Stranger than fiction

My dad has a book entitled, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.” If you’re in my family, that’s not a good idea.

My brother, for whatever reason, has no qualms about doing random things that make himself look like an idiot. That’s just fine and funny for us onlookers, until his idiocy taints us.

Example: My mom, bless her heart, just finally figured out that with cell phones, you have to keep the power on if you want to receive calls. So she’s not exactly tech-savvy when it comes to the more detailed aspects, like voicemail. My brother recorded himself singing a song in a girl voice as her outgoing message. Now it’s not just him looking like the idiot, but it’s my mom, when her Bible study leader or coworker calls. And she’s too befuddled and then frustrated to change it.

Along that same vein, my dad, who is even less techno-ledgable, has a picture of himself angrily reaching for the phone as his cell phone wallpaper. And when my mom calls his cell, “Home” doesn’t pop up. “Gulab jamins” announces her call, which is an Indian dessert. Weird and random.

I’m not immune either. Every time my old laptop booted up, a big, bloody picture advertising the movie “Saw” came up. I never remembered to change it, because it disappeared after I signed in, but people who saw me boot up thought I was deranged. And once, I lived with a lady named Boopsie. When my brother came to visit me at her house, he wrote on her dry erase board “chicken pot pie,” unbeknownst to me. A few weeks later, she came back from the grocery store with several chicken pot pies, and told me they were for me, even though I always bought my own groceries. I didn’t even see my brother’s hint on the board until months later. I won’t even talk about the facebook group, created by my brother for me.

Possibly the most pungent example of why my family should work on sweating the small stuff involves a flag, my dad and a bike. My dad has something against British people. It’s a general dislike, because with specific people, like our former British neighbors, it doesn’t apply. I think it comes from the same place in him that vehemently orders no pickles touching his plate and sends it back at the merest hint of pickle juice, but savors a meal of old, crusty bread piled with a concoction of leftovers that always resembles stroganoff.

Anyway, said British neighbors once gave me a plastic purse emblazoned with the British flag. Fast forward about 15 years. My dad spent several months without a car and only a bike for transportation (another story for another entry). Because my brother knew the unlikelihood of my dad to undo any prank, he seized the opportunity and created a flag with the plastic purse, securing it to the back of the bike. My dad rode the bike every day, displaying the flag of a people whose accents he mocks.

The stories are endless. Pranks with Instant Messages, uses for a bag full of keys, tricks on roommates … All this to say, I couldn’t make up more random things to happen to people. Truth is stranger than fiction, and in the end, we’re to blame for allowing it to happen. Sometimes it’s necessary to sweat the small stuff.