Pancake City

My wonderful sister, Tina, turned 28 on Friday. Her feelings about her birthday can be summed up by the photo below the fold.

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Mom visited Michele over the weekend. One of Michele’s cats, George, lost a lot of favor with Mom.

PRE-VISIT MOM: “I like George. He’s so friendly and playful. He’s much nicer than Black Cat.”
POST-VISIT MOM: [direct quote] “I’m going to put George in a cannon and shoot him.”

I’m not sure what George did, but it sounds like the Tuna Train got permanently derailed.

* While making Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my Mom what was in this bowl of sweet-smelling herbs. “Guess. You can test your smell.” Two seconds later, as I’m still in the process of bending over to smell then, she blurts out “Sage!”

ME: “Why did you tell me before I could guess?”
MOM: “I like to cheat.”

* “Sous Chef” is a fancy name for “chump who is unable or not trusted to cook.” I am always the Sous Chef on Thanksgiving.

* Mom has a hand-painted serving platter that she got from France. She loves this platter. I didn’t realize how much she loved it until she handed it to me to put on the dining table. “Jason. if you drop this, I will kill you. [laughter] I am serious. I will show no mercy.” After we stop laughing, she took the Death Platter back from me and put it on the table herself.

* I bought myself a hand blender for my birthday next week. Mom reimbursed me, and then Michele said she wanted to pay for the gift.

MOM: “Okay. You owe me $40.”
MICHELE: “$40? Jason told me it was $20.”
TINA: [looking to me] “I thought you said it was $30.”
ME: “It is $30. They are trying to one-up each other.”

Ass Prom!

This is so cool. It’s really good too. I want to steal her “Fucked-up Comments” idea. M’s posts are under “Inge” (I can only reveal so much about her identity).

I jotted a few notes while I was on vacation in Alaska. Most of them document my mom being silly.

* We were in a tourist store in Ketchikan. A green felt hat is on top of a clothes rack. My Mom swipes the hat and puts it on her head. “Shh! Don’t tell Tina.” She then sneaks towards to Tina to do who knows what. She never makes to Tina. A man next to her says: “Ma’am, excuse me. That’s my hat.”

* Each night there was a show on the cruise ship. The first night performers were the equivalent of a Broadway cover band. They did one song from almost every major musical: Phantom of the Opera, Grease, Oklahoma, and so on. Before the performance, they announced that “audio and video recordings are not allowed due to copyright infringement issues”. Yeah, I wouldn’t want Broadway to find out your swiping their best work either.

* While walking back to our room, Mom took the “Do Not Disturb” sign from a door and put it on someone else’s door. Then she ran away, giggling. I laughed. Tina was embarrassed.

* In Hoonah, we stopped by a crab shack for lunch. As we were resting at the table after the meal, I told Mom I was going to drink the rest of the dipping butter. She got up and started hitting me with her jacket. “You bad boy!” Tina interjected. “Mom! You hit that lady twice!”

Mom turned around to the woman she accidentally swiped and apologized. “I’m sorry. I was trying to hit my son.” On the off-chance that didn’t clear up the confusion, she followed up with an explanation. “He said he’s going to drink this cup of butter.”

There wasn’t much to say after that.

I’m cleaning my room and finding many scraps of paper with ideas or notes scratched on them. One of them has something my Mom said to my sisters and I when we were teasing her, worded for maximum guilt: “I’m used to the verbal abuse. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

Ouch!

Another was when our Mom was encouraging Tina and I to be more social.
MOM: “You need to get out more. Meet new friends.”
TINA: “Mom, we have social anxiety disorder. We don’t need to meet more people. We need there to be less people in the world.”

Let it be known across all nodes of ye Internet: it’s my sister’s birthday!

Subtitle: Finally, it’s finished.

I love my family. They are my biggest support network and constantly share their kindness with me. I wonder who reads my web page, but I know my family does. When I ran a contest a few weeks ago, Tina was the first to fulfill the stringent requirements (post a comment) and “won” a cartoon based on a word or phrase of her choice.

Her choice was “space monkey balls,” which I later learned was her variation of my Flickr account name. Time passed. She bugged me about my progress. “Still in the conceptual phase, Tina. I’ll have it done soon. Probably tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest.”

More time passed. I had some difficultly moving past the conceptual phase, i.e. a sheet of paper separated in uneven quadrants. Tina kept bugging me. Finally, to motivate myself and to show my sister how important it was for me to make a cartoon for her, contrary to my lack of action, I said: “I tell you what. I won’t make another post until I finish your cartoon.”

Dumb idea. The overall dumbness of the idea is that if I had the skills to make workable self-motivation plans, I wouldn’t have needed to make that promise in the first place.

The specific dumbness of the idea is that I, an incredibly lazy person, said, nay, promised, laid my integrity on the line, that come Satan’s dominion or a great flood, I just wasn’t going to do the ordinary work I avoid doing until I do the extra work that I’m really trying to avoid doing.

That happened two, three weeks ago? I could check, but again, re: laziness. What finally motivated me is Tina driving four hours to here to celebrate her birthday this weekend. The threat of a face-to-face meeting was a shameful enough thought to spur me to get the cartoon done.

Also, and I wish I was making this up, I kind of don’t have her Christmas gift done yet, and I am hoping this appeases her for a few days.

The cartoon.

Putting an exclamation point at the end would be emotional lying as I ended up going to bed at 11:30 p.m. on the 31th. Yes, I am an old man. I can’t wait for Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes.

I went to Florida for a week with Mom and Tina. We mostly stayed at the beach, and had a relaxing time. Global warming though has taken away the cache of vacationing to a warm climate.

I live in Washington D.C., an area that, up until a few years ago, had a potent combination of unpredictable winter weather and neurotic, fear-spongy residents. The local news stations are experts at whipping up weather-related fear. One of their tools is promotional ads for their respective station’s “Storm Center”.

The ads start off with a gruesome collection of winter images. People trudging to work through wind-whipped snow. Cars stacked on top of each other. Babies floating down the Potomac. An announcer utters with immense gravity: “Washington. Under Siege”. Or: “Winter Warning: Is the Snow-Nado Back?”

Oh, no! What do we do? The announcer’s voices softens: “Tune in to Channel 5, the only local channel with the Channel 5 Snow Patrol Doppler 5000 Protection League! Of Justice.” Whew.

Then Channel 7 airs their promo, except they have the Doppler 7000. Wow, that’s 2,000 more Doppler! And Channel 9 has the Doppler 9000, and Channel 13 has the Doppler 13000, and…wait a minute. Those Doppler douche-bags.

Anyway, the weather has been so mild this season that it has derailed most of the usual weather hysteria. I wish the unseasonable weather was a fluke, but as the Bush administration has stated, the warming trend over the past several years is real, and is caused, we know now, by what the scientific community calls “Angry Monkeys in Outer Space”.

These angry monkeys have made the last few winters in D.C. almost devoid of snow and forced local news stations to lower their promo airing standards from “Threat of Flurries” to “Brr! It’s cloudy outside.” (Seriously. They occasionally can’t help to air one of the promos, but the announcer has a tint of shame to his speech, like a co-worker the next day after he crapped his pants at the office holiday party.)

Back to my point. Thanks to angry space monkeys, vacationing to a warm climate in the winter barely earns a quiver of jealously anymore. This is a typical conversation I had with my friends when I got home:

ME: “How was your Christmas?”
FRIEND: “I’m Jewish.”
ME: “That’s good to hear. Guess what! I was in Florida!”
FRIEND: “That’s nice.”
ME: “Yup. 70 degrees weather the whole time. What was the weather like here?”
FRIEND: “60 degrees the whole time.”
ME: “Oh.”
FRIEND: “Yeah, we had another warm front.”
ME: “Well, it was so warm in Florida that I could wear shorts at night.”
FRIEND: “Lucky. I had to switch to pants after 8:00 p.m.”

There’s no way to make people jealous anymore with a winter trip. Where am I going to fly to now to make people jealous? Outer space? Not without a food-fitted Gatling gun and a box full of bananas. Besides, I would probably just have this conversation:

ME: “Guess what! I went to the Sun!”
FRIEND: “That’s nice.”
ME: “Yup. 6,000 Kelvin the whole time.”
FRIEND: “4,000 Kelvin here.”
ME: “Oh.”
FRIEND: “Yeah, we had another hole in the ozone layer.”
ME: “Well, it was so warm on he Sun that I was vaporized instantly into hydrogen.”
FRIEND: “Lucky. I had to be a semi-liquid after 10 p.m.”

My family’s favorite part of Christmas isn’t receiving gifts. It’s not giving gifts. It’s using trickery and guile to find out what they’re getting from each other before Christmas.

By using “they’re” instead of “we’re”, it may appear that I consider myself an outsider to their shenanigans, one who holds surprise to be the best part of gift giving and looks with dismay on anyone who seeks to corrupt the joy of the unknown before the appropriate day.

It may appear this way because it is absolutely true. I love surprises. They love CSI: Christmas Scene Investigator. We battle yearly, the purist vs. “This one is practically unwrapped already. Might as well open it now.” I always lose, it’s just a matter of what degree.

Yesterday, I was wrapping their gifts in a bedroom in my Mom’s house. I knew ahead of time this was a huge tactical blunder, much like a dopey security guard walking in one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn and swinging in each hand a large bag with a giant $ sign on it, while singing “Whistle While You Work” to himself and pausing occasionally to adjust his boxers or wave to strangers.

It was the only time I had to wrap the gifts, but I can blame no one but myself for what happened next. First, Tina tried the blunt approach. She walked in the room and began searching through the big bag of gifts that I brought. ‘Tina, what are you doing?” I snapped. She looked hurt. “What? I thought they were wrapped.”

Okay. Perhaps she didn’t see the scissors in my right hand. Or the wrapping paper strewn on the floor. Or that I had to spit out a piece of ribbon in my mouth before I could scold her. She stomped out of the room. “Everyone, watch out. Jason is Mr. Cranky Pants today.”

I could still hear the cries of “Mr. Cranky Pants” after she went downstairs, so I shut the door. I didn’t want to shut the door, because a closed door near Christmastime attracts a lot of attention in my family, much like a suitcase handcuffed to a courier pokes the curiosity of even the most virtuous.

A few minutes later, I realized I forgot to bring name tags for the gifts, so I opened the door a crack and slid out to grab some downstairs. Right after I put my foot on the first step, I heard a soft voice whisper behind me, “He’s gone, let’s go!” I turn around to see Michele and my Mom make a dash for the room.

I chased them down and shoved them out before they could discover anything. Then I locked the bedroom door, and, I’m being completely serious here, shoved a laundry hamper and a chair in front of the door to barricade it lest one of them pick the lock. Which they have done before. Usually with a letter opener, but they’ll use a paper clip if they have to.

After I finished wrapping the nameless gifts, I brought them downstairs. A luxury the family did not always have. After our dad passed away, there were a few hours in the day when Mom was at work and the three of us were at home, unsupervised. Michele and Tina used this valuable time for many tasks, one of which was to unwrap and rewrap their gifts.

They could have got away with it too, if they weren’t so proud of themselves that they burst into laughter in the midst of unwrapping presents Christmas morning (or occasionally crying to Mom a few days before Christmas because they unwrapped all their presents and found that they weren’t getting something they really wanted). My family isn’t Jewish, but we know the meaning of chutzpah.

Leaving gifts under the tree is no longer a risky behavior. Michele and Tina view surreptitious unwrapping the same way they view the Barbies and My Little Ponies they played with as children. They have moved on long ago to more sophisticated techniques.

All of which they learned from my Mom. Michele and Tina have come a long way, but they’re still not even in the same league as her.

This year, Tina had a good idea. Knowing my Mom loves to find out what she’s getting ahead of time as much as she does, Tina called Mom and proposed a trade: I’ll tell you one gift you don’t know about if you tell me one gift I don’t know about.

Mom agreed, and asked about the heavy, thin object. Mom thought it was a Picasso painting. Unfortunately it was a baking sheet. Tina asked about a medium-sized box, and found out Mom got her wine glasses.

Tina called Michele to crow about her cleverness.

“Guess what. I got Mom to tell me one of the gifts she got me.”

Michele knew most of the gifts Tina got. “Which one?”

“The wine glasses. I told her about the baking sheet, and she told me about the wine glasses.”

“Tina, you fool. Mom didn’t get you wine glasses. She hid the real present in a wine glass box.”

“WHAT?”

“Oops. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

As Tina and Michele were retelling the story on Christmas day, Mom shook her fist triumphantly. My Mom, the master bargain hunter, managed to get something for nothing again. Michele blabbed the goods to Tina, but Mom was still victorious: she pulled a fast one over her gullible kids.

I forget how I learned that Santa Claus isn’t real. I have a hunch though Mom had to resist doing a fist pump and saying, “Yes!” afterwards. And that, if I have kids, it will be hard for me not to do the same.

Update: After Tina read the post, she said, “I found out Santa didn’t exist when Mom asked me to write his name on a gift tag.”

Michele found out today that she passed the New York bar. Let the suing begin!

One of my Mom’s hobbies is to send her children alarmist emails about the hidden dangers of the world. These emails share three qualities:

1. They are about a danger that I have never heard about, and never would have if she had not sent me this email.

2. The danger affects about 1 in a million people, if that.

3. There is absolutely nothing reasonable one can do to defend against the danger. The defensive action suggest in the email, almost always forwarded through a long chain of people before it reaches her and she broadcasts it to us, is drastic and involves making a major behavior change that is completely overblown considering the negligible risk of the actual danger. In the past, this has included “Don’t go swimming in the ocean” (Summer of the Shark), “Don’t answer the door at night” and “Always check under your bed for Black Widow spiders before going to sleep.”

The title of the latest one, sent today? “FW: New Trick for Rapists, Please Read!”

A few years ago, I used to wonder why I’m so anxious that I need to take medication.

…never met me.

I couldn’t find a place before my lease ended at the end of September, so I moved in with my Mom for a week or so. Or a month. Or a year. This place is a trap.

The problem with moving in is that, in my old home, I lived in a dingy townhouse with a moderate-sized and cramped common areas. In my Mom’s house, I have my sleeping room, my changing room, my storage garage, my storage basement, and my guest room. Tina is visiting for the weekend, and in the spirit of generosity, I decided to let her stay in my changing room rather than my guest room, which, to be honest, doesn’t allow one the full range of comfort a guest should expect in another person’s home.

My best hope for getting out of here was a few days after I moved in, before my comfort items were unpacked and my Mom’s efforts to get me to stay with her by cooking nightly meals for a while took hold.

I know it’s not good for me to stay home, but it’s easy. I feel like I’m on vacation. Driving 45 min. each way to walk dogs for a few hours is a pain, but I know if I stopped it would just make it easier for me to dilly-dally. I dilly enough as it is in my life. I don’t need to dally.

One motivation for moving out is that I’m turning 30 in two months. I really don’t want to be living with my Mom when I’m 30. Arbitrary in a way, yes, but if I’m still living with my Mom in two months, I might as well quit my job and dig up a 2005 Holiday Hecht’s catalog so she can start dressing me too.

It’s my Mom’s birthday today. My Mom is so great that when my friends meet her, they try to get her to adopt them. She’s kind, generous, and has a big heart, even for psychotic cats, particularly a black one that no one else except my sister likes because the cat has crawlwed up from the depth of Hades to demand tuna…or else. Happy Birthday, Mom.

My sis Michele is taking the bar today (her birthday) and tomorrow. Wish her luck.