DR. WALLACE: My younger brother is 17 and it's his dream in life to someday be a bartender at a big fancy hotel restaurant. He dreams of making huge gratuities and rubbing elbows with all kinds of celebrities.

Apparently, he recently went to dinner at an upscale restaurant in our town with his best friend and the friend's parents, as they frequent the establishment. My brother witnessed the bartender taking out a chilled, frosted mug to pour a beer to serve to a customer at the bar. Ever since then, he has set up a rotation of three or four heavy glasses that he has chilled in our family's freezer at all times. He even told me that he now has it down to a science how much water to leave on the glass before he puts it in the freezer, to get what he calls the perfect frosted sheen.

Because of this, I gave him a new nickname and started calling him "frosty" whenever I would see him. I'm a 19-year-old female college student and I come home to have dinner with my family every other Sunday evening. The last time I was there, a strange incident happened. I wanted my brother to pass a food dish and I called him "frosty" when I made my request. It turns out that there was a very recent drug incident involving cocaine at his high school that I was unaware of.

When my mother heard me call him frosty, and she thought that was code for "snowman" as in Frosty the Snowman, and she literally started accusing him of being involved in the cocaine traffic at our at his high school! She thought "snowman" was related to "snow" as a code word for the drug cocaine. He, of course, had nothing to do with that, and both of us explained to our mother how and why I gave him that nickname, but she remained very dubious and even made a comment that it was quite convenient that we had a backstory established and ready to tell her!

My brother is really frustrated with me, but not mad, because he knows it wasn't my fault, but he's now caught in the crosshairs of an accusation that should never have happened. How can we convince our mother that this whole scenario she's developed in her mind is completely ridiculous? — He's No Drug Trafficker, via email

HE'S NO DRUG TRAFFICKER: By now, your mother should have already known that your brother dreams of being a bartender someday, and that, coupled with the fact that there was no fallout for him regarding the drug incident at his school, should be more than enough for your mother to stop with her hair-trigger accusations.

Unfortunately, sometimes it's very difficult to get people to listen to reason or stop suspecting something that they're clinging to for whatever reason. Hopefully your brother hasn't done anything in his recent past that would give her any cause to doubt him. In the meantime, advise your brother to relax, carry on in his normal way, and to simply laugh and reassure his mother whenever needed. Let her accusations fall on deaf ears, and soon enough she'll get tired of hearing herself talk about it.

MY SHOPPING STYLE CONFLICTS WITH THEIRS

DR. WALLACE: As a senior in high school, I'm a girl who's developed a style all my own. I'm comfortable in the way I do things, whether or not my friends and acquaintances agree with my style. Several of my friends love to go clothes shopping in a nice mall in our town, and I've joined them on several occasions.

But their style of shopping and mine are vastly different. They love to rush from clothing store to clothing store to look at specific outfits or pieces of clothing they're interested in. I prefer to just wander and glide through them all and take my time looking at many things without specifically focusing on anything to start with. What inevitably happens is that I'll go into the first store or two with them but quickly become bored and tell them I'll be outside waiting. Then when I'm outside, I'll walk by a few other storefronts and sometimes wander into other stores to simply browse, look around and do a bit of people watching as well.

My friends don't like this, because they feel they are always losing me and having to slow down to find me, so lately I've decided not to join them on some of their shopping trips. My style is to simply float around the mall, walk into any store for any reason and look at certain things that draw my interest. I usually don't buy much, but once. In a while I do! I also truly enjoy watching other people shop to see how they go about their decision-making, and to see what they might purchase. Plus, if there are two or three people shopping, you can overhear what they're saying and I find it very interesting. Someday I hope to work in retail marketing, so to me this is kind of a fun form of market research. Do you think there's something wrong with me that I don't shop like a normal teenager? My friends seem to think I'm a lost cause. — I Have My Own Style, via email

I HAVE MY OWN STYLE: To each their own is the appropriate reply from my perspective here. I see nothing at all wrong with the way you go about shopping, other than it conflicts with the comfort zone of some of your friends. It is probably wise to do most, if not all, of your shopping on your own so that you won't feel stressed and that you can continue your enjoyment and retail research, as you pointed out.

Every human being is going to have differences, variances, and stylistic inclinations that don't match up perfectly with everyone else. To me, that's a wonderful thing and speaks to the individuality that we all possess, enjoy, and can be proud of as long as our preferences don't harm anyone else.

In your case, I think you're perfectly fine and you've reached a solution that keeps the peace with your friends in the singular genre of retail shopping. I'm sure that you and your friends have many more other things in common that you all enjoy together effortlessly, so don't feel the need to force yourself to follow the pack in this one particular area.

Dr. Robert Wallace welcomes questions from readers. Although he is unable to reply to all of them individually, he will answer as many as possible in this column. Email him at [email protected]. To find out more about Dr. Robert Wallace and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Negley Stockman at Unsplash