I got an e-mail on Sunday morning from my brother who goes to college a few towns away in Hamden, Conn. Like me, he has an odd need to chronicle his life’s various misadventures so every now and then I get a letter about the sorts of things he’s been up to in the past few days. This is the one I got on Sunday:
Today’s Lesson: Don’t get into fights with chairs…of any shape or form. Sooo…Yeah, my life chugs on. Was up till like 5 last night hangin out with my friends. Towards the end, we all started drifting off to our rooms, and one of my friends lost the key to her room. One of my friends, whose room we were in, said it was on his bed. (He was in another room watchin the Matrix) so I go climb up to his bed and start looking around. The beds are five feet off the ground. So I went to jump down, but I slipped, so I actually FELL down. The kid also has a nifty little chair that you can rock back in; all the way until you’re like parallel with the ground.
My foot hit that chair, which set the back of it shooting upward. So to recap: I’m falling DOWN. The back of the chair is rocketing UP. The back of the chair hit me in the left eye, right above my eye actually. Come to find out later that I gave myself one HELL of a nasty gash, from my eyelashes all the way up to my eyebrow. So right now, my eye is sorta swollen and my entire eyelid is all like…gashes and bruises and cuts.
Way to be a doofus huh?
—B
Apparently the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.
It is a little strange though to think my younger brother is in college now. This is the kid I could trick into eating grass on a fairly regular basis. It’s actually a pretty easy thing to do when your little brother is obsessed with cows. Last time I checked his pajamas still had feet and a little flap in the back for him to poop out of. And now he’s making an ass out of himself in college too. Part of me couldn’t be prouder. This is probably the same part of me that reveled in seeing him eat grass.
But having a younger sibling in college isn’t all fun and games. All of the sudden I was supposed to be the wise one. The one with all the answers. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m not. Not in any way. The big difference between the freshman and junior versions of myself is that I’ve learned to hide the confused and scared look I had when I walked around campus as a freshman. I still don’t know where the Psych Library is for the life of me.
That doesn’t mean I’m completely worthless though. I’ve managed to impart a few things. My recipe for Triscuit Pizza has been successfully passed down and my brother is slowly learning the joys of brushing his teeth in the shower before his morning classes. He’s starting to power nap before dinner and though to this day he only drinks Fuzzy Navels, he at least knows the hierarchy of bad beers and has promised to never drink any alcoholic beverage that comes from Belgium. Now if I could just get him to stop using those little AIM smiley faces (especially that happy-go-lucky one with its tongue sticking out) I think we’d be getting somewhere.
And when it comes to giving advice, I like to think I don’t give him bad advice. At least not intentionally. I usually tell him to do what I would do in his situation, or when I actually know better, what a sensible person would do in his situation. And after 18 years of living together the kid knows when not to listen to me. Like the time when his roommate showed up drunk at 3 a.m., threw up on the futon, and then cried for two hours about how the room smelled when my parents were supposed to visit my brother early the next morning and I told my brother that in his situation I would have been passive aggressive and spent the rest of the year leaving errant pubic hairs on the roommate’s pillow. My brother just bought a futon cover because he’s proactive. And also, he may not have reached puberty yet. I’m not sure. We’re not that close.
But despite the quality of advice I give the kid, the fact remains that he comes to me for help and advice. It can be a bit of a burden but it’s kind of nice too. It puts things into perspective. It makes me feel like I’ve matured, if only a little bit. Yes, I still make mistakes. Yes, I still manage to embarrass myself. And yes, I still have a lot to learn. But at least I know better than to slip off a lofted bed and have a chair fall on my face.
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