Happy Birthday, Survival Knife!

Today is my brother's birthday. I have some things I'd like to share about him. But before I get to that, I just want to announce that this will be my last birthday post. I like making people embarrassed and appreciated by doing them, but there are some memories I do not want to share, not because they are embarrassing to the person involved, but because some memories are for me. That and, eventually, I might run out of things to tell and then I'd feel really bad. Anyway, without further ado...

If there's one thing you should know about my brother and I, its that we absolutely hated each other when we were growing up. Actually, I don't know if that is true. Let me rephrase that. I absolutely hated him growing up. He would always pick on me and I would bug him or aggravate him to do something so I could fight him or he could beat me up so I could get him in trouble. The only time we weren't fighting was when we would form a temporary truce to battle my sister, Amber, if she was put in charge and had begun to quickly declare her kingdom a dictatorship. He beat me up so many times when I was younger-although I probably deserved at least half of them. I used to swear to my mother that when I grew up, I was gonna beat him up. Now, that I AM grown up, I don't want to anymore. It was a curious thing how it happened. I remember one day being in the kitchen at our house, and I think I was around twelve, which would put my brother at 16. Out of the blue, he just...started talking to me...asking me about things...telling me that he wanted to show me some stuff he bought and was excited about. I was a bit skeptical. Was this some sort of new military strategy he was starting? Was I on new and dangerous and uncertain ground? But nothing happened. He was being nice to me and just kept being nice to me. He had grown up. I was so glad. Now, we are very close, maybe even the closest of the siblings just because we have many of the same interests. He has influenced me in so many ways, I don't think he even realizes.

Even though he might have picked on me when I was younger, he was still my older brother, and younger brother's all think that their older brother can beat up anyone else's older brother. One time, I was getting into lots of fights at school with a certain kid. This was when I was in kindergarten, so I don't think that the fights were very serious. You can rest easy, Mom. Anyway, I would always fight this boy and sometimes I would win and sometimes he would win. Then there was a few weeks stretch where I couldn't beat him, no matter what I did. So, I asked my brother, even though we didn't get along, on how to fight and what to do. He taught me some things, which I was surprised he did instead of just blowing me off. The next day, I got into a fight with that same boy and I won! I was so happy that I had finally won and I was happy that my brother had helped me do it.

My brother knows so much about so many things. He gets that from our father. He is a library of information and I always ask his opinion about things that I'm unsure about. He never thinks I'm stupid for not knowing something and is always glad to impart his knowledge to all of his family and friends.

One of my favorite childhood memories of my brother is one where for some reason, the tv where we played our video games ended up in the room that we shared along with our video games. My brother and I stayed up the entire night. I'm not even kidding. We played video games all night, and when we would get tired of that, we would play with these new cards that my brother had, which were crazy 8's, Old Maid, and a few other card games. We had so much fun. I think my mom knew we had stayed up all night because the next day, the tv and video games were taken out of our room again.

My brother is a wonderful man. I'm glad that we've become so close and I hope that we continue our relationship for the rest of our lives. Happy birthday, brother.