So your first semester away at college didn’t go so well. All you want to do is have a nice, relaxing trip home for the holidays, but your six-year-old cousin challenges you to the “Name the State Capitals Game” on your first day back and he completely wipes the floor with you.
You’ve officially hit rock bottom. How do you possibly come back from that? Here are five ways to regain your dignity and salvage the rest of your vacation:
1. A surefire way to regain your dignity is to immediately shotgun a beer in front of your six-year-old cousin. That always impressed your roommate, Steve, when the two of you were the only ones left in the dorm on Friday nights. So it will surely impress this pre-pubescent punk who just happened to know where Montpelier is. You’ll be back on top in no time!
2. Call your girlfriend, Nicole. Sure, you guys broke up the night before your Psych final… but at least you had a girlfriend. Your six-year-old cousin can’t say that, can he?! He still thinks girls have cooties. Cooties! Where does he think he is? Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida?!
3. Your six-year-old cousin was pretty damn proud of himself for knowing that the state capital with the most letters is Jefferson City, Missouri, wasn’t he? Show that cocky little shit all the big words you used in your Psych final this semester. He probably doesn’t even know half of the words in that paper! At least you knew almost half of the state capitals! Just try not to draw attention to the fact that your paper wasn’t properly formatted because you were too heartbroken by your breakup to thoroughly read the assignment and you ended up getting a D- in the class.
4. The only reason your six-year-old cousin knows Springfield is the state capital of Illinois, and not Chicago like you thought, is because he lives there now, but this holiday season he will be staying with your family for a few days. So make sure to leave him passive-aggressive notes whenever he leaves his toys scattered around the house, like your roommate Steve did after you didn’t clean up your side of the room in the week following your break up with Nicole.
The notes should be super condescending and hammer home the fact that your six-year-old cousin’s mommy isn’t here anymore, so he needs to act like an adult for the first time in his life and stop crying and clean up after himself! Much like your roommate Steve kindly suggested in his notes to you. Don’t worry, your six-year-old cousin won’t retaliate by smashing your brand-new Xbox and throwing your TV out of your bedroom window after shotgunning one too many beers one lonely Friday night like you did to your roommate Steve. Your six-year-old cousin is too young to have experienced the amount of heartbreak and betrayal that can push a man to that extreme.
5. Just walk away. He’s six years old. He knows this stuff because he probably just learned it in school, so it’s still fresh. You learned that stuff over a decade ago! It makes perfect sense that a few state capitals may have slipped your mind. You’ve lived a full life since then! Sure, you forgot Nashville was the capital of Tennessee, but at least you’re a Psych major at a prestigious university there… or at least you were. You don’t have time to squabble over something as petty as basic geography. Just pat the young man atop his stupid little jerk head, and bid him adieu. You have bigger fish to fry, like finding the best way to tell your parents that you’ve been kicked out of school for throwing a large television out of a third-story dorm room window.