WARNING: If anyone reading this knows any of my parental units, don’t tell them about any of this (you’ll see why below). I should state that none of these various parental units read (or even know about) the weblog, at least not to my knowledge. And if they do, they shouldn’t tell me they do, because then they’ll lose their link to my gripes against them.
I knew it was going to be an odd day when my mother called me this morning. There are two major things wrong with this sentence.
1. “my mother called me”
It’s Mother’s Day. Granted, it’s a Hallmark Holiday, but traditionally, isn’t the child supposed to call the mother, not vice-versa? I think this may be attributed in part to the fact that my mom’s birthday is tomorrow (or today, technically), and she expects me to call for that and thus decided to absolve me of calling two days in a row. Or my mom could just be nuts.
2. “this morning”
My parents know my sleeping schedule, especially on the weekends. I NEVER get up before noon on a Sunday unless I have some sort of pressing work issue. I know my mom has been quite displeased with this ever since I started regularly sleeping until 2pm when I was about 13 or 14, but she gave up on trying to drag my ass out of bed when I was 16.
I ended up talking to her, half asleep, for about twenty minutes, I think at which point she may have realized I wasn’t particularly, you know, conscious, and decided to let me go.
So that was an odd event. Then my dad called and tried to convince me to come to Atlanta after finals, telling me there was a Melissa Etheridge concert at Chastain Park June 10th. I declined since a) I have numerous finals due June 10th and b) tickets to this Melissa tour are about 90 bucks a pop, which I already coughed up for her “live and alone” tour, which was really fucking good, but unfortunatley I don’t have that kind of income to dispose of twice. Other than that it wasn’t a remarkable conversation.
20 minutes after I hung up with my dad, I got a phone call from Ray Ann, my stepmom. This is kind of an odd event in and of itself, since while friendly, she and I are not particularly close since she and my dad got married after I left for college, and she generally doesn’t call me. It’s generally “Say hi to Ray Ann for me” or “Ray Ann says hi,” which I have no problem with, but which made me surprised to hear her voice on the other end of the line.
This is the part that requires the subterfuge on the part of anyone who knows my folks: Ray Ann suggested that I come down to Atlanta to surprise my dad for Father’s Day. It sounds like it’ll be fun, and hopefully I won’t surprise him enough to give him a heart attack or something. However, the snag in all of this is that I start my summer job the day after Father’s Day, and I don’t want to be either stuck in Atlanta or jetlagged, since I have to get up at 6:30am to be there on time.
However, it’s a free trip (and Ray Ann knows my weaknesses: she promised a good steak dinner while I’m there…mmm…steak….) at a point where I will quite likely have a very strong desire and a small window of opportunity to physically flee Chicagoland for a couple of days, since I will have just finished finals.
And it will actually be nice to see my dad.
So I guess the long and short of this is that I’ve wound up with a free trip to Atlanta, a moderately smaller phone bill than I would otherwise have, and a great deal of confusion about which one of my parental units is the craziest.
Ah, family. Can’t live with ’em, so I live in Chicago.