I was with my father the other day, on a trip down to Omaha. We walked about the Henry Doorly Zoo for about six hours, and it was in the mid-nineties. I sweat a lot. Later, I went over to Dairy Queen and bought a large blizzard to cool me off. Also, I bought myself a bottle of Gatorade. Because that stuff feels real good when you've been sweating as much as I was.

Anyway, my father was telling me about how what I went through was "nothin'." "You probably won't believe this," he started, "but when I was in my twenties I had a job where I worked so hard that I sweat so much that I drank ten gallons of water a day...and I also ate a quart of ice cream."

He's right. I don't believe him.

He says that he used to rock climb on actual cliffs without a rope when he was my age, but oddly enough he refrains from climbing altogether whenever I drag him along to a rock climbing facility.

Family members have reported to me that, while watching the Fast and the Furious movies with him, he has in all sincerity claimed to have pulled off some of the stunts in those films.

He claims that he and all of his friends could run faster than the female sprinters in the last several Olympics (yes, that's as sexist as it sounds). So basically, he's saying that his friends could all run the 100m dash in ten and a half seconds. He also claims that he could swim faster than any Olympic female swimmer (news flash: he isn't built for swimming). I also find that rather offensive, considering that on my mother's side, I actually have a non-blood relation to actual Olympic athlete Diana Munz, who was my sports idol growing up. I even had a chance to train with an Olympic coach myself, and he shot that chance down because he thought that "he could train me better." And when I never became an Olympic athlete and quit my swim team because he was was an abusive father who beat me up when I didn't do well, he started attacking my character. He would have made it. Everyone that he knew growing up would have made it. All of the other parent's kids would have made up. I was the sole screw-up in the entire town, and an insult to him, and he would never let me forget it.

He's told tall tales like this for as long as I can remember. I make fun of them incessantly behind his back...and sometimes to his face. I do wonder how he can honestly believe that he did some of these things in his youth, and do so repeatedly. I think he first began convincing himself the day I was born, because that was the moment when he conveniently had someone to be perpetually disappointed in. And I've noticed that even when I do things that are more impressive than anything he ever actually did, he's still disappointed in me. His tall tales keep on coming.

Who here has someone like this in their life?