I get off work at 11. I call my parents as I usually do to get a ride home. No biggie, I live 2 minutes away from work and it is night so I don’t want to cross the highway.
No one is picking up. I ring for 2 minutes straight. No answer. I call the business line. Answering machine. I call the cell phone. Voice mail. Where is everyone?
A thousand things are going through my head right now. Maybe someone left the phone up in their room and forgot to take it downstairs. Perhaps there has been an accident that wiped out the phone lines. Could someone have broken in and killed them all? All these things and more are going through my head.
I wait for 45 minutes for one of the grill cooks to take me home. I get out in the parking lot and my mom is there, waiting to take me home. I ask, and she says the phone didn’t ring all night.
I get home, and the ringer is turned off. I yell out loud to no one in particular that they wasted 45 minutes of my life waiting at work.
That’s the windup; here’s the pitch.
I walk into the living room to pet my cat. The only innocent one in the house is sitting in the chair, so I sit down and pet him. He is the only one who couldn’t have turned off the ringer. I pet mhim, and almost immediately my brother comes over and starts sticking his hand into the kind of hovering leaning thing I am doing with my cat to bond.
Was it the “Leave me alone”, “Go away”, “stop touching my cat”, or the “GET AWAY OR I WILL KICK YOU IN THE HEAD” that didn’t click with you, or was it all of them that you didn’t get?
Mom came in the room after I yelled “STAY AWAY FROM MY CAT” and told you to leave me alone and you still didn’t. I kicked you, and you persisted. YOU ARE 17 YEARS OLD. I AM YOUR LITTLE BROTHER, AND I AM MORE MATURE THAN YOU. You told mom that since I always tell you you are acting immature, you tought you would act like it.
You have this way of turning everything into a plea for attention. I thought you had stopped. You are doing it even more lately. If I cured cancer, you would kill the president just to get on the front page.
Piss off. I am tired of this. You try to annoy me in every way possible. Tonight was no exception. Mom had to almost drag you upstairs when you decided that since my cat was staying up a little longer than usual to comfort me instead of going downstairs, you would do the same with yours. You have another cat that the family allows to stay upstairs just so you can get to sleep. You just wanted Mom’s attention.
Poking, prodding and annoying your brother are not things to do when he is mad. Especially when he has his cat next to him and needs him for comfort.
Grow up.
