Some Stuff on Family
My brother was up visiting me this past weekend which was really cool. it is weird to think that only four years ago we had a really hard time getting along but now we are able to hang out and do all sorts of things without any problem. It is a proximity thing really. Recently I have been lucky to see my brother once a month and I only talk to him on AIM or the phone about once every two weeks or so. It is a hell of a lot easier to get along with him without having to share living space with him. Good times.
Brothers make for interesting siblings. Now I say this as if I’ve got some great knowledge on the difference between different sibling combinations. I don’t. I come from a pretty average size family. My mother, my father, and a younger brother. I’ve always been the oldest and I’ve never had a sister. But anyways I find having a brother interesting because it leads to a general compitition of masculinity. In general my brother is bigger than me, more athletic than me, and all around probably physically superior to me. But I have the upperhand in the fact that I am smarter than him and no where near as lazy as he is. I think the biggest recent conflicts between me and my brother have been around the fact that he is lazy and I am much more driven.
I used to really wish I had a sister just because I didn’t and I thought that that would be cool. Also I wanted not to be the oldest (not the youngest either, just a middle child). Someday I want to have my own children and I wonder if the relationships they ahve with eachother will be similar to the relationships that me and my brother currently have. I’d like to have a daughter because the lineage of my fathers side of the family has continually been male (my father’s younger brother has a daughter but all the oldest males for several generations of Lords have had only sons). I think of the boss I worked for for the past two summers. He is the really masculine farmer dude and he has four daughters and two granddaughters (the granddaughters are the daughters of one of my closest friends, I was in this friends wedding as one of his best men).
I like thinking about families. I like hearing about the family members who came before me. Some day I’d like to have some really serious geneological work done to trace some of my ancestory and maybe write a book about some of it. My grandmother (Father’s mom) loves to tell stories and for a long time I’ve thought that it would be really fun to write a bunch of them down. Maybe someday I’ll get around to it. My grandfather (Mother’s dad) was in WWII and went all over the world. He climbed the pyramids in Egypt and workd on trains. He used to scare me a lot when I was little because he was really strict and gruff. He was amazing with tools and fixing stuff, I am not. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and learn more from him. More about fixing cars and rifles and pretty much any other contraption that needed some repair. Maybe I’ll write a book about him too.
I like the idea of family. I don’t always see eye to eye with my family, but I do appreciate my family. It always makes me kind of sad to see people who have really broken families and poor relationships with their families. Makes me feel fortunate for my own family. I think that the importance of family may sometimes be very easy to ignore but I feel that we should all try hard to preserve what we can of family. Something about a link to the past, where are we from and where are we going? Kind of a nostalgia thing. I’ll probably write more about family in the future seeing as I am very often thinking about it.
