|
|
2005-07-06
A weekend with MyBrother
Good evening, space cadets!
So this last weekend MyBrother spent the weekend with me. #1: this was the first time that me & MyBrother have spent an entire weekend with each other and #2: this was the first time my brother, who is 15, has ever flown on a plane by himself...hilarity ensues.
My brother and I grew up in two entirely different houses. So we have different attitudes to a lot of things. He's a very smart kid...but he says some of the most "teenagery" things I've heard. And I can be reasonably certain that I've said much the same things when I was his age.
For instance, MyBrother was commenting on how he did minimal amounts of homework but would still end up with A's and B's because he knew how to work the system. While I compliment his "cracking the system", I told him as non-parentally as I could that, "Anything worth having is worth working hard for." Of course, what I actually said was something like,"You know you can't slack off through life and stuff, ya know?"
It was funny when after being in my apartment for less than 10 minutes for "Hang out with Big Brother weekend", he had already spilled, and I quote,"only, like, maybe, an ounce of" Coke all over my computer desk. He spilled it fortunately only on the side of the desk that I keep unimportant papers (or they are now that they Coke on them). Shortly after spilling it, he comes to me where I'm just laying my wallet and keys down to let me know he just spilled. I look at him a little bewildered and say,"Uhh, dude, like go get the paper towels and stuff."
My brother is a goofball. I had forgotten to get my brother a towel that he could use to shower with (I'm sorry, but in this house, you get one towel per one body per one weekend). So when he goes to take a shower Friday morning he goes to where I keep all of my towels and grabs...
...the towel that I use to dry my car (Specifically, the wheels and tires). It's original color is white but you wouldn't know it from the black stains that are all over it. Right next to this towel are at least 7 or 8 towels that are manly (and an EVEN shade) colors of navy blue and hunter green that would seem to suggest that I don't use them to clean my bling-bling platinum spinning 22s. He still used the clean but dirty towel but I handed him a new towel for the weekend.
We started golfing on Saturday at 11:00 in the morning. It was already 104 degrees when he tee'd off. I was out of the sun most of the day under the roof of the cart with a glass of ice water in my hand most of the day. He was constantly in the sun and hitting beautiful golf shot after beautiful golf shot. I think of any of my friends and we would all be pretty happy to have MyBrother's worst shot. He shot a no-kidding 76 on a course he's never played at with a relatively high slope rating (difficulty) of 138. It was unfreaking believable. Its scary to think that he's ranked somewhere around 2000th nationally for the junior golfer association and he's still shooting that good. We were paired up with another group of guys who amazingly enough were half-brothers like me and MyBrother and were also born more than a decade apart. We had a great time and to celebrate surviving the weather I took him to...
...No, not Hooters. I took him to In-N-Out (coincidentally enough, the same one I took the photographs at).
So as not to deprive him of the opportunities to ogle girls his own age, I took him to the shopping center / lifestyle center place where they infest tend to congregate in high numbers. I learned something hanging out with him there: he's not as socially awkward (shy) as I was when I was his age. For a teenager of 15, he's got some mad game. Because some of his game skill-set is still classified, I cannot reveal to you, my loyal readers, the secrets of his success other than to say: confidence. He is a confident kid...which some days means "cool confidence" and other days means "egomaniacial doo-doo-head". MyBrother is still figuring out how that whole game works.
Finally, I have nothing but mad, mad love for Southwest Airlines. For July 4th, Southwest offered one-way airplane tickets all over the country starting less than $49. The catch was that that price was only good for travel on July 4th. Well, I had to stick my brother on a plane up to Reno on the 4th so that was a natural easy slam-dunk purchase. What I had failed to take into account was that 10,000 other people had someplace else to go on the 4th and all of them wanted to fly out of Phoenix. The Phoenix airport can be an extreme exercise in frustration if your airline tickets says something other than Southwest Airlines. MyBrother and I arrive at the terminal a full two hours ahead of the flight time and we are greeted with quite possibly, the longest check-in line I've ever seen. We didn't have the option to get his boarding pass online because we had to check baggage. The line wrapped from the east side of the terminal and to three separate queue lines that had easily 500 people in line. Time from entering the queue line to issuing of boarding pass and baggage drop off:...
22 MINUTES! I've stood in longer airport lines with less than 40 people in line.
In addition to his boarding pass, I got a "non-flying passenger escort" pass in order to walk through the checkpoint so I could hang with him until the plane took off. Apparently, with a minor under 16 years old , a person can have an escort....No, not that kind of escort, sickos. So MyBrother listened to my MP3 player while I stared (nose pressed against the glass) at the airplanes taking off. Who was the older person in this situation. God, I'm a goober sometimes.
We had a totally awesome (Crap, now I'm talking like him!) time hanging out with each other. We didn't have any fights (my parents laid odds on us fighting at the one of the Vegas casino's sportsbook) and we just really "got to know each other" better. I'm reasonably certain that I'm still the kick-ass big brother and I honestly hope that we can do more weekend trips more often. We haven't been terribly close since we are so far apart age-wise but it's TOTALLY awesome when a teenager thinks you've turned in your geek card.
Hugs & Kisses from the one who calls himself TX18366.
Show me some love:
|
PREVIOUS Entry | NEXT Entry
|
|
 |
 |
