When my brother left the nest

The other day, on one of many trips that I will be sure to take to Giant during this semester, my brother texted me.

Whenever he contacts me there is always an end goal, which is never “oh let me see how my sister is doing at school.” This time, though, it was a little weird because it was a link to a YouTube video. 

So I told my friend next to me how weird it was and she thought it could have been spam. I didn’t get enough time to run with that idea when he texted me to tell me his opinion.

Now I knew where this was going; homeboy wanted me to try and do his homework for him because lord knows he was not trying to make me laugh with a funny video since he keeps all the good ones to himself.

I am not exaggerating — every night when I’m at home you can hear him laughing while watching videos on his phone, but does he ever share with the class? No.

By this time, I was already back at home putting my phone to charge when I finally got the chance to watch the video. If he was reaching out for help then he needed it. It turned out to be a TED talk, so now I started doubting if it was homework because I’ve caught him watching some for fun.

The TED talk was “Multisource News and the Battle of Media Bias: Jim Spencer at TEDxMU.” The gist of it was summed in the title and Spencer instilled hope for the journalists in the room by saying media would always need a human hand. The main idea was to be sure to navigate different sources to learn about any given event in order to form your own opinion, which is like second nature to many of us.

While the video was only about 13 minutes long, by the time it finished he had texted me multiple times. So I called him. As a freshman in college he seemed to have already found his place, and he was determined to do well. Which is easy for him because my little bro is one of the smartest kids you’ll meet.

While a lot of people around campus may have those book smarts, street smarts are another part of the puzzle that helps you survive out in the real world, and my bro has it on lock.

Once we started discussing the video he really only wanted my help getting his ideas together, not without insulting me every step of the way as per usual for our relationship. But it was cool seeing how much he had become invested in school and had learned some nice colorful curse words.