My Brother January 26th, 2000 My younger brother is not exactly an easy person to deal with. All of my family tends to be very independent, and if someone were to randomly pick two people out of the pool of my nuclear family, there would be a good chance that the two picked would be at odds with each other at the time. My brother, however, is in a slightly different situation from the rest of us. He is the youngest, and is therefore not accorded the same wariness that is shown in the wide space that we give to each other. More importantly, he is going through the begining of his adolescent stage. Lately, and most likely due to this transition, he has taken to feeling things more strongly, knowing things more completely, and wanting things more vhenemently. A description is, of course, in order. The thing that I think of most in him is his stare. He has one kind of look, a distainful, disgusted look, that conveys his utter abhorence of whatever he turns it on. This is amplified by his steel-gray/green eyes, which have a certain cold clarity about them. The brightness of his eyes is muted, to a certain extent, by his deathly pale face. His hair is completely straight, though often sticking out in random directions, oblivious to the dicipline of a brush. With unmanageable bangs in the front and the back tapering down to fuzzy short hair, he often tends to look as if he has just arisen [as likely as not, this is true]. It's brown strands stand especially at attention when he periodically wets his hair. Of late, he has taken to wearing a dark-green cargo jacket that has many pockets and buttons in all of the available locations, which was mine not long ago. It has more zippered pockets and buttons in strange places than anyone could ever need. It was long on me, so my image of him in my mind is of someone who looks to be in a green pocketed straight jacket with a large collar, sleeves hanging past and covering up his whole arm. Often, when he walks, his sleeves flap slightly back and forth. When his hands do extend past the end of the sleeves, the contrast between the dark green of the jacket and the white of his hands is very obvious. The fact that his feet and hands are both large in relation to the rest of his body, and his thin, tall figure make him look older than reality, at first glance. All of his features combine with his gaunt, angular face to make him look to a slight degree like the victim of starvation. This fact seems to worry my mother, and she always nags him about eating more. It often becomes a contest of wills between them to try to get him to eat. When he was younger, I remember that he would take over-large portions of the dinner, and then later would refuse to eat some of the food. This challenge to my mother was invariably met by the command "sit there and eat your dinner". To which he would comply in half, sitting there for hours to avoid eating it. One time that I remember quite vividly, happened a few years ago in the middle of the Summer. My brother and I woke, got dressed, and began to have our breakfast of cereal. It was some kind of "honey" coated Cheerios which he decided to have that morning, and we were soon on our way to our other buisness. However, to our detriment, my mother discovered upon the table an unfinished, full bowl of these cheerios. My brother, when confronted with the cereal, flatly refused to partake of his handiwork. Of course, our day was ruined. Not only that, but eventually, my mother convinced me to join the crusade to get him to eat. A side responsibility of the post turned out to be helping her eat the cereal, in order to show him that it really wasn't poisonous. Unfortunately, this basic premise was quite unfounded. The Honey Cheerios had been sitting in their bowl of milk for over an hour. The whole bowl had become a glop of mushy Cheerios and milk. The instant that I put this gruel in my mouth, I regretted it. It was slimy and disgusting mush, and made me want to run to the bathroom and throw up in the toilet. My brother seemed to enjoy watching us slowly eat the Cheerios, and I forced myself to keep a beatific face all the while that I would rather have been washing my mouth out with soap. Of course, after the first bite, I continued only in hopes of convincing him to share in the punishment. After this incident, he continued upon his thorny little path, but I remembered this, and never copied his actions. He always seemed to get away with things that I could never get away with, though often, I didn't wish to follow his example. In some ways he is stubborn and unrepenting, but then too, he's sometimes mature beyond his years. He always would try to imitate me when he was younger, and I like to think that mainly for this reason, he began to read larger novels and such. Mainly, his maturity stemmed from his intelligence. He will sometimes show insight into a problem that belies his age. He stayed reasonably calm and collected when he was alone and accidently cut himself upon a smashed window pane in our glass frame door. He tied his hand up in bandage cloth, then went to find my mother. Luckily, the cut was superficial. He's a very active and ambitious person, at least one way that he is opposite me. Whenever he wants something he tends to focus himself upon it to exclusion of all else. It seems sometimes that he reaches the state of a sugar high without the benefit of sugar. But then, there is the other side of the coin, because I swear that without me, that boy would not even know what the word patience meant, much less how to practice such.