Dumb And Dumber

My older brother's main goal in life is not to look stupid. Unattractive is fine. Unfunny is okay. And slightly smelly is manageable. But being thought stupid is too much to handle. So getting through life without looking like a complete moron is his main objective. Unfortunately, when you focus so hard on that, you set yourself up to look even more stupid.

For example, he's usually afraid to ask people for help with stuff. I guess he thinks people will laugh at him if he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's how he spent two weeks in the wrong class in college because he never bothered to ask anyone why his American History professor was talking about Pre-Cambrian organisms. I guess he figured the professor wanted to give a really thorough background for his lectures on the Revolutionary War.

That's also how he ended up in the wrong state because he figured he could guess which way to go on the highway for an hour rather than call someone or stop and ask a local. We still joke with him that he can't drive anyone anywhere because they'll end up in Georgia.

But the funniest stuff is when he thinks he knows what he's talking about. He'd rather make something up than admit he doesn't know. So if you ask him about hockey, he won't admit that he doesn't watch hockey. He'll attempt feebly to stay with the conversation and throw out whatever information he can recall from the deep recesses of his memory. So I do what any brother should do... I mess with him. I talk about stuff that he's never heard of (because I make it up on the spot) and then try to get him to admit he doesn't know what it is. And if you could have heard him trying to stay with a conversation about a new species of monkey scientists recently discovered in the Adirondacks, you'd laugh as hard as I did. But I have to admit, he almost convinced me that he'd played a game called Sninkerwintz, even though I'd invented it 30 seconds earlier. So much for not looking stupid.