1. Be in your early teens.
2. Nurture an overriding knowledge of your own superiority (specifically between yourself and your family).
3. Read (comic) books. A lot.
4. Discover a witty, erudite, and scornful phrase that you think is the paragon of cleverness (but in later years will make you cringe like a bath of cold water on your nether regions).
5. Important: Do not consider all ramifications of the witty, erudite, and scornful phrase. Merely appreciate it for how witty, erudite, and scornful it sounds.
6. File away the witty, erudite, and scornful phrase in your adolescent brain for later use.
7. Wait.
8. Have your father do something that mortally embarrasses you. (This occurrence is a mathematical certainty.)
9. Pull your witty, erudite, and scornful phrase out, like a longsword from a scabbard, and brandish it in all its glory:
   

   “A pox on your firstborn!”

10. Now consider all ramifications of the witty, erudite, and scornful phrase.
11. Feel the walls of your psyche implode as your father proceeds to regale you — his firstborn son — with laughter as deep and as wide as the ocean.
12. Die inside.
13. And then recover.
14. Wait.
15. Relive the utter humiliation as this moment is brought forth and cherished, like a holy relic, throughout the remainder of your life.

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