After 38 years, the oboe is still a sensitive subject for you and your family. It helped shape the person you are today, a shell of a person riddled with multiple personality disorders.

It wasn’t your fault you couldn’t tame that plastic bastard – your tiny scarred lungs just couldn’t force enough air through that beaver-tooth reed.  You couldn’t play at home after the next door neighbor got home from work.  You weren’t allowed to play the oboe in marching band either.  You, you who could play Cole Porter and throw a perfect spiral thirty-five yards had to ding the freakin’ triangle out there on the football field.

And it wasn’t your fault that the oboes were cut out of the 7th grade band’s only recording; it was the first and second chairs who overwhelmed the entire woodwind section, thus depriving you of your fifteen minutes of fame.  The highlight of your musical career, reduced to a footnote on the back of the record, “oboes (D. Jones, L. Luce, T. Marie) cut from recording due to technical  malfunction.”

To your credit you emerged from that ordeal stronger but with a larger sense of entitlement.  Never again would your parents be able to control you as they gave in when you wailed, “It’s your fault — you ruined me with the oboe!”

Your dominant personality characteristic: your passiveness.

Your secondary personality characteristic: your aggressiveness.