I'm lucky to have not only one brother, but two brothers! I don't think I would've said this about fifteen years ago. They used to not be real people to me. What I mean by that is, I took it for granted that they were my brothers. I didn't realize that they had their own persona. Now I do, and I appreciate them very much.

My older brother used to play tricks on his younger siblings. Once, he told me to stick my finger into the can opener while he was opening a can. I don't know why I agreed to maim myself, but I did, fully trusting that he knew what he was doing. The result was a bloody finger. Another time, he made me stand against a wall and hold my breath for twenty seconds while he would press against my abdomen/lung area. He wanted to see if what he learned at school really worked. That if you do that to someone, that someone would faint. And like a lamb led to its slaughter I obeyed. And sure enough, it worked. I fainted. I lost consciousness for about one minute. I actually fell to the ground, hitting my head as I crashed to the floor. Later on my brother told me that he thought I was kidding, and that's why he didn't catch me.

Another time my older brother was cutting his toenails, and told me and my younger brother to come take a closer look. So here we were, crowded around his toes. He had a needle, and said, "Look, I'm going to poke this into my eye." I pleaded with him to stop from doing such a thing, but he wouldn't listen. So he poked his eye! I saw him do it. I promise. Or did I? And then we asked him, "What do you see?" He said that he sees everything clearly, except for a small hole in the middle of space where he poked himself with a needle. We totally believed him. Well, I did. For three years. I just accepted the fact that he had a hole in his vision. For THREE years I believed him. When I brought it up later in life, he just said that he was kidding.

Now my brothers and I have this email thing going, and we write to each other whenever we feel like it. I think both of them are hilarious. My older brother has that witty, sarcastic and punny humor, while my younger brother has a witty yet with a slight cutco knife-chanho park-united states government-statistical-baseball twist to it.

I want my kids to have siblings growing up. Ah!!!! They will call my brothers "uncle". Isn't that weird to think about? I think it is.

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