Have you ever wanted to be someone else? When you were growing up, everyone had that person they thought had every quality they ever wanted in a human being. For some, it's their father and for others, it might be a celebrity. In a brief period of my life growing up I also had one. That person was Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties . I don't quite know why I identified with him, but for a small part of my life, he was the most amazing human being that ever existed.

Maybe it was his quick wit or his entrepreneurial attitude, or maybe I just wanting to be a big brother to someone named Ming. I wanted to be Alex P. Keaton. I remember never being quite as emotional before the age of 10 as I was when I watched the last episode of Family Ties . I even went as far as telling people at school my real name was Alex Ryan Marshall.

If you ask anyone who know me, that is absolutely true. I can remember signing homework as Alex R. Marshall. Teachers would ask why I used a different name on my homework and I would fully explain that I casually went by my middle name. Still, to this day, can't figure out why I thought my story was so air-tight considering my mother was a teacher at the same school.

We had a lot in common. I figure the only way to show this is a point-by-point comparison of Ryan Marshall and Alex P. Keaton:

You see, we should have been related. Blablabla funny ending.