From Your Sister:

Happy Birthday, Brother!

In the spirit of a new decade, and because we can't all be together to honour you on this day, I have asked some of your relatives and friends, this: 1) to recall their favourite memory with you in the past thirty years, and 2) to offer you some advice for the next thirty.

I'll get the party started.

1) While I couldn't recall one singular favourite memory with you, I will say this, about our childhood: while many of my friends were pulling the hair of and hurling abuse at their siblings, we were making up theme songs about driving through Iowa, and pretending to be the Neville brothers. Sure, I beat you up and made you eat sand every so often (due to my incredible physical prowess), and you once told me our backyard was a civil war battlefield, but we wisely spent more of our energy jointly making our parents and others suffer, rather than each other. That is what I call Team Effort.

Our capers continue. Like when you still come into my room in the early morning and scream "WAKEUPITSCHRISTMAS!!!!", even though it's, like, June. Or when you wore Bettina's sparkly jacket and played piano, pretending to be Elton John. That was funny, too. See, you're always good at cheering up, making boring things fun, and being silly. And in these kinds of times, isn't that really what matters? Admiring sparkly unicorns, and puppies that have the hiccups; discovering delicious pork fat, and dinosaur cupcakes; getting joy in the small things: now that is the real stuff of substance.

(And, by the way, I can't wait until you have kids and convince them that koalas are the most dangerous creatures on earth. I'll buy an eye patch, pretend one got me while living in Oz, and help persuade them.)

2) I don't have much advice for you, because I'm younger and still figuring out things for myself. Many of the people here have given you some great advice (I especially like Allison's), and so I'll just leave you with someone else's advice to someone else. That didn't make sense, but you know what I mean:

"The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." - Sarah Palin.

Just kidding. Here it is:

"I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet.

Love you lots. Happy 30th!