It's been a hell of a past few weeks, let me tell you.
I visited my folks over the weekend. What a circus that turned out to be. My dad is partially senile and my mom is partially deaf. Put them at the same dinner table and it's like trying to teach a blind kid how to drive...a stick shift...in the snow...up hill. I'll spare you the details (they are hard to follow anyway), but all I know is, I was exhausted by the end of dinner. My sister is coming in for Easter with her kids. I gave her fair warning about the parental chaos and all she did was laugh at me. You know what I say to that? Go ahead and laugh, "J". I'm not going to translate a damn thing for you when you're in town. You think your 2-year old's babbling is hard to understand? Good luck with mom and dad.
Speaking of misunderstandings, I made the mistake of telling my mother this very true, very unfortunate story about myself: Up until about 5 years ago, when I would hear someone use the term, "F bomb," I thought the F meant "fart," as in, "Fart Bomb." That said, I was having conversations like this:
Other person: "Oh man, you should have been in that meeting! It got crazy! Joe dropped an F bomb and everything!"
Me: "Get outta here, that's hysterical! You know, I was at Wal-Mart the other day and I dropped a super loud F bomb in the check out line!"
You can imagine my mortification (is that a word? It is now) to find out that for ten years of my adult, professional life, I was dropping a totally different F bomb than my colleagues...and bragging about it. I consider myself to be a fairly smart individual (or at least 'relatively'). Why it never occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, all these public F bombs I was being told about weren't really FART bombs, that people generally don't brag about their flatulence, never crossed my mind. I'm glad I finally figured it out. I may be a slow learner, but I'm a learner none-the-less.
It seems as though misunderstanding runs in my family. My 6 yr old nephew freaked a little last week when he thought you *had* to get married when you got older. This clearly put a damper on his views of adulthood up to this point, since a few months ago he found out he could curse all-he-wanted when he turned 35. In any case, he went so far as to ask my sister if "Aunt C" (that's me) was married. Much to his relief, he found out I wasn't. As a result, he is officially my new, favorite person in the whole world: The only person to think it's cool that I'm 33 and NOT married, never been and it's a toss up if I ever will. But to finish his story, when my sister asked him why he did not want to get married, he replied, "Because I don't know all the girls in the world!" Sounds to me like we've got a mini-Wilt Chamberlain in the making. I can't wait to see how his story develops. I can only hope it doesn't end with antibiotics and child support.
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