Fascinating family history, Rick.

My sister and I are eight years apart and our childhood experiences were so different we might as well have had different parents.

My dad is an only child. He has two first cousins, siblings who are 11 years apart. The younger one is pretty close to my dad's age, and the two families lived near each other and were really close. That younger sibling says that she feels more like my dad is her brother than like her actual brother was. Her older brother was born in Germany, and lived there as a small child, but then spent ages 5-10 or so moving to a bunch of different countries as refugees, before finally settling in New York when he was 10 or 11. His younger sister was born in New York in the mid-forties. She grew up bilingual, while her brother had to learn English as a teenager.

I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule. My brother and I are 19 months apart, and our lives didn't go through any fundamental changes like those described above. But he and I are as different as possible.

It's probably genetic. I'm very much my father's son, and my brother looks more closely related to our cousins on my mother's side than to me. And our personalities take the same track.

My sister and I would be a fascinating study in Nature vs. Nurture. We are very different, about 5.5 years apart in age. Both adopted, no major changes in the family unit or financial situation during our upbringing. She knew we were both adopted, I did not.

There's almost 10 years between me and my brother (and 2 sisters evenly spaced between us). Between the time when I was born to the time my brother was born, my dad went from being a broke-ass law student to a pretty successful lawyer, so we grew up in very different financial households. My childhood involved a LOT more frozen fish sticks than his did.

Rick might enjoy this... my father is the second of eight. The kids range about 18 months to two years apart... the later the kids, the bigger the distance. The oldest was 16 when the youngest was born.

They grew up in the NJ suburbs depicted in The Sopranos and other than the actual Italianisms (a lot of it isn't properly Italian and my family isn't Italian at all) the oldest four basically have that accent... and the youngest four basically do not.

My theory is there was a population boom as the area shifted from truck farms to suburbs and the older kids were in a smaller more homogeneous peer group.

There was also a prosperity shift like P-moon's family as my grandfather's business grew and my grandmother went to work - the younger ones talk about spending the summer down the shore, the older ones maybe spent a week.

My mother's the youngest of five girls (all born between 1929 and 1936) and the older girls, even in just that short time period, had a very different view of their father than the younger ones.

My sister, who is almost 14 years my senior, moved a hell of a lot between the ages of zero and ten as her parents moved around for school and work, eventually moving to a new country and eventually buying a house of their own.

My experience is that my parents have lived in the same damn place since before I was born and are still there. (They've owned the house for 51 years.)

L guilt trips me all the time about being an only child. She really wishes she had a sibling. I mean, obviously, we had legit reasons for one-and-done, but I do sometimes agree with her on that.

Fuck. One of my classes has a midterm tomorrow night, and the other has a midterm Friday night. Which means two nights in a row when I'll have to be at work until at least 10. I was already worried about managing it. And so, of course, my EDS has decided that this would be a great time for my entire body to be in extreme pain.

Ugh, Hil. No doubt the stress makes it worse as well. Is there some time during this time period where you can indulge in something renewing and relaxing to ease the stress, both physical and mental.

Not really. I've got to go to a faculty lunch thing today. (Which isn't technically required, but I've been told that I've been skipping too many of them, so I've got to go.) Then tomorrow I'm teaching all day.