My father is a character—perhaps Elmer Fudd more so than Prince Charming.

For years, people have commented on my personality, its likeness to my mother's. I've let it go to my head. "Look at me! I'm nothing like my father! Yay!"

Not true. I was soaking in a bubble bath tonight when I crashed cruelly into reality. Of all the personality quirks I could have inherited...*sigh*

My father has a humor appreciated by a small circle...namely, himself. He delivers jokes that draw deafening silence from a room, and yet he laughs on...and delivers the same faulty joke at the next gathering, and the next, and the next, and all of them in a 10-year rotation.

It occurs to me that I often find myself terribly witty in the face of a crowd whose eyes look upon me and call me "idiot".

I was dining with my mother and aunts last night. My aunts were discussing how the couples with large height differences seem to be the happiest. They named off several examples, alighting upon the master and mistress of mlphillips last.

I replied immediately, "Well that's because we don't even try to see eye-to-eye." I smiled the smile of someone who thinks they just said something remarkably funny.

The table conversation abruptly changed directions. My comment went unacknowledged. I continued to smirk about it all night. I should start a list of Jokes That Failed, but I fear its length.