My Drunk Cousin

When I finished my grade 10, my cousin took me to a party one evening. We were a group of 5 including me, my cousin and 3 of his friends. It was a birthday bash for one of the mates of my cousin. All of us had a lot of fun that night. At the end of the night, my cousin was all drunk and he was barely left standing. As a minor I wasn’t allowed to drink and so I was the only one who was conscious. I took my cousin home with me that night. We reached home at 11 and he was murmuring something on the way to my room. When he reached there he jumped to the bed with his shoes on. I tried to take off his shoes and at that moment I heard what he was murmuring. He was saying “Ignorance is bliss. Nothing matters until you matter.”

I thought the alcohol was too much for him because I have heard that people become philosophers when they drink. I had even seen it on movies because it is a cliché. There I was receiving, first hand drunk talk by my cousin who was 3 years older than me. It didn’t matter what he spoke at that moment because I was tired and frankly nobody looks for wisdom at 11’o clock in the night. I wanted some shut eye and so I took a pillow and a blanket and jumped into the couch. It was an intense night because I was afraid that something awful would happen before I went to the party and I wasn’t wrong because the night had not yet ended.

The things that happen afterward were very weird and I am not still sure that I was awake and it wasn’t a dream because I saw my drunken cousin wake up from my bed and start writing on the wall with the pencils in my desk. He was writing the same thing he was murmuring earlier. I tried to calm him down but he wouldn’t stop writing. He wrote what he wanted and when he finished it, he went back to sleep as if nothing had happened. I was irritated by his shenanigans and kicked him in the butt as he slept peacefully and silently. I couldn’t sleep anymore so to pass my time I went for my laptop. There I googled what he wrote on the wall. I found many things but the thing I found remotely even related to him was a syllabus for his Philosophy class for his college which contained this topic. Topic was related to humans and their mindset. Then I checked his bag and found his homework assignment marked and “F” for the same topic.

I was simply shocked because I knew he was an ace student and there wasn’t any possibility that he would screw up his studies. Then again, I remembered he was little tense the preceding week. I read his paper and I found that his curriculum was above my understanding. I was shocked that by the depth he probed the topic and even then he got an “F”. I was petrified that I couldn’t compete with the likes of the toppers of his college even if I was at the same level as them but I was disheartened. I had to understand what he wrote even if it meant I had to give up my sleep. I looked at the watch and it was already 12-30 but it didn’t matter. What mattered was to know what I had read. It may sound as a silly impulse from any other individual’s point of view but it was plain curiosity. Thus, I googled anything and everything about the topic, from the definitions to examples, from the characteristics of human psychology to the depth of human understanding. It was far above my level as I see it now but finally I understood it and after I understood what the topic was I read the paper that my cousin had written again and this time I understood what the problem was clearly.

After understanding what he had done to deserve an “F”, I decided to help him. I decided to write to do the paper for him. I know he wouldn’t accept the paper if I gave him but if he read what I wrote he could at least judge it.  Then I kept typing until I was shocked once again by my cousin because he was awake and reading what I was typing.  I was amazed by his powers of suppressing a hangover. The first thing he asked was what I was doing at with the computer at 5 am in the morning! I told him all about the events of the night and he was smiling at the end of my narration. I showed him what I wrote and when he read it I asked him to judge it. He refused at first but after lots of persuasion he gave me a “C”. That hung-over idiot gave me a C (not exactly that day per se but after he was sober).

The “C” he gave me was more like an “A” for me at that moment. I had the chance to prove my research and my intelligence and I did. I wrote a paper for a topic that was the part of a philosophy class at a college and I got a “C” when I was at grade 10.It was an OMG moment. Still today, that “C” is more important to me than being the topper of my high-school. It was the thing I was proud of and I am and I always will be. From that day onwards I have harnessed my curiosity of learning and researching and if somebody asks me today “What matters to you most?” then I will say “My curiosity!” It is the thing that granted me my most important achievement.