After my Aunt, Sassy McBumble, wholly humiliated me just outside airport security, I thought I would have to return the humiliation. I wondered how I could match McBumble’s cardboard sign of a diapered child bearing my name in giant typeface. Brewing ideas, I concocted a medium-effort plan that would surely slap McBumble with a red-marked scar.
I decided to unveil a combination of a multi-colored jester hat clad with erect, bell ringing, octopus arms, booty-hugging teal highwater pants, and a cardboard sign that read, “The Joke’s on You.” I convinced my mother, Buff-a-Lee, to join in on humiliating McBumble. With her blacked out teeth, jacked up clothes, and hair teased into a wicked web of electrification, Buff produced yelps from passersby, firstly her son.
We arrived at the airport and checked the monitors to ensure McBumble’s flight had arrived at the gate. With McBumble’s arrival confirmed, armed with our arsenal of humiliation, cardboard sign raised high, we approached airport security. We knew the jitters we experienced, incited by our own self-consciousness, would be relieved in just minutes when our prey would fall victim to our assault.
Swarms of people with slogging strides, downtrodden and bedraggled from the joys of flying, exited the secured area. Buff and I looked for McBumble among the herd, all to no avail. Once the herd thinned out, airport workers and security personnel started looking at Buff and I, surely perturbed by our loitering in the airport wearing ghastly get-ups and carrying overbearing signs. After waiting for nearly thirty minutes, we realized McBumble was not coming through security. Perhaps she wasn’t even on that flight. We later found out that we had the wrong flight information. Her actual flight would arrive two hours later.
So in the end, Buff and I sauntered back to our car, unable to relish in our sacrificial appearance. Our pain was even more acidic because with our sign drawn passersby likely thought we had terrible taste in fashion or didn’t own a mirror, which is worse than knowing another’s public humiliation was behind our blatant buffoonery. Alas, though, my grand medium-effort attack was truly an attack on myself for harboring a desire to publicly humiliate. The joke was on me.
Categories: Status
The Social Moth 
Leave a comment