Alas! Woe Is Me!

In my late 20s, I was a bit of a whiner.  Oh, my life is so terrible.  Oh, nothing ever goes right.  Alas!  Woe is me!

Once, I was complaining to dad about some horribleness that had happened.  I’m sure it was something terribly dramatic like paying $3 more for an oil change or spilling a bag of M&Ms or no longer fitting into a pair of decade-old jeans.  I probably said something like, “I swear, everything always goes wrong for me!”

I was sitting with dad at the kitchen table, the maroon tablecloth protecting the polished wood underneath.  He was crouched over the morning newspaper, graying bed hair, navy robe, t-shirt.  His black coffee sitting on his right in an unreasonably large mug.  His hands holding the folded out newspaper at the center, the top about four inches off the table.  He raised his eyes to look at me without moving his head.  The top rims of his glasses underlined his irises.

“Well.”  He stated.  “That’s because of the meetings.”

I looked at him.

“Meetings.” I said.  A statement, not a question.

“That’s right.  Every week or so we all get together, everyone who’s in your life, and have these meetings late at night in a secret place to talk about how to make your life difficult.”

Not long after this confession, I started seriously dating a guy the family eventually started calling “Big Al”.  Big Al had gone to college on a football scholarship and unless you looked very closely, you would have thought his head sat right on top of his shoulders, necklessly.

Big Al and the family were all playing a game (I’d say p-k-r with the vowels, but the spammers liked that a little too much) one night and I kept losing and losing and losing and for the love of God will I ever win a game ever again and my life is so terrible!

“Well, we talked about this at the meeting last week.”  Dad said.  Big Al’s eyebrows raised and I explained about the meetings.  Dad looked at Big Al.

“Yeah…” dad said, slowly nodding his head thoughtfully. “Now that you’re hanging around, we’re going to have to start inviting you.”

And so it progressed.  Every time I whined about the unfairness of my tragic life (which included, by the way, good health, a good job, enough money to pay my bills and then some, plenty of friends and family and a surprisingly broad support system), Big Al would say something like, “Yeah.  We talked about that at the meeting last week.  I didn’t want to go along with it, it seemed pretty mean, but in the end I was outvoted.”  Or, “At the meeting last week we thought it would be funny to see you do that.  And it was!”

Big Al and I broke up nearly ten years ago.  It’s been at least eight years since I’ve heard anything about the meetings.  Either I stopped complaining or Big Al blackmailed them into putting an end to constructing my life’s destruction.