A Tough Competitor

My family is very critical of little things. We make sarcastic remarks to each other about almost everything that we see and laugh at things that most people wouldn't find even remotely funny. Our specialties include garage sale sign evaluations, commercial insults, bad accents, and utterly abhorrent dancing.

The sub-par accents and terrible 'dancing' is, I'm sure, something that we share with so many other families, but I feel that my family is particularly embarrassing. Last night I was speaking to my Sodoku book in an accent that sounded like a cross between Russian and Italian. Yesterday my dad was talking to himself in what I thought was a funny accent, but it turned out to be just babble. He came into the lounge room not only speaking in a German sounding accent, but using Spanish sounding gibberish; definitely not to be found in any dictionary. Sadly, I found this absoultely hilarious and seeing my stitches of laughter, he continued to mumble on accompanied by ridiculous hand gestures and changing tones so even though he was not using words, I knew the general message that was trying to be conveyed. It vaguely resembled the scene in Family Guy in which Peter grows a mostache and thinks that he can speak Italian. My cousins have created voices for their dogs and my dog; they use it all the time. The main perpetrator of the dancing, however, is me. Any advertisement with bad music calls for terrible dancing from me in front of my mother, who laughs and tells me that I am an idiot; it is the same with my mother's awful ringtone that just screams "DO A FUNNY DANCE" whenever it plays.

Why do we do this? Is it because we are so bored that we must entertain ourselves with barely funny antics? Perhaps we need to distract ourselves from whatever horrid thing that is stuck in our brains, or maybe we just feel great entertaining someone else for even a short while. I can only hope that many other families do the same and that my family is not somehow damaged.

Advertising is one of my favourite things to talk about, so you will no doubt later on be getting a detailed description of how companies think we are stupid and that there are very few ads as clever or as entertaining as the Libra Invisible commercial in which the guy puts the pads all over himself and pretends to be a superhero; genius. Anyway, poor quality of most ads is not the point of this post; the point is that my family, especially mum and me, love to insult ads. Picking the faults in simple things is how we get our kicks and so anytime a commercial is plain wanky, absolute bullshit, not funny at all, unrealistic without attempting to be so, or simply an insult to all human intelligence, we must point it out so that we know we are not being fooled but the pure idiocy. We want to prove that we are smarter than those creative people in the advertising business, because we are rarely smarter than other people.

When I was much younger, my family had a huge garage sale, with huge garage sale signs to match. They had everything: clear message, large writing, good directive arrows, date, time, and address; the epitime of perfect garage sale signage. Since then, every time we drive past a garage sale sign, we feel the need to compare it to our own flawless one. "They didn't even write the date on there; that could be ANY Saturday from 10am!" dad would yell. "They should have written that a bit thicker... I'm not sure if that says number 5 or number 6 from this far away" my sister often pointed out. "That's just on a bit of paper; it wraps around the pole! They should have made it out of cardboard like we did" I would confidently state. It not only makes us laugh at ourselves for being so stupid, but I know it always makes me feel excellent about our efforts of doing a better job with a Sharpie and a white bit of board than everybody else.

I hope my family is just like any other in our need to feel great about ourselves, but is the only way to do so to feel better than others? Can we not feel as good as others and yet still be good? Why do we feel the need to be better than other people? Would it not be better if everyone was equally fantastic and the world would benefit? Watching the Olympic Winter Games makes me think about why we compete. We want to be the best at whatever it is that we do and we want to show everyone that we are the best, but most of us will never be the best at anything. The vast majority of those competing will be disappointed because they did not win a gold medal; there's no second place, only first loser as someone pointed out to me recently. Almost everyone who competes for anything will be upset with the result so why do we do it? Some people may do it for fun, knowing that they have other talents to show off later, others may just think they are the best and that they will not be disappointed; I don't know as I try not to compete since I hate disappointment.

It may seem like this post moved from my family to the need to be the best, but that was my plan all along... or was it?... Yes it was. But was it really? You will never find out (insert evil laugh here). The point is: more often than not, a competetor will be defeated and therefore, disappointed, so why do we bother? Perhaps we just want to prove ourselves as the best even if we aren't. Thanks for reading.
-Renji