The devil is in the details

Why my sister is the greatest

For those of you who don't know, I have only one sibling: a little sister who is eleven years younger than I am. (She will be 15 in February.) Her name is Kim and she is a high school freshman, currently taking biology in school, starring on the field hockey team, earning awesome grades, being Little Miss Popular, causing scandal by dating a junior, etc., etc. We get along very well and talk on the phone and/or IM almost every day. Usually when I am home we laugh a lot and do some silly things. While I was home over Thanksgiving, we got into a very heated argument over who was taller and we had to measure. Let me tell you, I am quite proud of the 1 and 3/4 inches that I won by. We also had a lot of fun while I was home over Christmas which involved our finding my old original Nintendo system (which I got in 1988 or so) and hooking it up and playing Super Mario Brothers nearly incessantly.

One of the moments when I appreciated her the most (and this is sort of random) occurred on December 26th. All four of us had received Barnes and Noble gift certificates for Christmas from my grandmother (some of us also got them from my aunt.) The four of us decided to go to the Barnes and Noble in a nearby city (ahh having to drive an hour to go shopping) to buy some books and then go to see The Chronicles of Narnia. We bought the movie tickets first and then we went to Barnes and Noble with a long time to browse. I was looking at a few books in the Science section (yes, I am a nerd. Deal with it.) when my sister walked up to me to ask a question. While she was there, she started to look at the books too.

Suddenly, she picked one up and said "This is cool! I want to read this sometime!" She was talking about "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin. I picked up a copy as well to figure out which edition it was and I told her about why there were different editions and why one was considered better than the others. I mentioned that I had a copy of the "good" edition here in Boston. She said "Hmmmm. That's really cool. You know how you said you were going to send that book to Dad? Well, could you send "Origins of Species" to me in the same package so that I can read it?" I said of course. We ended up looking at books in the Science section for a long time, with me pointing out various books that I had read and enjoyed in the past. In the end, she asked me to send not only Origin of Species but also "The Mismeasure of Man", a really interesting book by Stephen Jay Gould as well as some other Gould books. One of the books I bought that day was "A Briefer History of Time" by Stephen Hawking, which my sister borrowed in the car and read before I came back.

I guess the thing that impressed me so much was that Kim was there interested in reading all of these interesting non-fiction books that I wasn't exposed to until college. I'm so glad that she is so curious about things and interested in science and that she has the opportunity to see what is going on in the world outside of our small town and is interested in learning about different ideas. Really, she rocks. :)

Books I bought at B&N that day or received for Christmas:
Non-fiction
A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
(I read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman over Christmas although I did not receive it.)
Fiction
Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire
A Time to Run by Barbara Boxer
The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella
True Believer by Nicholas Sparks

posted by Immunegirl @ 6:25 PM