Nice, generous, whatever

Everyone should grow up with an older brother. Because, you know, how else would you be able to play games with the same person everyday and somehow ALWAYS LOSE (even if you really did win)? Or let yourself be persuaded to trade your beloved sparkly, shiny puppy sticker for some other ridiculous, ordinary sticker of his and then when you regret it as soon as the trade is over, be informed that it’s now TOO LATE? How else could you discover that there is an alarm clock that’s set to go off every day at 4 p.m. hidden so well in your room that you never find it, even after 20 years? Or surrender your stuffed animals to an evil existence so that his stuffed animals could always be the good guys? So fun.

Of course, the fun times do go away after a while. Because one morning, you will wake up and have a brother who wants to be your friend. Who comes home from college and is sad because you are going out with your friends instead of spending every second with the one you’ve learned to trust as much as you trust a rattlesnake. And instead of buying one for himself, he gives you the newly unveiled Palm III for your college graduation and doesn’t throw up when you open it and can't figure out what it is. This is when you can expect that he will just keep getting nicer and nicer until you can hardly remember the innocent look plastered on his face right after he quietly pushed your DOING THIS WILL MAKE ME WANT TO PULL ALL OF MY HAIR OUT button.

Fortunately, you can always look back on the good times. Because you will never forget how a hidden alarm made you question your own sanity every day at 4 p.m. Or the way he used a sparkly, shiny puppy sticker to help you play an astonishingly good hand in the game of Mean Girl Sneaky Manipulations in high school. And sometimes, somewhere underneath that nice, generous grown man that everyone adores, you can still catch a glimpse of that manipulative, big brother that could outsmart you every time.

And you can breathe a big sigh of relief.