This I Believe

I was assigned to write a "this I believe" statement. I had a hard time with the assignment but once I remembered my brother and how much cooler he is than me I had a hard time keeping it within the 500 word limit.

I believe that my brother is cooler than me. And I believe that he always will be.

It’s odd because my brother is younger than me. He always has been and he always will be. And my brother is shorter than me too. Again, he always has been and we are both pretty sure he always will be. Also, my brother is going bald faster than me. I know that really anything could happen from this point onward but at the rate we’re going, my brother will end up as Patrick Stewart and I’ll look more like a young Bruce Willis.

That said one may find themselves asking why it is I believe my brother is cooler than me. It’s a legitimate question. I have to reply by saying that it took more than a single moment of enlightenment to figure out how much cooler my brother is than myself.

During my first few years of college, I started to tell people that if they liked me at all they would love my brother. Honestly, I don’t know why I first said it but it became a kind of catch phrase for me. My friends must have thought it somewhat peculiar, or perhaps they just thought I was attempting to be clever – and maybe I was. But more often than not I found myself attempting to explaining the statement, maybe not so much because of my friend’s curiosity as me wanting to just tell someone about how much cooler my brother is than me.

“My brother runs faster than me, draws better than me, plays guitar better than me, and grows a beard far better than me,” I would begin just to name a few. I’d tell them about my brother’s beard, how it grew to his chest before he shaved it into the biggest Fu Manchu you’d ever seen. I might tell them about how he nearly always answers me by saying “perhaps”, mimicking BBC character Hercules Perot and how that would inevitably cause me to sing a song by Cake (“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps”). I’d tell them about how he owns a batman costume and then about how he plans to work as doctor in Africa. I’d tell them that he runs marathons for fun, and that he has climbed all these mountains, and that he has swam across the deepest bluest seas, and walked on the moon, and . . . . And after I had said all that I would realize that I had gotten getting carried away with myself.

Again, I believe that my brother is cooler than me and that he always will be. I may have believed it as a joke at first: to embarrass him? Perhaps. But I have to say, that I believe it now because it is true. I began tell people about my brother’s coolness – I saw the evidence – and I was convinced. He may not be taller and he may not have as much hair but he can still be cooler than his older brother.