30 things about my sister on her 30th birthday

1.) She has always been really good at sports.

2.) She played basketball and volleyball when we were kids.

3.) Now she runs and bikes and has done a marathon and triathlons and stuff.

4.) She sang "On My Own" as the senior soloist at her high school concert and got a standing ovation.

5.) She taught herself to play the guitar.

6.) She got sick on Chinese food at the 1984 World's Fair and she was still such a miniature person at age 8 that she got pushed around in my baby brother's stroller.

7.) She is a fierce, rabid, lifelong Tiger fan.

8.) One of her eyebrows is formidably difficult to tame.

9.) She went backpacking through Europe by herself one summer and became best friends with a couple of Greek guys in Athens with whom she stayed up all night celebrating in the streets on the night that Greece won the World Cup.

10.) She left a high-paying, high-powered corporate job to go to law school.

11.) She was always being ranked first in her group at work and stuff like that.

12.) She was valedictorian of her high school graduating class.

13.) She bakes good brownies.

14.) She speaks pretty good Spanish.

15.) Once, when she was a little kid, she wrote a song about Chris Jackson to the tune of Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better" and performed it for a video compilation of his greatest basketball moments.

16.) She also wrote several poems about a few of her favorite athletes when she was young that had unbelievably slammin' rhymes going on in them.

17.) My sister loves Domino's cheese pizza, Coke, bagels with cream cheese, candy corn, pasta with marinara sauce, and McDonald's caramel sundaes.

18.) My sister sleeps like she's dead.

19.) I have always been very jealous of this ability.

20.) She never wants to return to the corporate world but wants to help poor people here and abroad with things like housing and finances.

21.) My sister is one of those people who is freakishly brilliant with both numbers and words.

22.) My sister and I shared a room for most of our lives and lived to tell about it.

23.) My sister cries with beautiful ease and this print reminds me of her.

24.) Every time I listen to music I love in the car I wish with a sad stab that she were there to sing it with me because chances are she loves it, too.

25.) She is refreshingly honest and will tell you the truth about whether or not those pants in fact do make you look fat.

26.) She is very talented in the art of painstakingly organized spreadsheets for all aspects of one's life.

27.) The time we spent together in Europe was one of the best times in my whole life even though once we had to stop and scream at each other in the streets of Edinburgh.

28.) She has great girlfriends whom she's had most of her life, and she also has really great friends she's made as an adult who would seemingly walk through fire for her.

29.) I'd walk through fire for her.

30.) I chose this picture of my sister for this post not only because it's one of my favorite pictures ever taken of her. I chose it because I really do see my sister as a fighter. She's always fought to succeed at whatever she's tried to do, and now that she's facing the search for her next path in life, she's fighting to find her way, fighting to be happy. I can't wait to see what happens next.