Friends You Can Choose, Family You Cannot

My brother just joined MSN and asked for mine... I gave it to him, and for a few minutes I felt like I was at home again...

He's 15, into basketball (and girls, I suppose) and his best friend is into computer stuff and often guides him. He said, when he called, that he realised what kind of person I would be if I were in his class, and he probably wouldn't like me very much. He's probably right, although back then I was just out of my basketball phase and would still say hi to him since he'd be in my team, but he wouldn't really be a friend-friend. And we'd lose touch a year later probably, just saying a random 'hello' here and there. And my mother would now tell me about him, about how he continued his studies while I left Edinburgh and Biochemistry and such, and how he'd still be the "good son" to the "problematic daughter" I still am...

Still, I'm more than proud of myself, being a weirdo and all... And people who are not related to me and don't have to stand me by necessity seem to like me anyway, for who I am. And I could build websites when I was his age, I could script, and I wrote poetry and stories and weird teenage stuff, while he has trouble with sending email attachments... Still, he's smart, and interesting, and a great teenager if I may say so myself, well-adjusted and well brought up. And he faces my dad's whining with laughter or irony, so he's well above it, which I admire. He's got people skills which I only recently developed, and he's the kind of person that I really wanted to be when I was still his age, but I found reasons to dislike them because I lived in a different world than them in the same closed and tiny universe of school...

And the only reason I love him so much is not because he can actually think and talk and understand - a lot of people probably can, but I usually meet the other kind lately for some reason - but because he's my brother. That's why he has me on his MSN list and why he'd care about Than's webcomic or whatever, not because I'm a 15 year old girl that he likes... And it's wonderful, I think, how family - like the army, or school, or like anything else you may just get forced into without choosing the pool of people that you hang out with - is there to help you appreciate the people in it, when you wouldn't choose them if they were just random people out there...

Family is a magical thing, if you let it. And I'd wish it upon everyone, but then I think that everyone's got one of their own.