my older sister.

She is a writer and always has been. I mean always. She wrote out her first stories when she was five and has been telling me stories for as long as I can remember. She is talented, and I am jealous every single day of her talent. She writes fiction primarily, but when I read her scholarly work I always enjoy how imaginatively she makes her points. Sometimes I send her paragraphs I am working on for something and she takes my stilted and awkward phrases and rearranges them into something that flows and makes sense. I don't know how she does it and I can't imagine I will ever reach her skill level, but her work will always be what I strive to emulate.

I don't know what I would do without my older sister. Because she's a writer I can always find her on the internet, and so she becomes the person that I turn to most. She never fails to encourage me, and she always has time and attention to help me with a problem. She listens to me and gives me good advise and makes me feel capable and intelligent, even when I'm certain that I'm not. My sister and I share experiences that formed who we are and we will always be able to relate to each other in a way that we can't relate to anyone else. This is what makes me happy, and I am so glad that I have her around to help me figure out this whole PhD mess. If I get in to anything, it'll be because of her kind encouragement.