"At Something Jenny Said!"
All about how my family doesn't know me. At all.
I have a very, very funny family. They are hilarious. The fact that they are super smart only adds to their humor, and I've never been able to compete with them. I am completely unfunny in their eyes. In fact, here is a completely true story from my childhood:
I was 14, and doing dishes after dinner with my sister. By this point I was so obsessed with learning to be funny that I'd literally spent two years up until that point listening to hypnosis tapes called "Embrace Your Humor Power". It bothered me that my family would kind of bag on me for being unfunny, and I was completely determined to show them that I, too, had a sense of humor.
So, that night, I was packing up the leftovers in the kitchen. My stepfather and sister were in the room too, and my mother was in the adjoining dining room. Taking a container of leftovers, I opened the fridge, and saw a wall of containers filled with leftover food. I looked at my sister and I simply said, "you know... I bet they don't need Tupperware in Ethiopia." It was a simple observation -- people were starving in Ethiopia, therefore... leftover storage probably wasn't something they worried about.
People laughed. My stepfather called my mother in and repeated my "joke" to her, and she laughed. He congratulated me on telling my first joke that someone actually laughed at. My mother wrote it on the calendar. "Jenny told 1st joke".
So, fast-forward to today. Here I am, a thirty-something woman, and my family still picks on me for having no sense of humor and for being horribly and awkwardly unfunny. I posted a comment on my sister's MySpace page, referencing something our mother used to do when we were children. Then today, I talked to my mother, and mentioned it. She said, "Oh yeah, Beth remembered that thing. She laughed out loud, and I asked, 'what's so funny?' and she said, 'I'm laughing at something Jenny said!' and I was like, 'something JENNY said?!' " The implication being that because I am so humorless and lame, it was clearly a shock that I'd actually amused anyone.
I accept this role in my family. The thing is, the older I get, the more I realize that the person who wrote the Hottie McHotterson blog isn't someone my family has ever met. Perhaps I will, for a day, become the person my family thinks they know, and be humorless. Then you guys will laugh at me simply because it seems so out of character! It just goes to show that no matter who you become, your family always remembers you as the awkward child you were. I can see it now; if I won the Nobel Peace Prize, my mother would stand up in the audience and scream, "Well, she may have helped avert war, but she can't tell a joke to save her life!"