> Clearly poor communication on my end; I was joking about the billion dollars. My bad.
No worries, I'm pretty bad at being able to recognize humor over text even when it's done well, so I legitimately can't tell the difference between whether it's on my end or yours! And if it is on your end, it's certainly still a more palatable character trait than the amount of ego needed to say it seriously.
It is genuinely hard for me to say anything completely seriously and without an abundance of sarcasm. My therapist says it might be an avoidance mechanism that I devised as a kid in order to avoid confronting serious topics.
There probably is some truth to that, and it can understandably come off as me not listening or being mindful to things people say to me because they think I'm blowing it off, even when it's more of just how I deal with things. My wife, being pretty awesome in many ways, realized this pretty early on and thus more or less always understood that when I make a smartass comment even for serious topics, I'm not really trying to make light of it as much as its just how I cope with things.
Anyway, yeah, I'm sarcastic a lot of the time and I realize that that doesn't always come through with text.
I can definitely relate to that to a certain extent. My (mistaken) inference that you were serious probably was because so much of the comment before that did seem genuinely thoughtful to me, so I assumed that maybe all of it was intended to be. If anything, it sounds like maybe holding off on the sarcasm for so long forced you to have to make a quip near the end (or I just missed more of the sarcasm earlier).
I was just saying that I am too much of a coward to actually even attempt to make my own business.