Parents ≠ Roommates

Image from Sparknotes.com

It should come as no surprise to anyone that living in a house with your parents at the age of 26 is something other than enthralling. This is not to say that don't I love and appreciate everything my parents do for me. Their kindness and generosity has, let's face it, kept me quite comfortable during a very difficult time. 


ON THE OTHER HAND... there's a reason we move out when we grow into adults. There's a reason we fly from the nest, or leave the den, or start swimming up our own stream, or whatever semi-anthropomorphic animal analogy you can think of. This reason is: certifiable insanity. Perhaps it's simply that three, blood-related adults should not live under the same roof. Perhaps it's that family members tend to develop similar quirks and traits and these things sometimes collide in a weird and unfortunate series of events. But, and more likely I think, being a parent creates permanent changes in one's brain and you end up with a few screws loose. Like the bumpy road that is Parenthood causes the bearings and gears in your Car of Life to get a little worn out, and by the time your children are adults, you're tired of driving passengers around. This is not a disparaging remark on parents, or parenthood, or even being a child, I just really think it's a highly probable occurrence, and if I had a scientific backing for it, I'd sound all the more ingenious. As it stands, I am essentially just calling my parents nuts. Or maybe I'm nuts. (Oh wait, I am.) 


Allow me to elaborate on my hypothesis, using highly unscientific anecdotal evidence (and I can, because this is my blog and I am giving myself permission). 


Scrabble


My parents and I play Scrabble over dinner most nights when we're all home. (Actually, we play Super Scrabble, it has 200 letter tiles and quadruple word score squares!) Both of my parents have master's degrees in English. Scrabble at our house is an event to be reckoned with. Part of this is due to the fact that my father, Greg, is competitive in pursuits of the mind like no one else I know (except for maybe my brother and me*). The game will progress thusly:


We choose our tiles. We determine who goes first. Greg inevitably asks who goes next, and my mother, Ellen, and I have to explain that, since we always sit in the same seats, and game play always progresses clockwise, this shouldn't be an issue. My father usually wins. Not only because he has an immense vocabulary and deeply competitive spirit, but because he makes up words. Not in their entirety, but but adding entirely absurd, impossible, and downright imaginary pre- and suffixes to any word his little tray of letters can create, preferably with lots of z's and q's and k's in them. And despite our best efforts, most of the time, my mother and I end up so flabbergasted with trying to convince him that "unquixotics" is only a word to Dr. Suess and shouldn't count, that we just stop arguing and start trying to keep up. Inevitably, each of us will lose track of whose turn it is at various intervals during the game, though never simultaneously. My forgetfulness usually occurs during my mom's turn, as she takes a mean time of 5 minutes to put her words on the board, and my tweaky mind wanders. My dad, however, sometimes forgets that it's his turn during his turn, so it all comes out in the wash. 


At some point during the game, when we become frustrated waiting for my mother to make a decision, she accuses us of not wanting her to win. I usually correct her in that it is not that we don't like it when she wins, it's more that we don't like it when we lose. There's a big difference.


Our games get very close, and usually end up in the score ranges of 500+, which isn't too shabby, if I do say so myself. And yet, no matter how many times we play, I know the game will result in three things; one, I will call my dad "baldy," a nickname only I can get away with; two, my mother will collapse in a fit of giggles; and three, my father will hum what we call his 'guilty tune,' a little self-made harmony that he emits when eating the last bit of chocolate in the house, taking second helpings of ice cream, or placing a completely made up word on the Scrabble board.


Green Tea


One afternoon not too long ago, I casually mentioned that I might bring a box of green tea over to Adam's house. He and his roommates didn't have any, and I like having a cup before bed as opposed to the coffee sometimes prefers. 


I left to run errands and returned later that evening. 


Ellen had decided to clean out her tea cabinet. My mother is a big tea drinker, and as such, everyone (and I mean everyone) she knows ends up giving her tea and tea-related paraphernalia as gifts. The funny thing is, my mother only really likes a few kinds of tea, usually herbal and very mild. However, being the extremely gracious woman that she is, she keeps all manner of teas in the house. This habit is actually really nice when we have company, as there is surely to be a type of tea for every palate. My aunt even gave her these great lucite tea boxes that hold a zillion tea bags read for display and browsing by anyone, but they in NO WAY can come close to holding the enormous amounts of tea my mother has in her possession. She has black teas, green teas, white teas, herbal teas, homemade teas, fruity teas, and teas that are supposed to improve memory and sleep and probably increase your likelihood of autonomous flight. And this is just the tea itself. She has tea pots, infusers, strainers, spoons, cups, saucers, mugs (oh the mugs! Jesus!), creamers, sugar dishes, trays, and reusable bags. It is, to put it lightly, a little obscene. 


But anyway, back to my tale. So, I came home that evening to find boxes of tea covering our kitchen counters. She was condensing like-teas into their one boxes, sorting out the aforementioned lucite boxes, and throwing out teas that were older than I am and already starting families of their own. She had one pile of about eight boxes that were strictly green teas set aside on the kitchen table. 


"Those are for you to take to Adam's," she said, gesturing at enough green tea to keep Panda Express in business until a new dynasty. 


"Oh, cool, thanks," says I. "But, I don't think I need all of them. That's A LOT of tea."


Ellen stepped down from the stool she was using to get into the upper recesses of her tea cupboard and walked to the middle of the room.


"You'll take them because you love it and it's good for you!" She said quickly, pointing at the tea.


"But, uh, I mean, we don't drink that much tea at Adam's!" I said with a laugh.


"You'll take them because you love it and it's good for you!" She repeated, turned, and left the room.


This was one of those instances I experience with my mother that leave me feeling as though I am actually watching myself go insane. It makes me feel like I am a neutral third party, observing the scene from afar, thinking, "why yes, none of this is logical. Carry on." 


At any rate, the next day, most of the teas were returned to the cabinet, including the boxes of green tea, and I completely forgot to bring any to Adam's. Apparently I don't love it?


Vanilla Ice Cream and Other Non Sequiturs


I don't even know how to set this one up. I will simply put it this way: my father is the pickiest eater this side of five years old. When asked why vanilla ice cream is his favorite by my brother, Colin, my father responded thusly:


"I like vanilla ice cream best because it can only be used for ice cream."


Your friends and/or relatives might find you dead of an aneurysm one day because you thought about that statement too hard or long. Even thinking about it now makes me slightly dizzy. If you can think of another use for ice cream, aside from it being ice cream, feel free to share.


My father is full of non sequiturs. In a way that rivals the absurdities of a person with severe ADD, or (just as a for instance) the Catholic Church, which have no bearing on reality whatsoever, my dad can spout the most nonsensical statements. I've learned that what is actually happening is that his brain jumps three thoughts before he verbalizes anything, causing a serious gap in the understanding of others in the conversation. For instance, during Easter this year, we were sitting around the living room with my aunt and uncle, trying to figure out what the hell were the images printed on the M&Ms we were snacking on (they were little springtime creatures, FYI). I mentioned you can pay to get pretty much anything you want on M&Ms, which started a slightly off-kilter discussion on what we could imprint on them. As we were doing so, my father said, "In another two years, it will be the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic."


Silence.


It was like a verbal dingleberry that everyone was aware of, but no one knew what to do with. What we eventually ascertained my father's brain did here was think about imprinting anniversary things on M&Ms, and then his strange mind thought printing HMS TITANIC on a some M&Ms might be morbidly amusing, and as such, he mentioned it aloud. Granted, we were not immediately privy to his thought process, and left with an awkward and dangling non sequitur. 


"Uh, nice nonsensical statement, dad," I laughed.


He then realized how odd his statement was, and went on to explain how he came to blurt out the Titanic thing, but honestly! Adam was there, and I'm continuously thankful that he's patient and totally accepting of crazy people, since it's getting harder and harder for me to hide my own insanity; my parents waving their Crazy Flags around all the time doesn't much help my case.


Don't Leave Me Hanging On The Telephone


As a last example of how crazy my parents can be, I will elaborate on my father's fucking weird phone behavior.


Not unreasonably, Greg hates, and I mean HATES, telephone cold-calls. It doesn't matter what organization or business you're calling from - even if he supports your cause - if you're asking for money in any way and a computer is connecting you to our phone number, you will be brusquely disposed of at best, cursed at at worst, but usually just hung up on.


For a while, when my father would answer the phone to find that the person on the other end was asking for him, he would put on an English accent and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, he's not in. May I take a message?" As if they had any possible way of knowing my dad isn't English. As if they might assume that we have a butler, a manservant, a dog's body, from the British Isles who we keep around expressly for the purpose of putting off telemarketers. One I pointed this out, my dad took another tack.


Now, he just out and out hangs up if he thinks there's no one on the other end of the line. This is because he says that when telephone marketers call, it takes a while for the computer to connect them fully. He's not entirely wrong in this, it's true, and you can hear it click over if you wait. However, this also means that if you are a real, live, actual friend or relative calling our house, you literally have .5 seconds to say hello back to my father or you will be hung up on. I'm not joking. In fact, I'd recommend having half the "hello" going at all times. I suggest saying "He-" after every ring, so that you can finish with the "-llo" the second you hear my father's voice. Or better yet, the second you hear ANY sound that might resemble someone picking up the damn phone.


Why, might you ask, does this concern me so much? After all, people can just call back if they really mean it, right? Well, after you've been hung up on by your own father half a dozen times, you get kind of sick of it. Of my friends, my father has hung up on Tanya, Kelsey, Charlie, and most recently, Adam. He has also hung up on my aunts, my mother's best friends, and his own damn stock broker. So, should you decide to call our house, you need to bring your A-game, or you're going to get nothing but an earful of dial tone. 


It's In The Jeans


Honestly, I don't fault my parents for their craziness, and their quirks. I have plenty of my own. I do feel that many of these nutty behaviors are learned, but just as many are genetic. Either way, I'm blaming - and thanking - my parents. 


All the same, after 10 years of doing the laundry, my father finally learned not to wash the jeans with the whites. We've been tie-dye underwear-free for a decade now. Some craziness can be cured, but most of the time, I love it and it is good for me.


*Note the correct avoidance of the reflexive "myself" here. If you misuse the reflexive, I become tempted to smack you with an unabridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This may or may not be a genetic and/or learned trait.