I'm Only Me When I'm With You [the person I do the most weird things with]

I took one look at the prompt for this post and immediately had my person picked out. Who could be more accurate than the person I've spent the past fifteen years doing weird [dangerous, stupid, awesome, silly, insane, risky, bad, daring] things with?

I guess it all started when Jordan used to do weird things to me. I've watched our ancient family videos and seen my innocent infant self lying out on a polka-dotted blanket, minding my own two-month-old business, completely oblivious to the monstrous three-year-old who has different plans for my afternoon. But before a parent can intervene, I have jingling toys around my head, a car on my stomach, and ten little fingers poking my unsuspecting stomach. Not knowing how to talk and being way too mature for crying, my eyes dart at him with the bewildered glare I still know how to give and my limbs go slack, perfectly combining confusion at who on earth would disturb a cute little baby, and downright "don't touch me, child." The poking subsides but the toys stay on me. We all know he's a little scared, but what boy would give in entirely to his baby sister? Not Jordan. At least, not for now.

The years passed by and we continued our back-and-forth of torture, guilt, and evening the playing field. By the time I was three, we had it down to a science. By this time, we had two dogs. It was our greatest joy in life to go outside and play with them. Jordan had also taught me the art of digging holes and I was quickly becoming a mud connoisseur. With our dogs trailing behind us and dirt caked on our shoes, we'd waltz around the yard like the mighty adventurers we knew darn well we were. Occasionally, we would pause to rip apart pink flowers from the neighbor's bush that overgrew into our yard. We would either drape them across the female dog's back to create her "wedding," or mash them together with water. This, of course, was perfume for our mother. She kindly took it, but it was definitely one of the most horrible scents we ever concocted.

A few years later, we became the greatest actors Hollywood's ever seen. We became absolutely obsessed with Spy Kids 3--and by obsessed, I mean we had the entire movie memorized. We would split up the characters [over civilly fighting over who got to play who] and act out the entire movie using shovels, dirt, and dogs as our props. In the continuation of our dog saga, we ended up getting a new one, and Jordan and I invented the awesomest dog chase/race/hide and seek game in the world. We even video taped it and concluded each episode with a breathless description of "tomorrow's episode."

One of the best things we ever did was spend an entire summer building with LEGOS. Our LEGO houses were absolutely fabulous. Jordan wanted to combine bedrooms in the name of saving bricks, but I quickly informed him that it was absolutely inappropriate to put a boy and a girl in the same room. In the end, he took care of the big screen TVs, and I handled the living quarters--which included making sure all the people had clothes and hair. Our "Legomation" videos were the best, right next to the time we turned his room into a "desert," complete with LEGO cacti.

We were also brilliant King Mouse and the Nutcracker storytellers. This required the assistance of our cousin, but in full force, it embodied "weird." We invented the most bewildering story which featured Princess Peach [me, obviously] frolicking in King Mouse's [Jordan] field. The King [who wasn't actually a mouse, but was so called because of his disturbing obsession with cheese] would catch the Princess in his yard and go to kill her mother for being such a disrespectful girl. The Princess was thrown in jail and ruthlessly beaten. His right hand man [played by our cousin and appropriately named Haman] would come and rescue me from jail and we would get married. The story always ended with me giving birth to Jordan's stuffed snowman-Gregry.

Weird.

Over the past few years, the strange things we do have either matured or become way dumber. Now, they mostly consist of the two of us being awake and together at ridiculous hours of the morning after having downed plenty of sugar and/or caffeine in the previous day. It usually starts out with me disintegrating into a giggling fit and losing all sense of tact and appropriateness. The lame and bad jokes start and Jordan goes from eyeing me uncomfortably to making jokes of his own. We also have our random playful fights here and there which always end with straight faces and the two of us continuing whatever we were doing as if nothing ever happened. We are also pros at screwing with our little brother's mind and convincing him of the strangest, awesomest things ever.

My big brother may be going off to college this fall. But I don't care who he meets or how many friends he makes--none of them will ever be as capable of creating disturbing hilarity as Jordan and me.