now with 33% more human.

We acquired a Bonus Teenager some weeks back. The pandemic weighs on everything, pressing us all out of shape, and households already under strain are not going to un-strain themselves. Long story short, J's friend X lives here now, until...later. He's been able to de-stress and keep talking to his family, so he's doing well.

Ironically, one of my brother's friends came to live with us (twice!) when I was a kid, and many of our friends we met here in California (some have moved on to bring their awesomeness to other states) have a similar story somewhere in their lives. It's a thing we can do.

One of the many changes is that J has someone to talk to, or sometimes just exchange monologues with. There's a marvelous early episode of Mythbusters where they investigate a myth that a duck's quack doesn't echo. I've never heard this elsewhere, but it resonated enough for Mythbusters to take it on, even if there was no obvious endpoint that involved fire, electrocution, or explosions.

(My friend group and I used to watch the show religiously.)

They find an acoustician and bring him out to some duck farm in the Central Valley, which picked a couple ducks (Bob and Roy) for them. They got the shoot all set up, and Bob the duck wouldn't quack. The show hosts are (or act like) City People™–not that growing up around ducks makes you an expert in making them quack–and host Jamie has an awkward little while trying to get a duck to quack.

They go to switch out Roy for Bob, and as the ducks pass each other, there's a festival of quacking. They just needed another duck there to listen.

Watching J and X is exactly like that. Left to his own devices, J will mostly not seek out social contact. But maybe it's never too late to have a sibling you get along with.

Incidentally, according to the Mythbusters wiki:

Initially, no echo could be found, so the team moved to an anechoic chamber for comparison. When examined by an audio expert, it was found that the echo was "swallowed" by the original quack, due to the very similar acoustic structure between the quack and the echo. Because of this, it may be difficult to tell where the quack ends and the echo begins, both having similar waveforms on an oscilloscope and blending together in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish. In the same way, human hearing may not perceive the difference between a duck's quack and its echo.