Sibling Lessons in Game Theory

The last slice of cake, the last slice of pie, the ice cream served in one bowl: at first, the ability to allocate my portions from theirs was part of their divine rights of parents, and I more or less accepted this. At five, my parents began permitting me to choose which dish was mine. The slices of cake were always disappointingly similarly sized, so this didn't change a lot, but I enjoyed the power.

I distinctly remember my dad sitting me down on the floor with a slice of cake and two plates. "Today's your turn to divide the cake, and I choose." I set a very small portion on one plate, and left 70% of the cake on another for myself. He began reaching, very slowly, for the larger plate, eyes locked on it, wordlessly explaining in no uncertain terms what was about to happen. I scowled, "Let me try again."

When Isaac was three and old enough to express his interest in cake, it was my duty as the six-year-old to divide the cake and let him select. Isaac was not the same sort of opponent as my parents. At first he could be tricked by putting the smaller portion near him, and after a few rounds of that he could be tricked by my pretending to hide the smaller portion from him and acting like it was somehow better. Just as they later did when the addition of Firefly lead to kickback and collusion dynamics, the divider was severely punished for such dishonest play. Rules emerged: plates had to be equally presented, divisions were final once the first person took a plate, choosers could only select a plate for themselves, and all games were discrete instances: debts incurred in one game couldn't be repaid in another.

It was a long while before Issac was ready to play as the divider, but one day my parents informed me he was. A long bar of brownies was placed on a plate, and my brother pulled off a small square from the end and put it on the second one. I grinned and reached for the larger one as my brothers face scrunched up in a scowl.

"That's not fair."

"It's the rules."

Isaac sighed, annoyed, "You're suppose to want the little one!"

Up

My mom's dad dreamed of a better life. Born in Hell's Kitchen, he permanently damaged his heart swimming in the polluted rivers as a child. They sent him on a charity cruise for dying children to give him one nice experience before he kicked it, but he's the one child that lived.

My mother dreamed of a better life. She hates mint ice cream. Once her family ran out of money, and used the last five dollars to buy a gallon of it for dinner. She's never told me what happened after that. She chose a career at my age to support her dying father and lives a reasonable middle-class life now.

I lived a sheltered and comfortable life. My father was out of work intermittently, but I didn't know. My parents, two siblings, and I would split one can of spam and a pot of rice for dinner, but for a kid my age that combination of grease, overprocessed meat, and carbohydrates was one of the coolest meals around. It wasn't until my mother announced one day that dad had a job and we wouldn't be having spam anymore that I figured anything out. I went to college, graduated into a respectable cube farm career that paid more than my parents made combined some years, and settled down to wonder if there was anything better.

Enron always wears polo shirts, says it's just what happens to you when you go to prep school. I give him no end of shit about it. He too was the poor kid in his highschool, but mostly because his family didn't have a jet.

***

"You're almost at the end!" I hugged him.

Jace didn't look up from screen and his keyboard, "The end?"

"You're level 54 now, you'll be level 60 soon. That's the highest level."

"See, that's the difference. Some people think they're hot shit when the reach 30, or 50, or 60, but for each person who considers something a goal, there's a better player who shrugs it off as a simple prerequisite. Those girls you coach dream of getting into college. You consider it a simple rite of passage on your way to the next thing, and always assumed you'd go."

"It's... still an achievement?"

Click click click went the mouse. He sighed and rolled his eyes, "The game starts at 60."

***

I sat on the deck of the Torii with Enron.

"I'm thinking of running for the board."

"Why?"

"I dunno, seems like a thing to do. I'm not sure what to do with myself anymore. I achieved most of my major goals. There is obviously more out there than a cube farm and toys, but I haven't any idea what it is, let alone how to get it."

"There's lots more,"

"Your life isn't interesting to me. There has to be another path 'up' other than the useless socialites."

He shrugged.

***

Six months later we, the four cofounders, are standing in a mall on a Monday afternoon staring.

"Neutral colors, all the products are very brightly colored, so the backgrounds are all very neutral to let them pop."

"Floors have busy patterns."

"Mmm, casinos are like that too."

"Let's go in the bookstore. Pretty dense product display there..."

***

"This has the potential to make us all life-changingly rich"

"I was looking for life-changing-lulz, but I also accept cash."

"That puts each of us past the only phase change in real wealth: buying your freedom. Below that is all gradations of slavery, and above that is all gradations of rich."

***

In a white suit coat he looked strangely out of place in the party. When he took us outside to talk to him, suddenly I begrudged Bluebeery and Enron a lot less for constantly wearing those damn polo shirts. Now I was the one who looked out of place, and they both needed me to make a good impression on the Angel.

"You guys are working on something pretty exciting," he said.

***

We're in a pool at a, for lack of a better term, corporate mansion. The pool is full of eager biologists playing water volleyball, and the garage is filled probably over a million dollars in lab equipment.

Enron taps me on the shoulder and laughs, "This, this is 'up.'"

Blood

It is a warm Christmas morning in the Torii when a kid with sandy blond hair comes in to find me playing my guitar.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you live with your family right?"

"Yeah."

"And it is Christmas..."

"Yeah..." he sighed.

"So... they let you live there for free... surely you're on good terms for a holiday..."

"No, my mom asked me to move back in, I think she was lonely, but now that I am there she takes every opportunity to look down on me and try to push me around. My sister too, it starts with the little things like 'Dusty, pass me a fork,' but it escalates on as long as I put up with it. She just wants to see how much she can push me around."

"Huh, your family too."

"And this year, it occurred to me, as they were doing all this garbage, that I didn't have to put up with it, so I left."

***

I went to the beach with her yesterday, but she looks really tired today. "Family," she explains when I ask. I give her a little verbal hug and she brightens, "but I'm off to see my made-family now."

"That's wonderful, tell them Merry Christmas."

Billy, who came with us on our beach trip, looks about the same and won't say anything about it except "Family is tiring." He is usually one of the most cheerful of us but today he is worn and wants to do nothing but zone out and watch TV.

***

I think the portrayal of the biological family as the epitome of goodness is one of the silliest habits of our society. We'll all admit that there are some people in this world who just don't know how to be decent and respectful to one another, but we never admit to ourselves that they are probably somebody's parents or siblings.

We put up with rude, selfish, and harmful behavior from these people that we would never tolerate in a boyfriend or girlfriend, in a coworker, of a friend. If any of those people treated us like this we would have no problem advising ourselves to steer clear of those people, but when our own flesh and blood treat us like this we feel an obligation to go back to them, year after year, for another dose.

Family, they tell us, have known us all our lives and will be there for us when all else fails but why would we want them there in the worst of times when they do not know how to treat others with respect and decency at the best of times?

This is not to say that I do not love my family. I love my family with all of my heart. I understand that they are doing their very best to be accepting of me, that they are never intentionally mean, and that, for many of them, this is simply how they were either born or raised and how much work it would take to change. What I am saying is just because you love your family doesn't give you an obligation to show up every year, nor them a license to treat you like shit should you choose to. As a matter of fact, I would almost say you have an obligation to yourself and to them to take a stand and explain that their behavior is not alright and that you won't be participating until everybody can be civil. I can not tell you how many people, myself included, I have watched completely dread the holidays and waste so much effort and time trying to salvage the truly demolished family structure.

If you have one of those wonderful families that really is all it is cracked up to be, I really hope you appreciate them. Send them a hug for me.

And if you don't have one of those families: accept that some people just don't win the lottery and move on with your life.

***

"You'd better be grateful," my mother sneered, "because nobody will ever love you like your family loves you."

All I can think is, "I most certainly hope so."

Real

"Pika," she asked, "Tell me a story about my life."

I am always amazed at how the very old and the very young are similar. Firefly use to ask the same things, "Tell me about when I came from China," "Tell me about when I was little and we drove to the beach."

Grandma is dying of Alzheimer's, but she has an usual variety. She can remember recent events well, but her early life has become a blur over the years.

"You were a total badass Grandma!" I exclaimed, "You went to Rice at 14 for mathematics. It was completely unheard of! Then you kept getting all the A's in the classes until the professors told you you were ruining the curve for boys who needed those A's for their career, so you got a degree to be a schoolteacher."

Grandma smiled.

"So then World War II happened, so you became a spy in the Navy. Not like a secret agent, but you listened in to tapped phones to see if anybody in Hawaii was conspiring against America. That is where you met grandpa. He was working in the army as a Rabbi.

Gramdpa was an amazing man. I never met him, but I wish I had. He was a Rabbi who did not believe in God, but his family had put him in rabbinical school when he was quite young and so that became his profession. He came to terms with it by decided that even if God did not exist, that belief in God was an amazing and powerful positive influence in people's lives, and that by helping other people believe in God he could make people's lives better. They say he died 5-10 years early because he kept sneaking out of his hospital bed to do last rites for other patients."

Grandma chuckled a little bit, "Oh Pika, you don't need to make up things like that to make me feel good. Why don't you tell me a real story?"

***

"I wasn't always old you know."

"Of course not Grandma!" I said, "Everybody was young once, and you were so cool too!"

Grandma smiled that smile which says she thinks I am humoring her again. I suppose some people can not be convinced...

"Tell us a story grandma!" I said. Grandma never brings up being young unless she remembers something.

"I use to ride horses. I use to gallop across the fields..."

"That's wonderful!" I said, "English or Western?"

Grandma tapped her hearing aid, "What?"

"I said English or Western riding?"

"What?"

"Did you jump?"

"What?"

"Did you ride the horse over jumps?"

"No."

The room gets quiet as the debris of my attempt at polite conversation settle. Grandma looks ashamed at having to ask me to repeat myself so many times.

***

Three years after my attempts to tell Grandma about Rice, Grandma barely ate in front of us anymore. She had trouble using a fork to put food in her mouth, and she was very ashamed of it.

"Nathan liked this," she says as she passed time rearranging the food on her plate with the tines of her fork.

I catch the cue and ask loudly, "Tell us about Grandpa!"

Grandma smiled, "Well, Nathan was a very interesting man. He proposed to me on the very first date."

"No!" I say. Grandma finds it easier when I talk more in emotions than words, and with very few words at a time.

"Yes, yes he did." She smiles one of the first genuine smiles I have seen in a while, "He really did." She paused and then laughed, "I thought he was crazy."

"Well," Mom asked like you might ask a small child, "What did you do?"

"I went home to my father and told him about it."

"And what did he do?"

"He said that sometimes in life you just have to take a chance."

"And you were happily married until he died!" Mom finished.

Grandma nodded.

"That's beautiful Grandma," I said, but Grandma was done talking. I could tell she was having problems with the subtleties of what Mom had said, but she didn't want to go into a "what" cycle again. I'm never sure if Grandma can catch the horrendously condescending tones of voice Mom uses on her, or if perhaps I'm just sensitive to her because I have seen a great deal of her interactions with very small children.

If our culture had stories like The Fox and the Bear, maybe they would tell us that old people lose their hearing but not their speaking because they don't need to hear as much anymore, and because it is their turn to be heard instead.

I wonder if I was to tell her this story again later if she would not believe this one was real either.

***

"But it’s the truth even if it didn't happen."

I'm awkwardly balancing my books on the little L which forms the armrest of my seat, unable to move my feet very far because I'll kick the person in front of me. High school and air travel both sometimes seem to be the fine art of getting people to accept being treated like cattle.

"What did Ken Kesey mean by that?" My American Literature teacher is pacing the front of the room.

"Wasn't he high all the time?" one girl asked, twirling a chunk of her hair in her fingertips, "Maybe it is just nonsense."

Junior year of highschool meant I had already had several experiences of hallucinating from the medication I was being fed. Perhaps that is why this book was probably the only piece of literature I was forced to read that year that I liked.

"Maybe," I said, "These things seemed so real that they impacted him and had effects on him as if they were real things."

"Ah," the teacher asked, "So that makes them real?"

"Of course not," I said, "Real things are real, fake things are not, all I'm saying is it doesn't have to be real to be important." I'm sure at the time I was nowhere near as eloquent.

"Yeah," another student said, "Otherwise real things could be fake if everybody forgot them."

Fireflies

My sister has adopted her peer's habit of attempting to use youtube as her own personal music library. She's a legitimate thirteen year-old teenager now, complete with a smart phone grafted to her hand, horrendous spelling, and the belief that capitalizing every other letter makes her cooler. We've settled upon some music we can both enjoy, and now the computer screen is filled with a man at his keyboard and a series of whirring mechanical toys.

	Owl City - Fireflies
	Found at skreemr.com

I smile. Before I left I had trouble enough grasping that she was eight, my clearest memories of her are when she was closer to five or six, before I got sick.

You would not believe your eyes
If 10 million fireflies
Lit up the world as I fell asleep

Cuz they'd fill the open air
And leave teardrops everywhere
You'd think me rude
But I would just stand and stare

I can remember running through fields at that age where long grass licked my ankles and tugged at my bare feet, chasing fireflies. My grandmother brought me a jar from the kitchen and we tapped holes in the tin lid with the point of a Phillips screwdriver. I remember the sheer joy of seeing them hovering in the twilight over the quad at college for the first time, that fantastic feeling of coming home to something familiar.

"You remember fireflies," I ask her, "from our old house?"

She doesn't hear me, she's absorbed in her texting. I go back to stirring the rice pudding on the stove.

***

Even at 9 I had known something very big, and probably very bad was happening when my mother had taken me to my favourite restaurant for "special time together." I could normally count the times we ate out on one hand in a year.

"Pika," my mother said gently, "I have some very big news."

I dug into some ice cream with a spoon. If mom was going to spring bad news on me I was going to at least get a chance to eat desert first out of it.

"Our family is going to be a little bit bigger soon."

"You're pregnant?"

"We might adopt a little girl from China who hasn't got a family."

I remember being overwhelmed by two thoughts. The first was that at the point where my mother was telling me this there wasn't really any actual "might" involved here at all. The second was that my mother was in her mid-fourties and dad was scraping fifty. I couldn't think of anybody that age with a newborn child, and couldn't figure out why that was.

"We're going to be about 10 years apart?"

"Yes."

"Are you...expecting me to help raise her?"

"Only as a sister."

I took another scoop of ice cream, thoroughly unconvinced.

***

By mid-high school my sister was calling me "Mom" by mistake more often than I was comfortable with. I remember doing the same thing in early elementary school with my Waldorf teacher, first calling her mom once by accident and then repeating the "mistake" because a part of my head really liked that idea.

***

My memories of being sick are blurry, but I distinctly remember finding and watching Grave of the Fireflies. More friends than I could count had told me I would bawl like a child at the end, but instead I couldn't remember being more enraged at a film. The boy had an obligation to his sister before his personal pride, and no matter how wretched his aunt was being I felt he should have stayed there until the food stopped, in order to try to provide for his sister. At 10 years apart he needed to care for her and put her above all else, as she'd never be able to look after herself at that age. Just looking at that little tin of candies in the grocery store made me mad for months.

***

Leave my door open just a crack
(Please take me away from here)
Because I feel like such an insomniac
(Please take me away from here)

***

I went to college more resentful of my parents than you'd believe, and every time I thought about them I worried for my sister. Issac and I were too close in age for me to protect, and my mother had always gotten along very well with him, but my sister I could do something about. All I had to do was graduate well-decorated, land a steady reputable high-paying job in a very good school district and get a chance to take care of her during her high school years. This desire stemmed from very simple logic: either my parents were not as bad as I thought they were, or I would be a terrible person to leave my sister to the same fate when I had the capacity to do something about it.

***

But I'll know where several are
If my dreams get real bizarre
'Cause I saved a few and I keep them in a jar

***

"Why don't they light up?" a six-year-old me asked, shaking the newly-re-purposed peanut butter jar.

The jar was hastily steadied by my grandma, "Don't shake it, you'll hurt them. I guess they just don't feel like lighting up right now."

My cousin Tom taught me how to kill the bugs when they lit up and smear their color on the pavement, but this was not what I wanted. I wanted a living, breathing nightlight which I could care for and in return could light my room.

Leaves, sticks, more air vents, I even once opened the jar after mom tucked me in to let them roam my whole room, but the results were always exactly the same. The next morning I had nothing but dead fireflies.

"Well, maybe they are just fragile," Mom offered.

Almost fifteen years later I am standing in the Torii lobby asking out of the blue if anybody ever mastered this.

"I just don't think they survive the night," Jen offered, "they are probably short-lived..."

I sighed, "I just probably never knew how to care for them."

***

There are curling irons mixed in with the rockband controllers. She's fooling with the wires and a little upset.

"There was a man outside when I was walking the dog," she informs me. "He was smoking and drinking."

I smiled a little bit. My sister was still untangling the cords.

"He asked if he could pet the dog and I was scared, so I said no because she bites and came back."

Thirteen. What does a good parent of a thirteen year old do? Certainly no drinking, no hardcore partying, limited going out late, having to stay out of trouble, and forget doing any serious dating... I'd essentially skip the lifestyle of my early 20's for four years, followed by another four years of being careful and financially stable to provide her a good college education. I'd need to move into an apartment with space for her and shift my work hours so I could be with her. Would the company feed her like they feed me? Otherwise I also need to make meals for her...

Even if I could do all that, could I provide her a good home? Would it be any more realistic or do her any more good than the stick and some leaves in a jar with air holes did for the fireflies? Single working parents have to be nearly heroic to raise children well...and here I've barely figured out all the stuff I have to not do, let alone be sure to do.

"Shit," she says, tugging on the cords.

"You're getting a little gratuitous with the swearing." I add, "It doesn't mean a lot if it's every fourth word."

She looks up at me with an expression I cannot quite fully read, but it definitely says "but you swear."

I'm not sure I can do this.

My Brother's Keeper

The basement was where my mom did laundry. We could always hear her voice at the top of the stairs but normally she tried to shut the door so my brother wouldn't fall down the stairs.

I found my brother crawling on the edge of the stairway and my mother's voice and grabbed him by his overalls to drag him away. He looked bewildered to be sliding backwards, little baby knees sliding fruitlessly back and forth trying to crawl the other way. Issac looked up at me bewildered, but I didn't let go of the red little overalls.

"I saved him," I exclaimed to my mother when she returned up the stairs.

"Oh?"

"He was going to fall down the stairs and I saved him!"

It hadn't been that near a miss in reality but my mother was immensely pleased with me and wanted to encourage this behavior. She picked me up and hugged me, and presented me with a copy of "Babar and Father Christmas" as a reward. I would still pick up the tattered VHS box years later with pride and remember how I had nobly saved my brother.

"Issac will need a lot of protection and teaching," my mother said, "you will always have to be a good big sister and look out for him...keep him out of trouble."

I beamed. I felt important.

***

"Hugga hugga hugga squeeeeeeeeeeeze," my mother would say, holding my brother in her arms. On each hug she would give him a strong hug and on the word squeeze she would hold him as long as the word lasted and kiss him on the head. My brother found this comforting when the world became overwhelming, which was often. This was the age where firetruck sirens were terrifying and we couldn't play music on our speakers because it was all overwhelming.

Keeping my brother out of trouble had been a great game when I was five and he was two, but as I neared seven I began to understand that my friends did not need to do nearly as much protecting of their younger siblings as I did, and I grew tired of the game of being important because I looked out for him. It became a chore. He worshipped me, and he wanted to follow me everywhere. As time progressed I just wanted to get away from him.

***

Sunday school was difficult: not in an academic sense, but in a behavioral one. I had to wear a dress for one thing, and patent leather shoes which always seemed to come home with scuffs on them, much to my amazement and my mother's distain. I never cared much for my teachers, and I felt like they always taught the same things over and over, but at 8 I was really too young to have much in the way of religious opinions or disbelief in what figures of authority told me was true. Hell, I'm not sure if I had even sorted out Santa Claus yet.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth...

Genesis 4:9-11

"That's wrong!" I said. I didn't understand at the time that God was upset with Cain for killing his brother, I thought he was mad about Cain not looking out for his little brother. Its amazing how sanitized the world presented to me at that age was.

"What's wrong?" the Sunday school teacher asked.

"Abel wasn't Cain's problem! What if Cain had other stuff to do? Why did he have to be Abel's keeper?"

The Sunday school teacher shook her head, "we are all our brother's keepers, Pika."

I was cranky the whole way home. When I got home I threw my patent leather shoes in my closet and my littly frilly dress on the floor to put my normal clothes back on. Then I pulled my stuffed animals off the shelves and sulked. God seemed pretty demanding and pretty eager to take the fun out of most things.

My brother's head cracked in the doorway and a big pair of blue eyes looked at me.

"NO!" I shouted, "You can't come in here. This is mine. I'm playing by myself."

My brother looked baffled. I sat there for a moment. I knew this wasn't how I was suppose to behave.

"Alright...you can play with one." I presented him Blue Bunny. He grabbed one ear and a foot and started pulling. I could almost hear the little stitches pop.

"No!" I shouted, "stop that! Blue bunny doesn't like that!" I tugged at the animal in his hands and he held on harder. Eventually I extracted it from his hands and stormed back into my room, leaving my bewildered little brother outside the slammed door. There was a few second pause before he started bawling. I could hear my mother's voice outside the door comforting him, and I felt very bad. Mom said I had to be patient with him until he was older and he could learn better. I felt like I had, but apparently it wasn't enough time.

***

"Pika's little brother is weird," Carolyn said to the group, making a funny face. The bus rattled and clanked off to Girl Scout Camp with all of us bouncing along inside.

"So what?" I asked.

"He acts funny!" she said, "he rocks back and forth and he talks to himself."

"Oh yeah? Well my brother is smart. He can name all the fish in the aquarium. Can your brother do that?"

Carolyn was quiet for a moment.

"That's right," I said, "and your brother is annoying too."

***

"What..." Mime said, looking at my snowpants and big rubber boots.

"My mom made me wear them. She says I can't go sledding without them. I asked not to...I know they aren't cool..."

Mime rolled her eyes a little gesturing to where my little brother was running around a tree shaking snow off the lower branches. He wrung his hands and rocked and muttered to himself in delight. She sighed, "and you brought him?"

"He's ok. I told him he isn't allowed to talk to anybody."

Looking back on it you may fault me as cruel for making this rule for my brother, but sometimes I did not have the patience to explain the complexities of things and did not want to spend all afternoon justifying him to my friends. My brother lived for black and white rules, and this simple one made so much of my life easier.

Mime, her sister Plato, Issac and I all headed for the sledding hill, but when Mime saw that Laura and her cronies were already at the hill she nearly turned back.

"Whatever," I said, "there is room to share."

Things went fairly peacefully for the first hour. Laura and her friends from time to time would say rude things about my brother, but neither of us rose to the bait. After growing board of this she switched tactics.

"Nice snowpants, Pika," she grinned. None of them were wearing big bulky snowpants.

"Yeah, my mom made me wear them."

"Hah, you always do whatever your parents say?"

"Invariably," my brother nodded, "Pika always honors our father and mother. She is the best."

There we go. In one line my brother had demonstrated his habit of reading the dictionary and saying words no eight year old knew, and also quoted the black and white rules of the Bible to win an arguement. It was very noble of him to stick up for me, it just happened to be the last thing we needed.

First she was mocking, then her cronies were mocking, and then my brother was shouting, and then they were pushing him. I ran up and joined the crowd, but couldn't think of anything better to say than "Knock it off!"

Laura was sneering. My brother was theatening that I would beat her up, just like I fought other kids who pushed him around. I was petrified.

Somehow it was agreed that I would fight Laura in a snowball fight. I asked for a moment to build a fort, but I knew it was in vain. Laura would run up, tackle me, and jam snow down my clothing, and then beat the shit out of me. I was weaker than her, smaller than her, and far slower in these God-awful snow pants. The fort was important though because it kept my brother occupied to build it while I tried to figure out a plan.

"I hope you appreciate," Mime said a few hours later when we were wrapped in blankets and drinking hot cocoa, "everything I did to get you out of that."

"You didn't do anything! You sat around with Laura's cronies and you were going to let them pummel me. Plato saved us because she's the only one who threw a fit to stop the fight."

"Plato lay on the ground and cried."

"Yeah! And it worked! And it was a lot more than you did!"

"You are so ungrateful," Mime said.

"Pika, is not! Pika is the best!" my brother shouted.

"Oh will you shut up!" I snapped. "This is how we got into trouble in the first place."

My brother looked upset to hear me shout at him like that for giving me a compliment. He didn't understand.

***

"Is this a bad time?" I'm sitting in a bar with some coworkers in Arizona after another equipment test."

"Uh, no" I said, hastly making my way out with my phone in hand, "What's up?"

"Well I wanted to apologise. We found a lot when we were teenagers, and I... want to make it better. I blamed you for a lot of things which aren't your fault."

"Oh."

"And... I never really thanked you for everything you did for me when we were really little. You tried really hard, and I appreciate that a whole lot, and I never thanked you."

"Forget it," I said.

"What?" he asked, taking me literally, "but it was really..."

"I mean... don't worry about it. Its what a good big sister should do... keep her brother out of trouble. I'm sorry too that I didn't do better sometimes..."

"Its ok Pika," I could hear the innocent smile through the phone line, "You're still the best."

Lipstick

"Its time you started wearing makeup," my mother said.

"Its kinda a hassle in the morning...and you can smell it all day when you wear it."

"Here," my she said, plunking something down in front of the keyboard I was typing at.

"Huh?"

"Its lipstick."

That much was accurate, it was technically lipstick. It was an appalling shade of light red that flirted a bit too dangerously with orange tones. I didn't hate makeup, I just mostly didn't care enough to bother with it. I sat there with the item in my hand thinking of the most delicate way to phrase this: if I was going to wear makeup I wanted to wear something subtle and...while I wasn't keen to go shopping for it myself it was pretty evident that I would need to in order for anything I actually wanted to wear to appear in.

"This is really nice Mom, but you don't need to do this for me."

"Somebody's got to or you'll never grow up."

I let that comment slide and ignored the statement. My mother seemed displeased with my silence.

"You know," she coaxed, trying another tactic, "the reason everybody thinks you are so young is because you don't wear makeup...come on, put some on...the boys will love you...that is if you would just stop scaring them off..."

I was a little annoyed so I didn't respond to that either. I'll spare you the details but Mom got progressively ruder from that point until I got fed up and started being rude back. This didn't result in anything positive as the situation escalated and she finally screamed at me, "Listen! You take this gift, you ungrateful little brat, and you are going to use it do you hear me? I don't care what you think! You are going to use this!"

"Fine!" I shouted, picking up the lipstick and storming off to the downstairs bathroom. In proper 16-year old style I slammed the door and then slunk down along it so I sat leaned back against it, feet flat on the floor, knees curled up, glaring at the bottom of the sink cabinets.

I sat there for a good five minutes before I procured a multi-tool from my pocket and opened the blade. A few good slices and the lipstick had a point on it.

F=ma

I grinned at my work on the mirror. I felt like an important scientist writing on a really expensive blackboard, and I enjoyed watching the copy of myself in the mirror reach forward to write in the same fugly orange-pink color.

A free-body diagram followed, and finishing the physics problem I sharpened the lipstick again to go for another round on my skin. Leaning between illustrations of the force vectors I started writing physics equations on my arms and face until the majority of my exposed body was covered. I wandered out of the bathroom with the remains of the lipstick in hand.

"Where are you going?" my mother asked, getting a look at my war-paint.

Prior to that question it hadn't occurred to me that I would go anywhere. I was just wearing the lipstick, and technically you could say this was just as I had been instructed. I paused for a second before testing a response, "Out."

"You can't go out like that."

"Why not?"

"You'll embarrass yourself."

"I'm not embarrassed."

"You can't go out, it would be embarrassing." She looked genuinely concerned and nervous.

It was then when it truly struck me. My mother found me an embarrassment. She wanted to help me be what she considered a presentable person, but moreover she was embarrassed that I might be any sort of reflection on her. Image meant a great deal to my mother, and I was ruining it.

"Ah," I said, weighing my options. I could go embarrass my mom or deal with a war...or back off and see if she did too. There did not seem to be any negative to backing off, as I could always re-cover myself in lipstick if I really wanted to piss her off.

"I'll stay inside," I said.

My mother looked relieved and past then took a tone of condescending dismissal. She made me clean my artwork, called me hopeless, told me I would never have a boyfriend, that everybody would always treat me like I am young, and that it was my own fault if I didn't know what was good for me.

I felt it was pretty worth it though. At the very least she never told me I didn't have a choice about wearing lipstick again.

...In Sin and Misery

I never cared much for the oldies station.

Far prior to the hubcapless wonder of my high school years our family made its way about in a beaten up blue ford station wagon. It was shorter, and I was shorter, and the combination of these facts meant that looking out the window wasn't a terribly efficient pastime unless I wanted to view the slightly fuzzy blue interior material which covered most of the door and the knobby top of the door lock which broke the otherwise soft level horizon of the interior material.

"There is, a house, in New Orleans..."

The man in the radio howled the next line and I jumped at the noise. My mother glanced over at me and laughed a little.

"You don't know this song, Pika?"

I shook my head.

"Its a very old and famous song, normally sung by a woman."

"And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy. Dear God, I know, I'm one."

"What's it about?" I asked.

"A brothel."

My pause indicated my vocab didn't quite cover that word.

"A whorehouse," my mother said.

"Oh," I said. I was aware of the world's oldest profession at that age but, being about nine, I didn't really understand the emotional ramifications of it.

"Its a very sad and desperate thing," my mother said. She seemed a little agitated at the whole conversation.

I was completely in my own world staring out the window listening, "I like it."

"What?"

"I like this song."

"Oh," she responded, slightly relieved.

"I like the way it sounds, I like this band."

"The Animals? They are not very good. Nobody liked them when I was your age. They are fake, put together by a business. They couldn't even play their own instruments when they started."

There did not seem to be very much to say to that. It wasn't until many years later that I would find any other version of the Animal's history but at the time I was too busy enjoying the music to question further. I wanted to sing along, but I didn't know the words. There was something about the utter misery and desperation in the singer's voice which held my attention, something beautiful. That same something remained with me for days after as I hummed the tune, slightly nervous to sing it aloud for fear I'd upset mom with the "brothel" talk.

***

Somewhere in the Mojave desert the moon watched a beat up little Ford Tarus of college students slide along the highway.

We have a rule that you know you are in the middle of nowhere when all you can get on the radio are Jesus stations and music featuring accordions. I was spinning through stations in the passenger seat at two in the morning when I came across the beginning chord progression.

"Ohmygod," I slurred the words together in my haste, cranking the volume, "I haven't heard this in forever."

"There is, a house, in New Orleans, they call the rising sun..."

"Heard what?" Drummer looked at me quizzically from the passenger seat.

I didn't respond, head tipped back, as I howled the next line with the radio, "And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy...dear God, I know, I'm one..."

I haven't the least idea how bad or good it sounded, but Drummer kept glancing at me sideways as we tore through the night. From time to time I'd catch him humming along bits of it with me. I think he would have sang aloud with me, but he did not know the words. The song eventually died and there car was filled with a content silence.

"What's that song?"

"House of the Rising Sun, its really old but pretty famous. This cover is by The Animals."

"Alright," he smiled, and his voice trailed off something about "when we get home." I found myself humming snatches of it for the next few weeks after hearing it, and it seemed to make him smile.

***

I hadn't talked to Tina in ages but somehow when I randomly IMed her we wound up in the most bizarre and complicated conversation I think we had ever had.

"...and so..." I said, "I started the blog to practice because I can't write well enough yet to finish the book..."

"You're writing right now?"

"Well yes, but I'm not pleased with the first draft I wrote for a chunk of the book. None of the characters are believable. Nobody really talks like the Gillmore Girls, its alienating when everybody in a book does."

"I don't know," she replied, naming a new TV show she was actively watching which I had not heard of and now can't remember the name of, "All the characters in that are sexy and clever, by your standards they should be very alienating. However, they are still very real because, for whatever reason, they are all very messed up and miserable inside, even though on the outside it looks like they shouldn't be."

"So you think everybody can identify with these people because we're all miserable inside too?"

"That's harsher than I would say it, but yes."

***

I've gone through the lyrics several times now in search of the whorehouse that upset my mother all those years ago. I understand that sometimes other people have found reference to it but that others never do. I don't think the lyrics are what are important to it though: not now, not however many hundreds of years ago it was first sung, and not in 1964 when it brought a little band from obscurity into wild fame. Its the empathy for the singer.

Oh Mother, tell your children,
Not to do what I have done.
Don't spend your lives in, sin and misery,
In the house, of the rising sun.

	The Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun
	Found at skreemr.com

Living Hawaiian

Microwave Directions:
Remove frozen burrito from individual packaging and wrap burrito in paper towel. Microwave on high for 1:20 minutes or until cheese is melted.

I stood there with the frozen food item turning it over in my hands. The shell seemed steamed completely shut and impossible to pry open without cracking it.

Huh, I wonder, If the cheese is inside, how would I even know?

Pulling the door of the freezer which wasn't mine open again I paw through the unfamiliar contents before throwing them all in a bag and loading them on my makeshift cart. Then I go for the fridge and start on the pantry shelves.

The sun was warm on my back and on the underside of my feet via the black tar that paves the road from delta to what was alpha.

***

"You guys should get on our meal plan next cycle."

"Nah," Bubbles says, "we have Costco frozen pizzas, we're set."

"That...sucks...to eat all the time."

"Nah," the Hawaiian replies, "We have ramen too, gotta eat your saiman!" He throws his thumb and pinky out and flicks his wrist back and forth in a shaka. I still find it odd to watch them do that, but of late they have adopted doing this to emphasize that whatever it is that I don't understand is just how they like things, that its something the "mainlanders" aren't going to get.

***

"There's no room in my freezer," Supplies lamented.

"There's only five people in Delta... Alpha and Gamma have seven and they seem to be ok.

"Yeah well we have all three Hawaiians and they all just went to costco. They are currently eating the 6th gallon of ice cream and rebagging ice cream sandwiches because only the first 5 gallons will fit in the freezer."

"Oh come on, I'm sure its not that--"

"And the corn dogs and the frozen pizzas and...I'm afraid to open the door because every time I do shit falls out."

"Ah," I said, "well, maybe Beta has a little room for you."

***

Even walking out of the airport I felt like I was in a totally different world. Portions of the airport did not even have walls, but the temperature was comfortable enough that I had not noticed this until I noticed a palm branch which had strayed, still on the living tree, into the corridor of the airport.

The McDonalds sold spam with breakfast. They also sold it with lunch, and even disguised as little sushi-like rolls bound up with a scrap of seaweed to a rectangular prism of sticky rice.

My mother had heard me mention that many of the rich girls from school went to Hawaii. I never dreamed to ask to go, but as we walked off the plane my mother said, as if already mid-conversation, "and now you can tell them you have been to Hawaii too."

We stayed in a small hotel in a little town near Hilo. The only comparison I could draw for the hotel was not until many years later when I saw Circus Circus in Las Vegas. Once it was pompus and gaudy by the day's standards, but time had given it a healthy dose of humility. Compared to what else existed you could even call it modest.

I spent my days mostly wandering the local town. Everything was slow and friendly, but I could not quantify it and so, being a geek, I turned to numbers: gas was expensive. Fresh food of all varieties was expensive. The frozen food section of grocery stores was tremendous.

"Everything they have here must be flown in," my mother said.

I remember standing in an isle with my hands on the glass of the freezer door, looking upon the rows on rows of cheerfully labled plastic bags of flash frozen, pre-cooked, make in 10-minutes everything. Really, a person could probably live off what could be found here. Somehow, what I really wanted at that moment was a fresh fruit salad.

I wonder if this is how we will all live in 100 years.

***

Two of the Hawaiians were sitting in the kitchen of Delta, obscured by the kitchen table.

"Hey," I said, "Sys's dad brought probably 4 gallons of ice cream to beta."

Kelson held up a spoon in one hand and a tub of ice cream in another, "Nah, we're trying to finish our own before move out."

Probably half an hour later Kelson is sitting with Gadget, Michelle, and Supplies playing Set. He's got a new quart of ice cream in his hands and a spoon.

The oddest part about Kelson and Bubbles is they both are rather thin and fit.

"If I ate that way," Gadget said, "I'd die of diabetes at 500 pounds."

***

The pile up of abandoned food in Alpha is tremendous. I must have at least 7 jars of salsa in varying degrees of spiciness. Ketchup and mayo follow in close pursuit in popularity. All of these people gave to me when they moved out instead of putting them into the trash can.

Most people managed to finish their fresh fruit and sandwich meats. All that's really left are the things they bought in bulk: cereal and frozen foods. I used up my own fresh supplies some time ago, and buying food when you already have some here for free seems wasteful.

Cereal for breakfast, frozen potstickers for lunch. To change it up I added a pot of rice to the entre of potstickers for dinner.

"Heh," I laughed over AIM to Supplies, "I'm living Hawaiian now!"

"Don't be stupid," he said, "if you were going to do that you'd need to have a flash frozen breakfast too."

Con Man

The white rails of my bunk bed are cool to the touch. My palms are pressed against them, laying on my back staring at the ceiling not four feet above my head.

"Get up," my mother said. A pair of khaki pants I normally only wore for photos and formal occasions flew over the edge of the bunk and landed with one leg across my face. A nice shirt similar to the ones I had seen my high school peers wearing followed. Previously I didn't think I owned such an item.

"Put these on," my mother said.

"Wha..." I said, picking up the shirt by the collar in one hand and holding it in front of me gingerly as if it might be roadkill, "what's going on, are we going someplace special?"

"We're going to a neurologist," my mother responded, flicking on the lights and causing me to cease to regard the shirt as wholly undesirable, as it now made an excellent cover for my face to block the light. It still smelled like a store.

"So, why do I have to wear these?" I asked, but my mother was already gone.

I repeated the question shortly after as I wandered out the front door and pulled open the dented hubcapless minivan which was my family's primary mode of transportation during highschool.

My mother put the car into reverse and looked backwards between the seats to back out of the driveway, "We have to convince the neurologist to take your case, he's very important and doesn't have to. I want him to like you, so you have to remind him of his daughter. Better yet, if his daughter is a brat, I want you to remind him of who he wishes his daughter was."

"And this?" I pulled at the back of my shirt so it came around to let me see the tag. It read 'Abercronbie and Fitch.'

"Neurologists are rich."

There was a long pause interrupted only by the jostling of the car over the bumps in the road. My mother broke it, "What shoes are you wearing today, Pika?"

"My sneakers," I replied, fairly aware that if that question was asked this answer wouldn't be right. It hadn't seemed too unrealistic at the time, I had seen girls who wore shirts like this also wear sneakers.

"You're incorrigible," my mother sighed, reaching into the back seat to grab another pair of shoes and put them on my lap, "put these on."

The neurologist was definitely of my mother's generation. I sat with my hands folded and ankles crossed that day on the exam table. I spoke when spoken to, and I smiled the whole time. This was not the model of a modern teenager, but this was something that looked like a modern teenager and acted exactly the way the baby-boomers had been expected to behave as children.

"Seems a shame," the neurologist said, "you seem to be a nice girl. Lets see what we can can do to help you." He reached out and patted me on the head and smiled. I obediently widened my smile and looked up at him with big eyes.

***

The eight and a half mile trail Panorama trail had taken considerably more time than we had anticipated between the elevation changes and the fact that we weren't use to the elevation yet. Dusk was falling and we had four miles to go with an elevation change of 3,200 feet to get back to the cars. Pacem and had run ahead and tried to hitchhike a ride while Joker did the same thing nearby, both to no avail. The whole time the sky was getting darker.

"We're going it anyway," Bobby said. Five of them piled into a shuttle bus and I turned to follow them.

"Pika, stay here," Joker said. I scowled at him. Arguably I was not as strong as the boys and might slow them down, but any reminder of this made me more than slightly cranky. If an adventure was afoot, I sure as hell wanted to be part of it.

I watched the doors shut and the bus pull away.

"FUCK!"

Bane tried not to roll his eyes, "Calm down Pika."

"It doesn't bother you, to be left behind, when they are going to have an adventure?"

"If by adventure you mean pretty shitty time," Duckling replied. The words were not meant to be a challenge or overly sarcastic, he simply stated his opinion calmly through half-open eyes.

"Lets try another path...Bane, you have a spare set of keys?"

"In my glove compartment."

"Lets break into your car."

The four of us were on the next shuttle. In my hand I held a stray bobby pin I had picked up from the platform. Now all I had to do was convince somebody to drive us an hour out to the car.

Two grimy men were sitting in the seat of the shuttle in front of us wearing backpacking gear. They were in their late 50s and chatted idly with one another. I could see the wedding band on the one sitting to the right as he braced himself against a pole. Men that age either have children or adopt strange people often treating them like children.

"Ok," I said as if already mid conversation with Bane, "we're going to be alright, all we have to do is get to the car. I still can't believe this happened..."

It wasn't terribly long before the two men were sucked into our imaginary conversation and it wasn't too long after that before they made arrangements to take us to our destination.

"Call Bobby," I told Bane, "bring them all back."

Its fully dark two hours later. Pacem and Joker are up with our new friend Bob getting the car and the rest of the group is waiting by a bus stop. Drummer walks back with a bag full of s'mores in his arms. I'm carrying beer for our new friend Bob and a chocolate bar.

"I thought you didn't have your ID," Bobby looked up and asked as we approached the group.

"I don't," I replied, shoving a flashlight and some water bottles aside to find a place to sit.

"And they didn't card you?"

"No," Drummer said, "they did. They gave it to her anyway."

Bobby shook his head, "How the fuck do you do this?"

Memorize

"17 squared is...?"

"Erm..."

"Oh come on Pika, you need to know this."

"Not with a calculator..."

"You should really know this, its not like you will carry a calculator everywhere with you during life."

I have a calculator in my backpack, but normally I just use the one integrated into my cell phone. I carry this phone everywhere, and I have not seen a phone in the last 5 years which doesn't have such a calculator on it.

***

They call us the search engine generation. We are storing less and less knowledge in our minds and have come more and more to rely on our ability to rapidly locate data than our actual knowledge of it.

***

I'm thumbing through yet another applicant's exam, first for the easy short answer questions before I even begin working out if the code they wrote is correct.

"What pins," the exam asks, "do you need to drive in order to put a number on the four 7 segment displays on the Nexys II by Digilent?"

"I have no experience with this display," the response reads.

Its a shame we don't have paper applications anymore. Crumpling up the application and trying for a two point swoosh into the trash can might be strangely gratifying. That particular board was chosen to be obscure, the question was meant to be one of character. If the applicant so much as pulled up an image of that board on Google he would find the numbers he requires have physically been printed on the front of the board. I find the concept that you would expect anybody to have memorized everything he needs laughable.

***

"Did you know," the priest asked, "that when paper first became widely available in ancient Greece that the older philosophers had a fit about it?"

The art of being in high school seemed to lie in pretending very hard that nothing a teacher could ever say would be interesting. After pause sufficient enough to indicate that he didn't plan to continue until we responded I shook my head.

"Yes," he said, "they thought that students would never learn anything because they could always just write it down instead."

***

"Your language skills are terrible, you'll never pass in any social context" my mother said, "you can not even recite poetry."

"Most people don't even read poetry anymore let alone memorize it..."

"This," she pointed to her bookshelf, "is what educated adults know. Some day you will grow out of this childish phase and want to pass as an educated adult you know."

Somehow I remember feeling distinctly like I wouldn't.

My mother was irritated and persistent, "Recite! Poe!"

"Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though,"

"Its that's Frost. I said Poe."

***

Meet Drummer. Drummer scored the best of the applicants on his technical exam, attends an ivy league school, and currently has an internship with a fairly respectable federal agency. He, in a similar previous episode of distraction, once named all 151 original Pokemon on a sheet of paper. He's a phenomenal coder and I have no issue with his performance or raw intellect.

"Could you name all 50 states?" he asked me.

I laughed, thinking he was being funny.

"No, seriously, if we printed blank maps of the United States do you think you could put the right titles in all the states?"

"Yeah, and I am sure you could too."

"I'm not..."

"Lets try."

Sys was up for the challenge too. The states were easy enough, and with enough discussion we got all of the capitols (although Sys contributed significantly more to that list than I did.) Drummer, partially from his mind and partially from random eavesdropping exclamations such as "oh yeah, Kentucky is a state!" managed to fill in most of his map.

Here's a photograph we took of it. It is worth noting that the two states Drummer has lived in are Georgia and New York.

After a merry round of below the belt comments about Drummer's education and general intellect he started looking slightly sad.

"How did you even pass 5th grade?" I asked.

"Well," he shrugged, "I knew it all then...I guess I just...forgot."

"Forgot?"

"Some of these states...aren't even important," he says.

"Of course they are all important!" I snap, "this is the country we live in. You should know at least all the parts of it..."

"Actually, I think its defensible," Gadget joined in, "I mean...he can always go look up the gory details if he wants them right?"

"No," I insist, "there is a basic minimum that you need to not look like an idiot in any historical or political discussion. This is fundamental knowledge for an educated adult."

Educated adult? I am slightly creeped out to hear my mother's words come out of my mouth. Is my insistance on what I consider basic geography as outrageous as I found her insistence on poetry? It might be possible. If the ancient greeks thought paper was a scandal, my parent's generation loathed handheld calculators in favor of Poe, might it be possible that in a few years memorization tasks like basic geography be rendered obsolete? Throughout the whole progression of human history we have slowly kept less and less in our heads and more and more in our tools. Where do we, as a generation, draw our lines of dependency?

***

I'm walking across the lab. Drummer's on break at his desk, sandwich in hand, staring at his screen.

"Penny for your thoughts," I say.

Drummer takes another bite of his sandwich and tilts the monitor so I can see it with his other hand. Across the whole screen I can see a map of the United States, completely labeled this time.

"Ahh, you're studying?" I asked.

Drummer nodded.

It warms my little heart.

Eighths

When my brother was young he lacked the insight that other people were people too. When he hurt himself he caused himself physical pain which his body told him was bad. When he caused physical pain to others it did not hurt him. Thus, his mind never added up that it was bad.

This resulted in a two year old child who would grab a fist full of hair and pull it as hard as he could to get your attention. From a standpoint of a logical human who completely lacked empathy this was a very effective tactic: all his mind saw was the cause and effect that causing people pain would promptly get their attention. I understood that there would be strict penalties to hitting my brother, so I didn't, and so in my brother's perception there were no negative consequences to this action.

He and our dog, a very mild mannered part German Shepard part yellow lab, had the same favourite beanbag chair. This was a major source of inconvenience for Issac who frequently wished to remove the dog from the chair so he could use it. Issac would toddle up and begin kicking the dog, pulling on its ears, and yanking on its tail until she got up and left. The dog tried to express her dislike of this procedure politely by growling and snarling but my brother blew past these warnings for the same reasons he had no problem pulling my hair or hitting me. One day the dog simply decided to not put up with it anymore. She lept up and with a single paw the 60 pound dog swatted my two year old brother to the ground. She used the paw to hold him there and began gnawing on his hair, moving across his scalp like she might clean a puppy's fur. My brother howled and screamed but was unable to escape until the dog finished. At that point he lay bawling on the floor completely overwhelmed and baffled with what had just transpired. That was the day he learned that there were other things in the world which felt pain, that the rest of the creatures in the world were a little more than moving scenery. The dog served as his best friend well into my college years when it died.

***

Brown on one side, black with white spots on the other. I was wrapped from head to toe in this blanket with a portion of it looped up over my head like a hood. My mother lay in a large bed and next to her was a small bedside table with white sanitary plastic walls around the top.

"You want to see him?" my maternal grandmother asked.

"Mmm!" I said, extending both arms in a y above me as my way of asking to be picked up.

She picked me up and now I could see over the edge of the hospital crib. There was something small ugly and pink in it. "See?" grandma asked, "there he is!"

"Mom says we'll be best friends for our whole lives," I recited.

"That's right," grandma said.

"How long before we can play T-ball and tag?"

Grandma laughed a little, "not so long, but you'll have to be patient."

As it turned out my brother needed significantly more patience than anybody had anticipated. Even after he started preschool a firetruck or an ambulance driving within earshot would cause him to dissolve in a fit of tears on the floor from sensory overload. Any game which involved coordination was almost entirely out of the question, as a matter of fact his motor skills were so poor that my dad use to give him candy to practice playing catch with him in the back yard. When this failed to provide results he was sent to physical therapy.

Perhaps it was because my parents were at that age too busy for me or perhaps its because I have always been an attention whore but I remember being terribly jealous of my brother for getting to go to physical therapy. In my eyes it seemed like my brother randomly recieved the undivided attention of an adult for several hours a week for doing mind-numbingly easy tasks. Sometimes the therapist would meet us at a park and I would be told to go play while they worked, but sometimes I was permitted to stay and watch quietly. I remember watching him being handed playing cards back and forth and them discussing them. I remember them not even throwing and catching a ball but sitting down and rolling it back and forth to each other. Once or twice being I was permitted to play too. I blew through all the games, only to find that doing so did not result in candy or being lavished with praise and that it made my brother cranky and jealous of my progress. Once I went with my dad to pick him up from physical therapy and I remember being green with envy. Everywhere as far as I could see were giant balls to play on and large foam structures to climb on like at gymnastics class. It looked like the ultimate playground. My brother wandered out looking very tired.

"He did a great job today," the therapist said.

"That's great," my dad said, "Issac, you can choose what we have for dinner tonight."

"Pick soup!" I said as I ran up to the nearest foam toy and begin climbing on it.

"Now Pika," my dad said, "your brother worked very hard today and its his...Pika! Pika get down from there! You're not allowed up there!"

It all seemed so horrendously unfair.

***

"Now," my mother asked my brother as they sat on the floor with a poster of faces and a pile of candy. "Which of these faces is the annoyed face?"

It is a good thing one of my brother's greatest difficulties was non-verbal communication because I didn't do a whole lot to contain my eye-rolling.

***

"One eigff of..."

"Eighth," my mother corrected.

"Uh-huh."

"You must work to say all the letters in the words Pika."

I continued to draw on the piece of paper in front of me.

"Pika, are you listening to me? You never use to speak like this. You have gotten lazy recently with your speech. You are copying Issac."

As the days passed my mother found me more stubbornly lazy...and so I found myself sitting in the first day of speech therapy. I was terribly excited. I knew that my brother came here for an hour or so each week to recieve the undivided attention of an adult and then be treated to ice cream by our parents. It seemed that I was finally getting in on this scam too.

The therapist's name was Mrs. Buss. I remember thinking that a funny name for a speech therapist as none of her patients would be able to call her by name until they didn't need her anymore.

We talked for a little bit as she studied the way I spoke, when finally she held up a diagram and said "Now," said Mrs. Buss, "what fraction of the pie is shaded?"

"Three out of eight."

"And how else might you say that?"

"Not five out of eight."

Mrs. Buss was not amused. "Say three eighths."

I frowned. I had carefully learned to dance around hard 's' sounds and 'th's around strangers as I was aware that I would frequently say them inaccurately and I found the new lisp embarassing. As a side note, who decided that lisp should have a hard 's' in it? This seems about the equivalent of making the word "mute" in sign language require a verbal component to it.

The rest of the hour dragged on. Mrs. Buss had sheets of sentances littered with difficult words to say. It was not tiring of itself, but the humiliation of knowing that this sort of thing should be a cakewalk wore on me. For the first time I began to understand what a complete asshole I was for belittling how difficult my brother's physical therapy tasks were.

"Eighths," Mrs. Buss said.

"Eigffs."

***

Gilby's standing in the kitchen making himself a meal and so am I. Truth be told, its the only time we see each other normally. We don't have a lot in common to discuss otherwise.

"I've got no problem," he said, "With autistic people just so long as they work and overcome it."

"So, basically, you have no problem with autistic people who aren't autistic?"

"No, they can still have problems, but they have to be trying, and they have to improve. If that happens, well they're just doing their best..."

"And how will you know how far these people have come?"

Grown Up Grown Ups

Nothing has so thoroughly impressed upon me how severely pathetic humankind is as the experience of working in a cube farm.

I worked in IT. This meant that I was in a unique position. On the one hand I was removed from the food chain of status symbols, and on the other I was frequently the personal bitch of whoever called the help line.

I worked in basically a three cube by four cube space that had become the IT office. This was my first "real" job where I was paid by somebody else, wasn't a camp counselor, and wasn't selling things door to door. Calling me naive was an understatement.

There was a woman who was lurking near my peripheral vision as I worked my first day. After five minutes or so I felt nervous, and after about ten I started thinking I must be doing something wrong.

"Um, can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Rob."

"Well he's not here right now, but I'm the new intern, can I help?"

"Well, I was wondering if you could move me up the list."

"The list?"

"Of who gets a new monitor. I really need one, it would help increase my productivity."

If there even was such a list I was pretty skeptical that begging moved you anywhere you wanted to go on it, but mostly I was skeptical why a woman so invested in her workplace productivity was lurking for prolonged periods outside my office.

As spring break progressed I became increasingly aware of the hierarchy of the approximately 400 person office. The best thing was to have a big office, followed by a small office, followed by a window cube, followed by a large cube, followed by a phone with caller ID, followed by an LCD monitor, followed by a big CRT. There were subrankings of various sizes of monitors. All higher rankings automatically got the stuff the lower rankings had. Accounting seemed to be the people everybody else looked down on to feel better. It was probably the only place I knew where people in 2007 would fight over the size of their CRTs.

***

"So, what can I do?"

"We need to replace some phones." My boss pointed gave me a box of nice new phones with all the gadgets you would never really need to use and a list of persons to deliver them to. All of them were delivered to large offices where important old men sat. Oddly enough these old phones seemed rather nice, and an odd thing to be replacing when I had seen far rattier phones while walking around accounting. It was not long before I had filled the box with the replaced phones, which I brought back to my boss.

"What should I do with these?"

My boss presented me with another list. "Give these people those phones." This list consisted of people in smaller offices with the odd window cube thrown in. Their rejected phones went to the double cubes, which went to the single cubes, all the way down the poor man in accounting who grinned at his new ratty 1980's attrosity like a five year old at christmas.

This was my life: monitors, cube moves, new phones, all had to be brought down the food chain item by item to preserve the hiarchy of power. My primary purpose was to push the little cart around delivering the goodies nobody in their right mind should actually care about from place to place.

***

I dimly remember the pre-hippy days. I remember that my daycare was called "Mother's Day Out," and that I use to beg to spend as much time there as possible. I remember that there was a small slide in the corner, and under the slide was a box-like structure with round holes in each side. This was my fort, and from this place I would sometimes quietly curl up and watch the goings on in the play area with my toy squirrel.

"What are you doing?" some girl called. I remember that she wore a white flowered shirt, and that she was a lot bigger than me.

"This is my space, and I like it."

"Oh yeah?" The girl stomped up the slide adjacent to the box and sat atop my hideaway, swinging her feet across my vision, "Well this is my spot, and its better."

***

"And," the old man asked as I ran cords and adjusted the computer system, "is this a good phone?"

"Same one I have in my office, I think its pretty nice."

"Hrm..."

The man leaned back in his chair, "Well, I suppose IT knows how to get the good things don't they?" I chuckled politely. He watched me for a moment before leaning forward to ask, "Is this better than my old phone?"

I had no idea what the factual answer was but I knew what I was suppose to say, "Oh yes, its one of the nicest phones in the building."

***

"Uggggggggggh," Playlist rolled his eyes.

"What?"

"So my brother bought some new shades using my ebay account. They were Oakley brand, but when we got them we found out they were in fact 'Oakey' brand and he didn't really like them...so he went to resell them. The new buyer also got upset that they're 'Oakey' brand but it turns out they really are Oakleys its just they write the official logo funny..."

***

We're obsessed with stupid status symbols we have invented to make ourselves feel superior to others. I guess I'm not shocked by that, but I am impressed that we don't even know what the symbols are suppose to be anymore.

***

"Shit!"

Michael grins at Mandela and leans over and says the word as loud as he dares, which isn't very loud in fourth grade.

"You can't SAY that."

"Yes I can."

"Teacher's going to hear you!"

"Not unless you rat, are you a rat?"

Mandela crossed her arms and hugged them to herself, "Bet you don't even know what it means!"

Michael scowls at her. Its evident she's right and that he's lost face for it.

***

"Alright so if we leverage rapid prototyping with our available resources for sensor fusion..."

"Which sensors?"

"What?"

"I...can we try that again in plain English? I'm not understanding what you intend to do."

"So...if we..." the voice trails off and I'm faced with an eerily familiar scowl.

***

"Mmmm mmmm," the lady next to me at the lunch table in the cafeteria says, "that woman is a BITCH."

"Oh you can't talk like that," says the other stranger, "Do you know who she is?"

"Girl, I don't CARE who she is, and I don't care who her friends are. I got higher friends than her. I ain't afraid of her."

***

Everybody always seemed big to me, but Laura was big to everybody. She towered over Mime and me. I was too foolish to be afraid of her, but Mime was quite busy with alternately being terrified and adoring this girl.

"She has an older brother," I remember Mime telling me, "He's very old, like 12. He shows her the movie Batman and has lots of teenager friends."

I remember not being adiquately impressed by these attributes in Mime's mind, much to her dismay. "Look, she's the coolest kid, you'd better be nice."

Now the three of us were standing talking, Laura leering over us as usual, "You don't have an older brother," she said to me, "who makes you cool?"

***

I'm texting back and forth with my sister. She just got in another fight with mom.

"Yeah sometimes that happens. Try to stay cool."
"I cant i ask her one thing and then she starts telling me CRAP about wat i said along time ago and it pisses me off :("
"Don't blame you. Still just stay cool or you'll give her some ammo to throw back at you later."
"Ok i will try its just that she talks about herself ALOT."
"Yeah. You will kinda notice very few grown ups ever actually grew up."
"Hahahaha you got that right :)"

Little Dog Syndrome

I hate little dogs. As far as I'm concerned nothing under 25 pounds is actually a dog, its simply an overgrown rat with a bad attitude.

I'm standing on the grass outside one of Gamma unit and one is being walked past. If it was a real dog and behaving that way it would be in fact walking the owner. It snarls and leaps at every available opportunity, and half way through each leap the leash stops it short with a jerk. As forcing individuals to learn from the consequences of their actions is completely out of style the leash is even a non-choke shoulder harness for the dog, leaving it free to repeat this behavior every few steps.

"Don't come near," the owner says, "He doesn't like people."

Yes, because that's the appropriate solution to the fact that your dog would tear my throat out if it could, just ask me not to go near it. Telling people to "just not go near it" wouldn't fly with OSHA, any zoning ordinance and most courts of law...but somehow it is ok for your dog. You're willing to walk around and pick up your dog's shit every few feet but you won't teach it manners?

***

I seem to be specializing in the white trash ambiance these days. Couches and chairs line grass between the units in front of Gamma and a half dozen college students pick their way among them. A different lady walks by, but the only reason I can tell is because this one has two dogs in tow instead of one. The border collie walks relatively calmly while the little dog is still jerking like a crash test dummy against the impact of his harness.

"May I pet him?" I ask pointing to the larger dog.

The lady nods through chomps of bubble gum, "yeah but not the little one, he doesn't like people."

As I approach the little dog makes a dash for my shins and the owner wordlessly scoops him up. The larger one temporarily rocks back onto his hind legs like it might put his front paws on my stomach.

"GINGER!" The word from the owner is sharp an angry as she flicks the leash. Its a real leash as well, not a chest harness, and the flick puts a small amount of tension on the animal's neck. Ginger sits meekly and waits to be petted. The smaller dog in the owner's arms is still going ballistic.

I think this is a pretty good representation of what is happening in general. The owner could teach both of her dogs self-control, good manners and discipline, or she could simply control the small dog from doing any sort of significant damage. The border collie, however, was probably too big to be brute forced by a small woman into behaving and so she took the time to teach it proper manners.

***

When I was a small child I remember being told to walk close to my mother, and, in circumstances which included extreme shininess, told to walk holding her hand. This was sufficient to keep me from getting lost or being run over by a car.

I'm walking through the farmer's market now. A small child keeps letting go of his mother's hand in front of me and dashing at various stands.

"Ugh," the mother sighs, "that's it! You're going in the stroller."

I find it odd that physically restraining a small child is an acceptable substitute for teaching him manners, but our society has somehow decided it is. In addition to strollers I have also witnessed a variety of leash products for children. Most of these are backpacks with a long handy string on them but a few are complete harnesses which are designed to be difficult for a child to remove.

I wonder what will become of these children when they grow too large for physical restraints to be a feasible control tactic.

***

I had wanted to take karate for a long time but my mother considered it far too violent. However, with the number of kids who were attempting to beat up my brother it was becoming increasingly clear that he needed a way to take care of himself. In 6th grade I was permitted to go to Taekwando lessons with the explicit understanding that I was there for the purpose of taking care of my brother until he was able to take care of himself, and that nothing I learned was to be ever used except to stop bullies from hurting me.

I was forbidden to ever spar under any circumstances by my mother, even in the dojo under sensei's supervision.

About two months later my mother was very angry with me. I have no memory of why she was mad, only that she was, and that she was going to slap me across the face for it. I remember watching her wind up and realizing I did not feel like being hit at that moment, and that furthermore I did not have to let her. I found myself standing with my arm extended in an upper block, her face speechless and red as she found her hand was harmlessly a good foot above my head. I don't think I have ever seen my mother so angry. I backed down at this point and silently let her hit me a few times because I was far more afraid of the anger than her hand. I think she mostly did it to prove that she could. After that she never hit me again.

This is the problem of raising your children by physical intimidation and control. Even if you have no ethical qualms around it whatsoever it is grossly impractical. Your child will eventually grow to be as strong as you.

***

I'm sitting on a bench on the edge of a street amid a large cluster of cafes. I see parents jogging by with children in the strollers. Is it just me or are children staying in strollers until older ages now? I think I have seen some rather industrial models with children as old as seven or eight in them. Was my parent's generation raised like this?

***

The small child bellowed unintelligibly through heaving sobs and tears. The whole restaurant was completely silent and aghast, and alternating between staring at the family and trying not to stare.

I sat there, across from my coworkers, and realized that I was going on my 10th week or so in Hong Kong and that this was the first time I had heard a child throw a screaming tantrum in a public place since I arrived.

I only spent 2 hours on the Newark layover but I witnessed 3 meltdowns.

***

I suppose when it all boils down I don't hate little dogs at all. I hate their owners.

We're All Adults Here

[So...big pause...I'm working on a large-thought post...hope to finish it later this week. Not that it will be especially profound, those posts are just a lot more time consuming.]

My brother, Isaac, has come to visit today.

He's going to community college next year. He keeps asking me what I think of that, and I keep saying "whatever makes you happy man." It kills me a little that he's talking about considering going to community college for English. If you're going to piss away four years of your life on a useless degree at least do it in a pretty location with some good drinking pals...get the full experience. God knows Mom would spring for it.

"He's not ready to go so far afield." Mom says.

Far afield? The school in question is right next to my high school...and not more than an exit from the middle school he attended at the time. He went that far every morning then...why not now?

"Well, I'm going to take Mom's advice," he says.

Ugh.

Its several hours later now, he's standing in my kitchen. Gilby is wandering around making dinner. We have come to a truce in some sense, I think everybody has calmed down since his move-in and found a little common ground. I'm cooking a vat of plain pasta for my brother, who is strolling around the kitchen venting his excitement by fluttering his arms and hands as he walks, grinning to himself.

"You want some sauce for your pasta?" Gilby asks him.

I find myself answering on my brother's behalf before he does, "No, he doesn't like that, he likes it plain."

"Maybe...some pasta sauce from a jar then if he doesn't like mine?"

"No, he eats things plain, he's like Hannalore."

Gilby grins a little, "There are more people like Hannalore?"

"Yup."

We share a few minutes of comfortable silence as the grease bubbles on the stove and my brother paces. I can't help but compare my brother and Gilby. Gilby may be immature and stupid but I still think of him as my peer in some sense, which is probably why I give him such a rough time on all his flaws.

"When's your birthday Gilby?"

Gilby looks up from a pan of hot greese and steak bits to tell me.

"Huh," I said, "Hey Isaac, you're twins with Gilby, what do you think of that?"

Gilby smiled, "Yeah, but not the same year."

"Guess again."

Isaac is pretty excited by this. "What time of day?" he asks. Gilby doesn't know, and this frustrates Isaac. I drain his pasta and begin serving him a portion.

"I can do it myself," Isaac informs me and takes the tongs and plate for himself.

Oh...yes...of course. I stutter mentally. I can't treat him like this, after all, would I ever serve Gilby his pasta? I'd tell him to get his lazy ass up to the stove and do it himself.

I watch Isaac, quietly marveling how much his coordination has improved. He use to be unable to throw and catch a ball. A physical therapist would throw and catch with him for hours. First she would roll a ball to him on the ground which he would capture and return. It was ages before he could catch it in the air himself. He found it infuriating. My parents would bribe him with candy and anything his heart desired to get him to keep trying. I remember running in front of him and catching the ball instead, hoping to get the same amount of praise. It didn't quite work like that.

I've never regarded my brother as disabled. I have, since a very young age, always known he was different, but it had been ages since I had compared him to anybody. I avoid it normally, try to take him as he comes.

I find that he is older than the high school kids I coach, and yet requires more care and supervision. I find that my middle school sister is beginning to overtake him in many ways, and that it is growing far easier to bond to her than to him.

You can't treat him like a normal person. If a normal person talked to me with the same ignorant narrow-minded black-and-white view of the world I wouldn't hang out with them. Depending on my mood I'd probably also tell that person off too. Personal beliefs aside, its pretty difficult to hold conversations with somebody who has, medically speaking, pretty much no sense of subtlety.

Yet, to not take my brother's words and thoughts seriously, to shrug it off as simply as an artifact of a medical condition, is to not take him seriously as a peer who requires my respect as a fellow human being. He can sense when I do this, and it infuriates him. After all, what right do I have to treat somebody only three years younger than myself as a child?

I'm almost positive both of us have expressed at some point in our lives, although never directly to each other, that we wish he simply needed a wheelchair instead. It would be so much easier on so many levels.

I'm telling Gilby and Isaac the story of the bar fight in the pancake house by this point.

"So we're in this pancake place...nice middle aged lady is our waitress...kinda heavset...wears a red checkered apron, big smile, calls you dear, asks you if you want gravy on your gravy..."

"Gravy on your gravy?" Isaac asks. "What about your food?"

"Its..." I pause, "you know the sort of place I mean. The place where everything comes with gravy."

"Ice cream?"

"Well...uh...not everything."

"She's evoking an archetype," Gilby said. He paused for a second. "How do you prounounce that?"

"Ar-keh-type," I responded.

My brother grinned. We were now discussing true and false statements, which is a favourite topic of his, "Yup! That's right!"

I nodded and continued my story, "So, there we are...and one of my friends...this kid is probably the whitest guy I know..."

Gilby grins and nods his head to my brother, not putting down his food, "Whiter than him?"

"I'm actually really pleased with my tan this summer," Isaac chirps excidedly.

Gilby starts cracking up.

"That's not quite what I meant," I said, looking at my food.

Isaac is puzzled, "What then?"

I put a chunk of meat in my mouth to chew to buy myself some time. We can make jokes at our own expense...I mean...we're all adults here...right?

Gilby, for once in his life, seems to be catching on. "Its another archetype."

We finished our meal and cleared the plates. My brother is thrilled. I can tell this meant a lot to him, and that he had a really good time. I walk him downstairs and let him out, then come back upstairs to help Gilby clear.

"Hey, thanks for..."

Gilby cuts me off with a laugh, "No, thank you for not being like your brother."

I feel like a total asshole but I laugh anyway. It definately is a relief when people acknowledge that we're not alike.

"Your brother has white-person syndrome...doesn't he?"

"What?"

"He's Asperger's."

I start cracking up again. It isn't even that funny, I'm just massively relieved.

"He's gone right?" Magpie pokes his head out the door of his room.

"Yeah," I said.

Magpie shakes his head, "You two are so mean."

"Aww come on," Gilby smiles, "We're all adults here..."