Purple Rain #3

I know the history of my family tree quite well due to repeated visits from my grandmother and I've come to one conclusion about my ansestors.

I am decended from a long line of fence-sitting wimps.

Let's start in 1774. Just outside my family's castle, the infamous Battle of Colloden was being waged by the Scotish and the English. My family sided with nobody. I'd probably be speaking with a Scotish accent if after the Scotish retreated, the English didn't storm the castle looking for stragglers from the previous battle. As a result of the ensuing witch hunt, my family fled to America to aviod fighting the English. In 1774. The irony is painful. When the Revolutionary War broke out, guess what, my family didn't take a side. Ditto to the Civil War. My ansestors never fought a battle in neighther of the two World Wars nor Vietnam. My dad got close to breaking the tradition by being the the military and being deployed to Vietnam. Trouble was, he was a leuteniant of the USS Safeguard, a Navy diving boat.

Somehow, this penchant for pacifism didn't really carry on to me. I never step down from a fight, almost to a fault. Hold on, screw "almost", to a fault. When you argue with a TA, no matter how good your arguements are, you still lose. There is no effective rebuttal to the "I have power, you don't" arguement, because none exists.

There is also another thing my dad did when he was my age that I'm glad I don't do. Whenever he met a girl, he would write down her name on an index card along with things he picked up from the conservation. There are only three kinds of people that keep a file of index cards of all the girls they've met: pimps, stalkers, or losers that obsessivly file everything. Thankfully, my dad was only the third type. As expected, my dad wasn't really sussesful in getting a girlfriend, but he still thinks that I ought to make the file cards.

If I'm going to fail, I'm going to do it with dignity.