if you're a heterosexual girl and you've always been frustrated by the fact that you can't have a real crush on me, here's your best alternative. my genetic equal (50% genia, 50% lee) in male form. my room mate, wombmate, punching bag, accomplice and buddy for life: my little brother, my only sibling, tripp (wallace lee vincent III on his rap sheet).
my mom put up a banner on tripp's old room. too bad we stole that room because it's bigger and we were staying the night with judah and jesse and me all in one room. i moved his banner across the hall..
tripp lives in seattle, a hippie at heart (he has been to MANY phish shows), he needed to escape the judgemental yuckiness of the bible belt (don't we all?). after 18 years in atlanta and 4 years in charleston, he is now loving the emerald city and this makes us all very happy. what doesn't tickle us quite as much is only getting to see our dear trippopotamus once per year. i had a bit of a pregnant hissy fit when i found out he wasn't flying cross-country for the birth of judah (apparently the birth was NOT a national holiday after all, even though it was on memorial day). so we had to wait 7 whole months for judah to meet his uncle tripp this christmas.
. waiting with bated breath for the much anticipated surprise airport pickup (my parents were just going to pick him up at the curb...shame!) where every turn of the escalator brings new hope and anticipation...for 30 straight minutes.
once when i was about 8 and tripp was 5, my mom refused to take us both to the store because she knew we would fight like crazy and overwhelm both her and the security forces at target. so i snuck tripp out to the car before she left and hid him in the back of our volvo station wagon under a bunch of clothes and then pretended like we had decided that only i would come and tripp would stay with my dad. when my mom and i arrived at target, tripp popped up in the back, scaring the crap out of my mom...much to my delight. we terrorized her doubly that day.
we used to have a house at lake lanier. it had a big back porch off the back. one day when we were about 13 and 10 my dad was working on some project under the deck and tripp and i realized that ziploc bags would make good substitutes for water balloons. we filled up a quart-sized one and dropped it from about 15 feet onto my dad's head. after he chased us down and spanked us within an inch of our lives we realized he had been working on electrical wiring and we had almost killed him.
tripp is the only human i have ever punched in the face. i was 15 and he was 11 and we were in paris. we were fighting and he was performing his trademark move, "the mylanta" on me wherein he had me pinned face down and then he jumped up and landed on my spine with his knees. i warned him if he did it again i would punch him. he did and i did. it was amazing. it didn't even hurt (me) and he had a big face bruise he had to come back and explain to his girlfriend.
buds. tripp kept talking to judah in the voice usually reserved for people's pet cats. he kept saying, "mr, crazy judah face." it was weird.
tripp's pretend gun-firing noise for whenever we were playing war or some shooting game was not "bang" or "pow," it was "too-doof!" said in a really high-pitched voice. we think maybe star wars was where he got this from.
tripp was chunky from 7-8th grade, but thanks to a steady diet of verbal abuse from me, he worked it off and has been super lean ever since (please do not return the favor, tripp). he is in year #3 of a 5 year vegetarian experiment. he had no problem living this way but looks forward to going back to meat in 2012.
tripp and i could not be more different in many ways, but i am so glad he is my brother. if anything, i wish we had been born closer together so that i could have gotten over the "baby brother" thing sooner and appreciated just how cool he was much earlier. i definitely do now that i only get to see him on special occasions because if i had the option, i would hang out with him weekly...well monthly at least. jesse really really likes tripp and i know judah will get a big kick out of his "uncle tip (we are projecting a speech impediment onto the bug)" when he is older. love you, bruder!
Man I miss Tripp too. It has been too long since your wedding and music midtown!