Am I my brother's keeper? No, seriously, dude.

Okay, it was bad enough when I wrote his paper comparing the first and last soliloquies from Richard III for him. I mean, it was Sunday and the paper was due the next day and he had a rough draft that he'd apparently written while he was high on Pixy Stix and it was a challenging and totally uninspiring prompt anyway and it was so very very bad that when I tried to read the first sentence aloud to him, he fled the room.

Now, when I say that I wrote it for him, be assured that I in fact trapped him in the basement and opened the document in SubEthaEdit with him and willed the paper into coherence by virtue of a.) discussing with with him, b.) forcing him to write what each paragraph was actually about at the top so that he wouldn't forget mid-sentence, c.) looking up quotations in his book to either argue against what he said or support it and d.) actually writing sentences. You could tell what sentences I'd written, because they were lavender.¹ But I still suffered during the entire writing process.

But that was as nothing to when I found myself inviting girls to Homecoming for him by means of an elaborate project which he conceived on the spur of the moment during maths and which he expected to have carried out by 6:00 PM.

See, he started by asking me to use my digital camera to take some pictures around town for him, which I was perfectly willing to do. I figured it was for school. It turned out that he had written out what he wanted to say in his invitation to this girl, and he wanted to have it illustrated with photos of certain things, like the high school, one of those pictures of himself, the movie theatre, a restaurant, his video game, collection, an elk,² etc.

( This story is continued behind this cut tag, with illustrations. )

At least it worked. She turned him down last year, but not this year. Thanks to me. Me, me, all me.

Trip to the dentist was uneventful. Drove all the way there listening to The View From Saturday, which was an excellent production with five different readers for each of the different narrators: Mrs. Olinski, Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian. Plus another guy to read the fifteen questions at the end. ;) I still love that book to pieces, and now my mother knows why.

When we got to my grandparents' house, I collapsed and fell asleep while my mom and grandma fussed around with AOL in an utter reversal of expected roles. The AOL tech support people refused to reveal sensitive information like where the "Send Email" button in AOL 9.0 is to my grandma, because her name is not on the credit card that pays the monthly fee.

My mother dragged me most unwillingly out of bed at 7:40 and we went to the dentist. He said to ignore the weird shadow on my tooth that is visible in some lights, which he attributed to the incredible shittiness of the underlying tooth.³ He also drilled down the filling that he had put in in June, saying that it was much too high and he was surprised it hadn't broken already. Jeez. He might have noticed that before. He didn't charge us for the visit or anything, though.

On the way back we listened to the first 4/10 of Night Train to Memphis and now my mom is listening to the rest of it. At one point while I was switching tapes, she started singing something called "Delta Rose" and I groaned, "Good lord," and she thought that I called her a whore. Which, you know. Makes us even.

I've got new socks on! Nice smartwool casual walking socks. Mmm, wool.


¹Not in the final copy.
²I am so not even shitting you.
³The exact word he used was "calcification". But yeah. I know my teeth are evil. This is why I had them capped.

Am I my brother's keeper? No, seriously, dude.

Okay, it was bad enough when I wrote his paper comparing the first and last soliloquies from Richard III for him. I mean, it was Sunday and the paper was due the next day and he had a rough draft that he'd apparently written while he was high on Pixy Stix and it was a challenging and totally uninspiring prompt anyway and it was so very very bad that when I tried to read the first sentence aloud to him, he fled the room.

Now, when I say that I wrote it for him, be assured that I in fact trapped him in the basement and opened the document in SubEthaEdit with him and willed the paper into coherence by virtue of a.) discussing with with him, b.) forcing him to write what each paragraph was actually about at the top so that he wouldn't forget mid-sentence, c.) looking up quotations in his book to either argue against what he said or support it and d.) actually writing sentences. You could tell what sentences I'd written, because they were lavender.¹ But I still suffered during the entire writing process.

But that was as nothing to when I found myself inviting girls to Homecoming for him by means of an elaborate project which he conceived on the spur of the moment during maths and which he expected to have carried out by 6:00 PM.

See, he started by asking me to use my digital camera to take some pictures around town for him, which I was perfectly willing to do. I figured it was for school. It turned out that he had written out what he wanted to say in his invitation to this girl, and he wanted to have it illustrated with photos of certain things, like the high school, one of those pictures of himself, the movie theatre, a restaurant, his video game, collection, an elk,² etc.

( This story is continued behind this cut tag, with illustrations. )

At least it worked. She turned him down last year, but not this year. Thanks to me. Me, me, all me.

Trip to the dentist was uneventful. Drove all the way there listening to The View From Saturday, which was an excellent production with five different readers for each of the different narrators: Mrs. Olinski, Noah, Nadia, Ethan and Julian. Plus another guy to read the fifteen questions at the end. ;) I still love that book to pieces, and now my mother knows why.

When we got to my grandparents' house, I collapsed and fell asleep while my mom and grandma fussed around with AOL in an utter reversal of expected roles. The AOL tech support people refused to reveal sensitive information like where the "Send Email" button in AOL 9.0 is to my grandma, because her name is not on the credit card that pays the monthly fee.

My mother dragged me most unwillingly out of bed at 7:40 and we went to the dentist. He said to ignore the weird shadow on my tooth that is visible in some lights, which he attributed to the incredible shittiness of the underlying tooth.³ He also drilled down the filling that he had put in in June, saying that it was much too high and he was surprised it hadn't broken already. Jeez. He might have noticed that before. He didn't charge us for the visit or anything, though.

On the way back we listened to the first 4/10 of Night Train to Memphis and now my mom is listening to the rest of it. At one point while I was switching tapes, she started singing something called "Delta Rose" and I groaned, "Good lord," and she thought that I called her a whore. Which, you know. Makes us even.

I've got new socks on! Nice smartwool casual walking socks. Mmm, wool.


¹Not in the final copy.
²I am so not even shitting you.
³The exact word he used was "calcification". But yeah. I know my teeth are evil. This is why I had them capped.