I have submitted to the pressure of corporate America and pop culture

But not enough to get an iPod. (Although if I did, the 4GB nano would be my cup of tea.) Instead, after painstaking research (read: a couple hours online) I found a 4GB small sandisk player much to my liking. Now all that remains is to find a cute skin for it that will wrap around my arm to go running with, and I will camouflage perfectly into the masses of preppy teenagers with their tiny mp3 players. Delightful. But there is something to be said for being able to listen to my music while I'm counting cells or making DNA or doing other repetitive procedures. (I don't need the arm-band skin for that.)


Perhaps my burgeoning desire to seclude my self in my personal cocoon of music stems from spending hours upon end with my family. Don't get me wrong, my family and I never had the sort of melodramatic petulant fights that characterize a stereotypical teenager-hood. They knew that pressuring me into a certain mold, restricting my activities or dictating my behaviors would just end up making me angry and wouldn't end up making me a calmer, happier, more successful child. I knew that if I really screwed up, it would have repercussions in my own life other than having two irate parents. So I toed the line to the extent that was reasonable and my parents got off my back about most things. Instead, my brother went through the angry fights and conflicts with my parents about getting schoolwork done and staying out at night and I was the child who had her head screwed on correctly.

The problem is that when I left, my brother and my parents worked things out. They get along just fine, and while my brother still has the attention to detail reminiscent of "big picture" people everywhere and while I still have tendencies that lean towards professional editor-levels of hair-splitting, my parents are trying to negotiate between the two of us. Generally, what happens is that my brother gets attention and gratitude for things that he half-does, and I get to finish them. Or he messes something up, forgets something, or loses something, and the entire family will go into panic mode to fix whatever it is that is wrong, leaving me behind in the dust. It would be so much nicer if I could just tune everything out and not care about it as much as I do; if I didn't listen to the sounds of their orbits around him. But (at least until the player comes in the mail and I can plug in and zone out) instead I get sucked into the morass of my brother declaring that he knows how to do JavaScript (which he doesn't) or at least can figure it out (which he couldn't) and then get drafted in to fixing it with my limited knowledge of the language or finding a site online which will teach him (or at least give him code to rip off). Of course, when my mother finally just gives him code to copy, he "gets it working" and applauds himself for his skill, which she, for some reason unknown to me, echoes.

I don't really have a conclusion. I was always worst at conclusions. I guess the conclusion is simply that I'm chafing at the bit to get back to college and my real life. Instead of staying here and playing court to my brother. And that I'm getting a new mp3 player, which is going to be sweet.