The Reason I Started This Blog (Part 2)

In the first installment of The Reason I Started This Blog, back on March 20, I alluded to the fact that the embarrassing IPEX bra commercial story wasn't the only one I could tell about my darling little brother, Ty. Here is another story, which I assure you is presented free of hyperbole and malice. Well, at least it's free of hyperbole.

Alternate Title: I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar (A True Story)

When I was going to college at Cascade, I lived in my parents' house just across the street from the soccer field. This made me more popular than I might have been otherwise, because my friends could come to visit our full-sized fridge, cushy carpet, and free washer & dryer. Or maybe it was just my charming personality.

Another draw was our TV & VCR (this was back in the olden days when only really rich people had DVD players)--no one in the dorms had the space and autonomy to have big groups of people over for movie nights, so I hosted more than my fair share. Most of these movie nights were girls only, and the only requirement for film selection was Must Contain Hot Guys. We didn't exactly have a smorgasbord of hot guys to drool over on campus, so we turned to Blockbuster. We called these movie nights Lust Fests because a) it was catchy, and catchy is fun, and b) it sounded naughty, and naughty is fun. We weren't actually lusting, because lust is a sin. It was all very innocent, I promise. Just a bunch of silly girls eating caramel corn and squealing and giggling over Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Keanu Reeves. (For obvious reasons, we all pretend that we never liked Tom Cruise.)

Needless to say, my family was not invited to said Lust Fests. No one wants to attend a Lust Fest with their mother. That's just wrong. But Mom is the friendly type, and it sort of hurt her feelings to get kicked out of her own house so her daughter and her friends could have fun without her. I started feeling badly about this, so I decided that Mom and I should have our own Girls' Movie Night.

We rented Only You, a chick flick if there ever was one, and were just settling down to watch when Ty burst into the room. He must have gotten home early from gallivanting with the youth group and he thought he could join us in our Girls' Movie Night. We told him he'd probably hate the movie. He promised he wouldn't make fun of it. We told him it was Girls' Movie Night, so it was girls only. He said that wasn't fair, and he'd pretend to be one of the girls if we'd let him join us. So we did.

Everything was going fine till the end of the movie drew nigh. I don't recall the details, but the hero was thwarted, the heroine had lost hope, and Billy Zane figured into it somehow. I think there might have been a convertible and some miscommunication involved. Being a veteran of chick movies, I was confident that Marissa and Robert would end up living happily ever after. But Ty was not a veteran of chick movies. And Ty had taken his promise to be "one of the girls" a little too seriously. He got rather upset that the couple would never be together and burst out with some frustrated and vehement exclamation along the lines of, "No! They HAVE to end up together! He really loves her!"

Mom and I looked at Ty, then at each other, then at Ty again.

One of us said, "Calm down, it's just a movie."

Ty said, "I'm a woman and I can get emotional if I want to."

That, my friends, is a direct quote.