blood is thicker than..... well, it's thick..... (originally posted January 22, 2009)

It's another special night watching the second season of Brothers & Sisters on DVD, and just seeing the idealism of the tragic American family standard play over and over through smart anecdotes and attacking what no other show wants to answer - are any other families just as screwed up or better than mine?

Justin, the youngest child in the Walker family, has returned from the war, wounded and avoiding his mother's aide. He tries to prove he's still the same guy he was before the war, before the injury. As the show progresses the nerve blocker wears off and then deals with an unbearable physical pain since he refuses to avoid medication due to a prior history of addiction.

While growing up, my brother and I shared a room, and embarassingly enough, and a bed because we didn't have enough room in a house to have our own rooms. And it may sound completely off for other poeple but I didn't have a second thought as to if it was weird. The only thing that made it easy for us was putting a stack of pillows on our big bed to separate our spaces through the night, but even then we would talk to one another while trying to fall asleep.

We would talk about anything that happened in our lives. He would ask about what it's like to be my age in my grade. I would listen to him talk about his friends and the sports he wanted to play when he got into high school. We would laugh about our mutual friends or gossip about what we really thought about some of our family. You know as they always say, (who is they anyway?)Blood is thicker than water. Who can you trust if you can't trust your own family? I think that's where the random parts of screwed up families come from - the lack of trust.

I know I'm always busting a fuse on here, talking about how I lack any friendship in Los Angeles. Then I think about it, am I just spoiled?

Maybe what I really have been lacking in my life has been that late night 1 hour conversations in the dark looking at the popcorn ceiling with splotches of those glow in the dark constellation stickers that we put up together one Saturday weekend. Maybe I've been so spoiled with having a best friend for that one hour every night growing up who had no selfish need to hear my stories and at the same time I knew I could trust wholeheartedly.

But then again, it's still always good to have those people, other than a sibling, that will challenge and entertain me.