how tapes cured my dad

Two years ago, I was sad and really lonely (what's new, right?). My boyfriend had just dumped me and within a week had found some shiny new skeletor girl to screw. For days, I wore old '80s sweatpants courtesy of my father, I swore off anything and everything to do with personal hygiene, and lived off the stale Captain Crunch I found under my desk just so that I wouldn't have to go outside to buy groceries.

My friends did all they could to cheer me up. Funny anecdotes about poop didn't do it, having people awkwardly listening to me on the phone while I whimpered and sobbed didn't do it, and drinking a shit-ton of Smirnoff REALLY didn't do it.

So in a desperate attempt for companionship and understanding, I called my dad. He stayed on the phone with me for hours, relaying stories about his college life and his suffering from quote/unquote depression. He had just moved to New York and was naturally homesick. His foreignness freaked the other students out and the English he learned in Thailand couldn't sustain him here. So he went to talk to the school therapist and had his head shrunk.

The therapist ingeniously tells him that his "problem" is loneliness. Doctor Douche Bag then hands him a small tape recorder and tells him to "talk into it everyday as if it were [his] friend." My dad was bemused, but who was he to question a "doctor" of that caliber. So he went home and spoke into it everyday. He complained about teachers, his frustration with girls, and talked about how much he missed his mother's home cooking. Despite feeling really ridiculous, my dad was hopeful that with these tapes, El Douche could find a way to cure him of his sickness. After a month of the talking-to-yourself-like-a-crazy-person exercise, my dad goes into the therapist's office with the tapes one hand and the recorder in his other. Not long after my dad sat down did the school shrink ask him to take the tapes and crush them with his feet. My dad shifted his eyes, unsure of what he just heard and in his best English asked, "you want me to destroy these tapes?" "Precisely," the therapist answered.

Infuriated by the thought that he had wasted his time with some harebrained exercise, he threw the tapes and the tape recorder at his moronic therapist. Which, even though my dad left it out, was probably followed by a brief call to security about some psycho student rampaging about campus. In any manner, he left the office and since that incident, made more friends than he ever believed. He realized that only he could control his own happiness. That if something was making him upset, he had to find a way to fix it, or a way to embrace it. He said that everyone, EVERYONE, deserves to be happy and you should ever let small people or bad circumstances take away your right to that happiness.

I have to take my dad's advice to heart (and Leona Lewis' too) and learn to smile cause I deserve to. There are always going to be those people in life who want to tear you down. Or unideal circumstances that deteriorate your self-worth. The best way to approach these obstacles is just to be positive and live happily. And despite their attempts at ruining your person, those vindictive, cruel people are not bad people. They are just weak-minded and cowardly and the best we could do for society is to not be like them.

Over and out.