My Life Sucks Worse Than Yours

Everyone has bad days. Sometimes we even have bad weeks…or bad months. I’ve had my share. There was this one day in grade two when I was beaten up by three bullies behind the school (this was a regular occurrence for me in grade two) and later that night proceeded to fall down my basement stairs while eating a sugar cookie. There’s nothing quite like landing at the bottom of a stair case covered in half-chewed sugar cookie. Crying with a mouthful of sugar cookie is more difficult than it sounds. Needless to say that was a bad day. I went on a dateless streak from 1993 to about 1995. That’s a bad couple years. Look at the Toronto Maple Leafs. They haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967! That’s practically a bad half century! So you can see that streaks of bad luck can run for any length of time. It happens. It’s part of life. Life goes on. Some people however, seem to need to constantly remind you that they are having a bad day/month/year/life. And no matter what is happening in their life, it’s got to be worse than what’s happening in yours, and boy oh boy are you going to hear about it you lucky duck!

Picture the following conversation. I’m going to use a fictional person named Frank. You may substitute Frank’s name for the name of an annoying acquaintance of yours.

Me: Hey Frank.

Frank: Hey Steve. How’s it going?

Me: Oh not too bad. Been working a lot though. I’m freakin’ tired.

Frank: Huh. You think you’re tired? I worked 70 hours last week and I had a COLD!

Let me explain something to you Frank, you non-listening, insinuating-crap-that-I-never-said dipstick. I never said that you weren’t tired. I said that I was tired. Try to follow along with the conversation pal. It will make your life infinitely easier. I don’t ever recall saying, “Holy crap I’m tired Frank. I’m far more tired than you could ever be. In fact, if there were an Oscar for tired people, I’d win. And then I’d make a blubbering, 15 minute long acceptance speech that would make Halle Berry’s Oscar speech look like a picture of grace and composure. Oh and you wouldn’t even be nominated you wide awake jackass. Jeez Frank, stop even trying to be as tired as me. You’re like Tired-Lite.”

Everyone knows a Frank. They can be spotted in the wild by their familiar, repetitive and incredulous tone. “You think you’re tired!? You think you’ve got it bad?! You think you’ve got a raging case of herpes?!” No matter what you are feeling, Frank will be feeling it far worse than you are. You could be telling a story about the worst flu you ever had or the worst drive home you ever had or your worst teacher or professor. No matter what you say, Frank will have had it worse and he’ll practically belittle you like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket for not having it as bad as he did.

More often than not, a Frank’s life is not that bad. People who have truly crappy lives tend not to talk about them that much. I know a few people that have had a real rough go of things and they just don’t bring it up in conversation. A Frank on the other hand wouldn’t know a truly bad day if it bit him in the rear end so hard he needed a tetanus shot.

I suppose for every yin there’s a yang. Remember the kid in school who always had the best of everything…or at least claimed too. Sure there were the spoiled rich kids who got everything they wanted, but do you remember the kid who wasn’t rich and still tried to claim that he had all those cool toys and gadgets anyway? Let’s call this kid – Patrick. You could be talking about your Nintendo and Patrick would pipe up about his SUPER Nintendo. Or you could be talking about your new BMX bike and Patrick would pipe up about his BMX bike that had monster truck tires and rocket launchers on the side. Or maybe you were even talking about your crazy Uncle Gus and Patrick would inevitably bring up his crazy Uncle Hulk Hogan. At the time you’d actually believe the stories Patrick and other kids like him were spewing out. Except for this one time in grade one when a girl in my class – a very eastern Canadian, very Caucasian girl - stood up and said she thought that Michael Jackson was her cousin. I mean it’s very possible that Joseph and/or Katherine Jackson spent time working on a fishing trawler in eastern Nova Scotia only to leave behind their relatives and move to Gary, Indiana and spawn the Jackson 5 plus Janet and the other one…but it seems somewhat unlikely. I’m getting off track here. I’m just saying that’s the one time I didn’t buy into one of those outrageous stories. But I digress.

I actually used to have fun with these “Patrick” kids when I got a little older. I would be talking about say, stereos, and mention that mine was 60 watts. Then Patrick would claim that his was 100 watts. Then I would say mine had a 6 CD changer. Patrick would say that his had a 10 CD changer. And back and forth – tit for tat. Then I’d start to mess with him. “Oh yeah? Well mine has a T-39, jumbo, super turbo grip flux capacitor.” Of course Patrick would reply that his had the very same except that it was a T-59 and had super DUPER turbo grip and was hand delivered to his house by Tony Hawk. Then we’d snicker and call him a wiener behind his back. Kids can be so cruel.

Anyway, what I’m getting at here is that these were the kids that needed to have a better toy than you, needed to have a better bike, needed to have a better video game. They needed to be better than you. Period. So what’s up with Frank? Why does he need to be worse than you? What kind of a weirdo perspective is that? I think both characteristics kind of suck but I can’t see wanting to be on the crappy end of the stick like Frank.

What’s the deal Frank? Are you looking for sympathy? Please don’t. It’s not an endearing feature. It’s right up there with picking your nose before you shake hands with someone or farting in church. Actually even to this day I can find the latter to be one of the most comical things on the planet. So scratch that Frank and please, toot on. But as I was saying, the sympathy thing - it’s not a good look. Life is not that bad. There’s plenty to be thankful for and to be happy about. Convincing me that your life stinks worse than mine is likely not going to prompt me to buy you a sympathy present. It will however, prompt me to avoid most verbal communication with you on a semi-regular basis. No one wants to be known as “a drag” Frank. So buck up. Smile. Stop complaining and let’s go make fun of Patrick. He just said he could fart louder than you in church. What a wiener.