Friday, June 29, 2007

Sisterly behavior

Just in case someone out there wondered fleetingly if I have always been of an annoying persuasion, let me put your suspicions to rest. Yesterday, cleaning out the garage, my brother found a stash of papers and drawings he had done in elementary school, complete with childish scrawl and coloring across lines. One was a little booklet, shaped and colored like a ladybug, with the title "Things That Bug Me" printed across the first page and the handwritten superscript,
"By Dylan
illistrated by Dylan
to mom & Dad an
poot to
gether
by mrs
Davis".

Cute, right? Yeah, I know. But what were the things that bugged my 6-year-old brother so? The kinds of things that jumped immediately to his mind, things that merited publication on special sheets with lines like these:
___________________________
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
___________________________
?

Simply, me. I was the biggest complaint in my brother's life during his turbulent days as a first grader. Here are his grievances, with spelling corrected for clarity.

"My sister always comes where I go. She mostly chews on her toothbrush more than brushing and she blows her bad breath on me. And when she has a slumber party she causes a lot of trouble and I try to do the same thing to her and make traps too. And my sister chews with her mouth full. And once when my sister had a slumber party I got a dart and Jamie Easterwood said 'O MY WORD DYLAN HAS A DART!' The End."

What I would like to say to Dylan is GET OVER IT. Not to his 6-year-old self, but to his 23-year-old self, because he still has nothing better to do than let the fact that I chew on toothbrushes get under his skin. That being said, I can't help but feel like I owe him some class of guilty apology for making his innocent childhood a living hell by chewing with my mouth full.

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