Boxen

My mother works as an interior designer for a large multinational firm. She spends a few hours each week looking at color and carpet samples, and each of these samples is encased in a clever little box or tube, created to draw the designer's attention to that company's product. My mother's gotten in the habit of bringing an especially interesting case home every week or two, and giving it to my brother or I to store stuff in.

I'll take a second to discuss my brother, then we'll go back to the subject of my first paragraph.

My brother is 18 years old, 3 years younger than me. He has one of those late summer birthdays, which probably caused trouble for him when he was younger, because all of the freinds he might want to invite to a party were away on vacation. He's charismatic and personable, but he has a pretty crippling social anxiety. His social anxiety creates an interesting paradox - he is perfectly suited for being what con movies call a "face man", talking to people and convincing groups to do what he wants. However, because he must be forced to talk to people, I am usually put in the "face man" position. More about my brother: tall, handsome, good smile, almost never cuts his hair or washes his clothes, great in a crisis, good swimming instructor, stubborn, staying out of college for a semester, didn't go to class his second semester of college, works out all the time, alternates between never cleaning and almost phanatical "everything in its place" type neatness.

So, given this information, which only relates to the first paragraph in its last 13 words, lets try to tie this post together, maybe come up with a theme. We shall discuss fancy containers.

The latest object my mother brought home was a long plastic tube. It has a plastic cap at both ends, and could probably be used for keeping scrolls of paper dry. I'm looking at it now, and debating giving it to my brother, who would probably find something cool to do with it, or at least use it to store some the crap flooding his room. However, just a few minutes before I began this post I started messing with the tube, opening one end then trying to force the top down, compressing the air in the tube. My experiment worked, and the bottom cap flew off as I pressed the top one down.

This tube is too cool for my brother. I'm keeping it.