Jijim

All of sudden I want to blog a lot, where is this enthusiasm coming from?

Maybe it's from the fact that today is the last day of class before a week-long break for Easter! Sure, I'll finish late, around 7pm because of my Audit lecture, but imagine that feeling of sweet, sweet joy I'll have when I walk home knowing I am going to do NOTHING AT ALL for the weekend except fun stuff and I can sleep guilt-free without worrying about homework, at least for the next couple days.

Speaking of guilt, I woke up late this morning and skipped one of my lectures, and it made me feel guilty.

That irrelevant confession aside, I feel slightly breathless. Not literally out of breath, but more like I have that tak-sabar feeling to blog, as if I have tons of good news to announce, or useful information to share.

I actually don't. As usual, much of what I'll write here will be incoherent nonsense, and I suppose it's a morning-after effect of having too much cake (the amount of cake and ice-cream I had yesterday was SINFUL, I tell you), but whatever.

Have I ever told you about my brother? He just turned 13 yesterday. My brother. When he was a toddler I used to love holding out my arms and see him running towards me for a hug. My adorable brother, the one who managed to inherit long,pretty eyelashes, a genetic trait that skipped past the daughters of the family(kakak and I both have the straight, downward-slanting-macam-bumbung kind). He used to be all round and pudgy, with a perut buncit and chubby cheeks and curly hair, and he would do things like talk embarrassingly loud while using the public toilet, and he loved trucks, tractors, forklifts.

My brother's now a teenager, and he's no longer pudgy, he's thin and lanky, and I suppose his height is shooting up even as I type this, because 80% of his pants always seem to look senteng on him. He is intelligent, he can be eloquent when he wants to be, stubbornly opinionated, obnoxiously annoying, very cynical, knowledgeable on all things military.

My brother, my teenage brother. When I was in my mid-teens, going through my crazy years and thinking that my family disliked me, he was excluded from that bullshit. Maybe because he was still small. Even as a crazily emotional time-bomb, you don't doubt the love and intentions of kids, you're not paranoid with them as you are with adults. When he got older and started having some troubles of his own, I thought I recognized some of them as mine, and I felt an affinity with him. Although I was at loss at attempting to say "I get it",that feeling of understanding and wanting to make things better made me feel like a big sister more than anything else.

My brother, whom I think my sister and I are trying to sub-consciously develop into becoming our best version of a man. We want him to be smart, respectful of women, we want him to be kind, open-minded, brave, and everything good, with the bonus of having good taste in music and books.

He loves to read, he loves cats, he loves iced lemon tea, he likes Kings of Convenience and Radiohead. He's learning to play the guitar, he's an avid gamer, he wants to buy a gas-mask off ebay, he now has facebook. Girls are starting to show an interest, he sometimes feels isolated at school, he's doing choral speaking. He's not that much into sports, he has a sense of humour, he can be the typical teenager with a sullen expression on his face and a mono-syllable answer for every question, but there are times where he will crack a smile, burst out laughing or become wildly enthusiastic over something.

He's growing up.