I was laboring
I'm done now, though. I finished writing an article for Pulp…which I should skim over and send off before I get sucked in to screwing around on here. Be right back…
But before I do, I have to tell you that the crazy old guy that lives across the street from me is wearing a tshirt that says, “I Climbed Mt. Everest for Parkinson's.” Bizarre. I can't read the rest of it, which is a shame because it might explain the overall meaning of the shirt.
Alright, it's sent. Let's all heave a sigh of relief.
My weekend has been pretty full. We didn't go to Ray's or anything because we just didn't have any spending money. On Friday we were especially broke and tired so we just stayed home and watched Queen of the Damned, which is one of the dumbest movies I've ever seen. That's saying a lot, too, because I've seen many many dumb movies. The boyfriend fell asleep halfway through but I stayed awake so that I could continue cutting up on it to myself. Some of the gems produced:
“This is, like, the gothest movie EVER!”
Upon seeing the huge gathering of goths for the concert in Death Valley: “That's my worst fucking nightmare…being stuck in the desert with a bunch of morons who can't dance and watching actors in leather pants lip sync to Korn.”
“Aaliyah…she's so goth she's black.” (I have to credit the boyfriend with that one.)
Anyway, I was starting to wonder why Aaliyah had to walk all serpentine-like. It was really getting on my nerves. Oh yeah, but of course, the Egyptians all walked with their torsos facing sideways and their arms akimbo. So I guess that's not too far off base, stylistically.
*snort*
Saturday I got up kind of early because I was meeting a guy on the South Side to interview him for the article I was writing. My mom was being very strange and menopausal, however, which resulted in us having several tiffs before even leaving the house. I was getting very irritated with her and the boyfriend because I often find that when I'm doing something “work-related” those two suddenly become extremely inept at child care. For instance, while I was supposed to meet the guy at 10 and at 9:15 I was not yet dressed and was making breakfast for the baby. The boyfriend was checking his email and my mom was sitting at the kitchen table complaining about hot flashes. My mom suddenly got all snippy with me and said, “Don't you have to meet that guy at 10? You'd better get ready, you're going to be late and that is unprofessional!” Bitch, don't tell me about unprofessional. I told her that I was aware of that but I had to make my son breakfast since apparently no one else was going to. My mom got the hint and helped the baby out with his food.
Earlier in the morning, my mom and I decided that she would drive me to the South Side while the boyfriend stayed home with the baby. I told her to please get the car seat from her car so that if the boyfriend needed to go somewhere he wouldn't be stranded. My mom just sort of looked at me but I figured that she understood. While I was getting dressed the boyfriend decided that he was going to take the baby out to Brookline to visit his family and therefore would be able to pick me up when I was done. It made sense, since my mom had to go somewhere with my grandmother. When I came downstairs the car seat was still in my mother's car and all three of them were sitting at the kitchen table, the baby picking at his french toast. My mom scrunched up her face at me and said, “The baby's shivering cold.” I looked around and noticed that not only was the ceiling fan on, but both the windows and the door were wide open.
“Why don't you close the door or something?” I asked.
“Because I'm hot,” my mom said.
I then got to use one of my least favorite lines. It's one that my mom always uses on me when she's trying to make me feel like a horrible person: “Well, it's not about you, it's about the baby.”
Oh, snap.
But we finally got out the door and got the car seat straightened out. On the way to the South Side I noticed that my mother was crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“I'm not crying!”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I'm not!”
“Yes, you are.”
“NO, I'M NOT!”
“You're crazy.”
That made her cry even harder and then she went off on some tangent about how I was keeping the boyfriend's plans from her. I explained to her (I admit that I did not use my calmest voice ever) that I did not know they were going to Brookline, it was something they decided at the last minute, and what was the big deal anyway? She then blubbered about how she couldn't deal with spur-of-the-moment plans and that I needed to be sensitive to that. I didn't see what she and her inflexibility had to do with any of it but whatever. I refrained from asking her if the surgeon didn't accidentally perform a lobotomy when they removed her uterus. I wanted to really bad, though.
Anyway, the interview went pretty well, although I didn't care too much about the contest that the guy is holding: The Loneliest Single Guy and Gal in America Contest. (You can read about it later in Pulp.) The guy was nice enough, though. Once the interview was over we were chatting and whatnot and the guy, Joe, said to me, “Do you mind if I tell you something completely off the record?” He then proceeded to tell me that he thought that I was very beautiful and blahblahblah. I was blushing furiously. I was flattered but uncomfortable since I was not attracted to this man what.so.ever.
I spent most of the day out in Brookline, dealing with the boyfriend's menopausal mother. She is constantly 50 degrees hotter than everyone else and doesn't seem to realize that while she is obese and menopausal, we are not. Therefore, we are not as hot as she is. augh.
The boyfriend's sister drove me home since the boyfriend stayed behind to help his uncle with some building. I realized as soon as we pulled into the driveway that I had forgotten my keys. It wasn't an extremely desperate situation as my mom was at the grocery store and due back soon. But I was pretty hungry and sitting on the deck for an hour was a little torturous. It was fun, though. The baby ran around while I sat and picked at ingrown leg hairs. Delightful.
Yesterday we had some friends and family over for a Labor Day picnic. I pigged out on food and champagne, chatted a little bit but spent most of the day by myself. My grandmother decided that after five years it was high time to pick on me about my nosering. It was odd, because it seems that any time an elderly person starts to do that, the person they're picking on, no matter what their age, suddenly becomes a sullen teenager.
“Kelly B., why do you have that ring in your nose?”
“I dunno.”
“Well, what's the point?”
“I dunnno, I just like it.”
“Well, who started it? Someone must have set the trend.”
“I dunno.”
I could have gone on some tangent about “tribal” customs making their way into white society and finding pleasure in pain and all that but I didn't feel like it. I'm not very spiritual about my piercings the way that some people are but I still don't like being bothered about it.
My grandmother also could not get over the Britney/Madonna/Christina performance at the VMAs. I'm not sure why she even watched it but it's been all that she's been able to talk about for days. Coincidentally, when I was in Brookline on Saturday, the boyfriend's sister was watching the VMAs as she had missed them the first time. The boyfriend's grandmother and mother have this weird habit of watching shows and commenting on the breasts of every woman who flashes across the screen. “Hers are huge…hers are tiny…hers are saggy for such a young woman…why do they wear those outfits? they leave nothing to the imagination.” God knows that the last thing that I feel like doing at this point is talk about Christina Aguilera's taste in clothes one more goddamned time. You know why she dresses that way? Because she's obviously a little crazy. End of conversation. Perhaps if Kim Jong Il were to start dressing in little dresses made of pink feathers Americans would start paying attention to him and discussing him at any sort of length instead of just staring blankly and saying, “Who? Isn't Kim Jong Il that female rapper who wore that skimpy dress to the VMAs that one year?”
But I digress. Back to the cookout. I suppose my alocohol consumption, while not in excess but still to the “toasty” level, prompted me to state that I thought that Madonna looked gorgeous and that I would have totally kissed her. My grandmother, the boyfriend's grandmother, and my mother's best friend looked at me as though I had just shit on their plates. Realizing that I had maybe gone to far, I retreated to the bathroom.
A surprising number of my friends attended, although they mostly clustered to themselves and didn't talk to anyone in my family. All in all, a pleasant day.
Today we're just hanging out, eating leftovers. Speaking of which, relatives are here.
