The thing that I hated so much about ear phone plugs is how they tend to collect wax from the user over a period of time. The brown wax gets stuck on the plug and over years it either helps deteriote the plastic-y mesh covering, or, if you've got the kind with only smooth plastic and no covering, embeds itself into the little holes so that when you look at them, in a enough light and at the right angle, you can actually see the little crap-brown bits plugging up the holes.

It's so fucking disgusting. And I remember, being something like eight or ten, and first seeing the waxy build up on my cousin's phone that my little sister got into, like the way oily dirt accumulates in black layers on my grandma's kitchen chairs, so thick and yet so pliable that you could scrape it off with a fingernail or coin into much cleaner layers that you'd ever get from a block of properly warmed chocolate or soft candle, and thinking, with much hatred and disgust, that her earwax would never be on my earphones if I ever had any.

But I was like ten or something. And full of the usual hatred toward the younger sibling, when I knew damn well that I'd probably do it if I hadn't already. Hell, that might have been my wax. I didn't know that anyone could tell who it came from, exactly. I didn't know about things like DNA testing. I was like ten or something, and this was back in the nineties, when I'm not even sure that they had stuff like DNA testing.

How far it all seems today.

(Okay, so maybe not everyone hates their siblings.)