Wake-up calls

Some people get really nervous when they receive phone calls late at night, as such calls are harbingers of unsettling news. I, on the other hand, fear phone calls before 8:00 AM, especially those from my mother, and especially since my father has cancer. My mother's skewed mindset makes her wait hours to reveal important, serious, and upsetting information until the early morning, when she knows I should be awake and getting ready for work. This is how I found out about my grandmother's death, while she got the call several hours earlier.

Not only do I dread these calls because of what information they relay, I also freak out TEN FOLD because I'm usually still asleep when she calls me.

I have gotten two early-morning calls from her in the past week, but they were not of the bad-news variety. Last week, she called to ask if I knew anyone who went to Northeastern Illinois University, and I had no idea what she was talking about, because it was 7:10 and I had been hitting the snooze button on my alarm for an hour. When I told her no, she replied, "Okay! Just checking! Have a good day!"

This morning it happened again. I had asked her to Tivo the broadcast of Company on Great Performances last night (fag.) since I don't get PBS (seriously!). She called at 7:00 to tell me that she forgot until it was a half-hour into the show, and then she set up the recorder, figuring I'd be fine missing the opening, or something. Then she realized that she recorded the wrong channel. Ha ha ha!! Isn't that funny?! CLICK.

It's one thing for her to save me the emotional burden of waking me up in the middle of the night to give me terrible news, but it's quite another thing to set up some sort of pattern and then, in a weird Boy-Cried-Wolf sort of way, freak the hell out of me at seven in the morning when she's driving to work and wants to think out loud over the phone.

Instant Messages from the Mothership

Every now and then, my mom and I will be on AIM at the same time. It rarely happens, but when it does, it's magical.

First, in response to my post on This Recording:



She's talking about my buddy icon, which I find hilarious. She does not.



Apparently, she's trying her hand at ethnic cuisine:



...And is always quick to give out advice:



She told me to use this picture instead:





If she reads this, she will probs disown me.

Pottymouths

I brought two discs of Deadwood home with me, as I'm in the middle of the second season, and since we're all adults around here, I figured it as OK to watch it in front of my parents.

Wrong-o.

I don't think they've been more offended by a television show. And it's not because in almost every episode you see one of the prostitutes giving a BJ. Or because there's a lot of violence, seemingly without consequence. No, it's because they say "fuck" a lot.

Five minutes into it, my father says, "I don't think they said that back then. This show isn't realistic."

It's so goddamn typical that the language would upset them. And entertaining, in a way, since my parents have never been ones to watch their language around their children. Or aging parents. While they usually reserve the F-word for very special occasions (read: when yelling at me), they do say "shit" quite often. In fact, my mother has called me a "shithead" at least twice since I've been home, and it hasn't even been a week.

She's also quite fascinated with "cocksucker" now that she's seen parts of Deadwood. The other night I heard her asking my eighteen-year-old brother if he's ever heard anyone use that word.

Something tells me that by next Christmas, Momma is gonna have a new term of endearment in her vocabulary.

Eeek! My parents are coming!

My parents are coming to Chicago to visit me for the first time since I moved here over two years ago. They had been planning to come for a long time but there's been a ton of family crises (deaths, cancer, etc) keeping them in Virginia. I'm very excited, but now that they'll be here in two days, I'm rather nervous because I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH THEM.

Granted, I can have them do all of the tourist stuff like the Sears Tower and Millennium Park because I know they want to do that stuff. But at the same time, I don't want to limit it to the crappy stuff like going to the top of a big building and looking at that damn Bean. I'm definitely going to encourage that we make the trek down to Hyde Park to go to the Museum of Science and Industry, since my dad is obsessed with Discovery Channel type things, and the Field Museum since my mom likes dead, stuffed animals (especially elephants!).

I'm also trying to figure out where to go for dinner three nights in a row. My parents definitely aren't as picky as I am when it comes to food, but they are just as hesitant to unnecessary fancy meals. (We don't have an exotic selection in Montross, natch.) I talked to my mom online last night, and she started asking me if I'd heard of the restaurants featured in her Frommers' guide (from 2004). "Have you heard of North Pond? How about Italian Village? Ooh! A Rainforest Cafe!" I, on the other hand, am trying to find some places that have some character and do not have locations in other cities. And also feature hamburgers on the menu.

I've also come up with two rules that my parents will have to follow the entire weekend. The first is mostly for my father: DO NOT TALK TO ANYONE YOU DO NOT KNOW. When my father came with me to Chicago, every single bum and con artist on the street took him for the sucker he is, and I'll be damned if he wasn't handing out spare change to anyone who asked him for it, only to bitch about it later to me. He even paid twelve dollars for an unsolicited shoe-shine!

Rule number two is for my mother: DO NOT ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT MY NEW JOB. My mother has been driving me absolutely nuts since Monday by calling me at work multiple times a day with random queries about my new employment. Hell, this started on Thursday, the day of the interview, when she asked me three times if Northwestern offered benefits. The thing that really aggravates me is that she'll just look up the answers to her questions on the Northwestern HR site no matter what I tell her, so I don't know why she's bothering me with them in the first place. Yesterday was probably the worst of it, when she called to tell me that I shouldn't have formally resigned from DePaul because I haven't gotten the official offer letter. She's convinced that my new boss is trying to scam me into working for free, I think, and she's terrified that I won't have a real job in two weeks. She also told me not to burn my bridges at DePaul "just in case of an emergency." I guess she expects that on Friday I'll be so excited to leave that I'll be throwing out Fuck-yous and c-punches and lighting my farts on fire.

I mean, it's not like I haven't thought about it, but come on - I'm an adult now.

Shocking revelations.

Sometimes my mom and I email each other while we're at work, none of which are very informative or worth sharing unless she tells me something specifically kooky. I thought that we had reached that point this morning when she told me that she also had that Klute haircut in college, but it went to a whole other level this afternoon. I'm including screen caps to show you I didn't make this up, and I apologize for what you're about to read.





Excuse me, but not until college? I assume that means she didn't choose to blow her nose until college, but still, that kind of baffles me. And I guarantee that she told me that if I didn't blow my nose I'd get ear and throat infections, as no one else would give me such health advice. Either that, or she was just trying to frighten me into blowing my nose so my sniffling wouldn't annoy her.

To say that I'm living a lie cannot begin to aptly describe this Earth-crashing information.

True Friendship, or: I'm your child, please take care of me until I'm thirty.

My parents just forwarded this email to me, the receipt of which was rather unsettling.

True Friendship: None of that Sissy Crap

Are you tired of those sissy "friendship" poems that always sound good, but never actually come close to reality? Well, here is a series of promises that actually speak of true friendship. You will see no cutesy little smiley faces on this e-mail-just the stone cold truth of our great friendship.

1. When you are sad -- I will help you get drunk and plot revenge against the sorry person who made you sad.

2. When you are blue -- I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3. When you smile -- I will know what you did last night.

4. When you are scared - -I will rag on you about it every chance I get.

5. When you are worried -- I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be... until you quit whining.

6. When you are confused -- I will use little words.

7. When you are sick -- Stay the heck away from me until you are well again. I don't want whatever you have.

8. When you fall -- I will point and laugh at your clumsy butt.

9. This is my oath..... I pledge it to the end. "Why?" you may ask; "Because you are my friend."

Send this to all 10 of your friends, then get depressed because you can only think of 4.

Is it absolutely terrible that I just want option ten ("When you overdraw your account for the fifth time in two months, I will sent you money so that you can pay your rent")? That one is surely the most applicable, only because they are unable to get me a new job where I can actually afford to pay my bills and eat two meals a day at the same time.

Stop reading my blog, Mom.

I called my mom last night because I hadn't talked to her in a few days, and, after asking me if I'd been to the Minneapolis airport lately (WHAT?!), we started talking about my brother and how he's adjusting to college.

"Do you talk to him often?" she asked.

"Yeah, I talk to him online everyday... he seems to be doing okay."

"Yes, he does seem to be enjoying it a little more. But is he telling you things he's not telling me? Is that story on your blog true?"

"Huh?"

"Did his roommate actually pee on the carpet?"

"Uh... I thought you didn't read my blog."

"Well, I Google you occasionally just to see what you've been up to."

Great. My mother GOOGLES me. Also, David: call her.

He hasn't fallen and he can get up.

It's hot here in the Outer Banks with temperatures dangerously close to one hundred degrees. And since we're in between two large bodies of water, the humidity is about ninety-seven percent. Basically, we sweat a lot, and then we get in the ocean and it's so cold that our balls hurt (especially Kristin's).

When we got back from the beach yesterday, I found my father like this:

I ran over to him, thinking he had slipped and fallen down the stairs, and asked him if he was okay. He shouted, "I'm fine, just hot! Lean down and put your head against this bar! It's nice and cool!"

My father grew up on a farm and didn't have indoor plumbing until he was seven. Likewise, central air must still be a luxury to him.