Admitting Your Faults

A while back, I had a nice meal with my family. Both my brother and my sister-in-law were present at that meal, and all three of us thoroughly enjoyed our meals. As it turned out, I finished my meal that night, despite the waiter more or less telling me he didn't think that I could do it. The whole thing cracked me up, so I wrote about it.

Truth be told, it's not like I was bragging about my eating prowess. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and wiser, or maybe I'm just getting lazy, but those days are past. I've decided that I should try to eat smaller portions, after all. In fact, I had lunch with a friend of mine recently, and she commented on just how small my lunch had been. I'm not just all talk, I tell you, I really am eating a little bit less these days.


Regardless, I told the whole story as it happened: I finished my meal, but my brother and his wife did not finish theirs. There were some jokes about the size of the bowl of the soup, and we all laughed about it. I soon forgot about this episode. Of course, I'm writing about this, so there was a twist in this tale.


It turns out that my brother and my sister-in-law thought that they were unfairly portrayed in that particular post. To use their exact words, they complained that I made them "sound weak" in my retelling of the story. Mind you, they didn't question any of the facts of the story, nor did they accuse me of embellishing the tale in any way. Nevertheless, I had in some way managed to spin the story to portray them in a negative light.

In fact, my brother was vaguely considering taking matters in to his own hands to rectify the situation. He was going to start his own blog (titled "Even More Mild Amusement"), so that he could tell his side of the story. It was going to open with the more accurate version of that meal, so he could clear his good name. After all, someone was wrong on the Internet, and he couldn't simply let this injustice slide. My sister-in-law, on the other hand, suggested how I should be writing in order to prevent future mishaps. She knew the proper turn of phrases to accurately reflect both the facts and the appropriate tone, so she made sure to impart that knowledge to me. After all, it'd make for better posts if I was completely honest with my own actions and faults, she said.

The great irony in all of this was we had this conversation during the course of another large meal, during which two people who shall remain nameless failed to clear their plates. That's actually how the conversation started: someone said something about a large meal, I said something about eating less, the blog came up, and then suddenly I learned of some helpful phrases for my writing and of "Even More Mild Amusement." Mind you, this was also the same set of people who ordered less food than I did. I would also say that they finished a smaller percentage of their food than I finished of my own, but I'm not completely certain that's true, so I'll hold off from asserting that. I wouldn't want to be accused of embellishing, after all.

So given all of that, I'd say it was a pretty educational meal for me, and I suspect that one or more of you may find a tiny bit of amusement in all of that. Oh, and I didn't finish my food at the latter lunch. You know what? My sister-in-law is right. I'm way more amused after telling the story of how I didn't finish my meal.