Weekend Wrap Up
This past weekend, I went home to celebratemy mom's 50th birthday. I bet she'd die if she saw that I just put her age in print. Although maybe not, my mom's not really one to get hyped up about age. Anyway, my point is, I was home. And, as always, with my family, it's always an enlightening experience. Here's some of what ensued.
- My weekend began on Thursday afternoon, with my right index finger getting slammed in a door. I swear, I yelled "fuck" in like ten different languages at ten different decibals within about a ten second span. It's all blueish and dead. Only now am I getting some feeling back, and normally that's not so bad, but you'd be surprised how much a person uses their right index finger. Plus, it looks disgusting and people have been telling me I'll probably lose my fingernail and it will take a year to grow back. I love hearing these things. It's only second to hearing, "Ewww, oh man, what's on your finger?!" when you're talking with someone. I wish my middle finger was the gross one, becuase it would be so ironic to flash it right back at these people.
- The Commuter Rail is an interesting place. I took the rush-hour train to Worcester, so I got a good idea of what the average commuter is like. It reminded me of going to jury duty a few years back. When I went to jury duty, and saw what a jury of my peers looked like, I got freaked out for life. Pretty much the same thing on the Commuter Rail.
- My sister, dad, and I went to dinner when we got home. We were at this restaurant, and the waitress came over to take our order. She asked if we were ready, and we all said yes. Then, as she went through each of us ordering, all three of us took about ten minutes a piece to order, change our mind, make an amendment to our selection, and argue with each other over what we were getting. I would have been pretty peeved if I were this waitress.
We also had an interesting conversation topic at dinner, where my sister unveiled her newfound obsession with all things CSI related. She treated our topic like she was the lead detective at a crime scene investigation. I'd go into more detail, but I really can't. Suffice it to say that the couple next to our table kept looking over at us, wondering whether we were crazy or whether they were going to be called in as witnesses during a police investigation. Even writing this is sketchy and weird.
- My sister and I absolutely love the MTV show Run's House. It's on at 10:30 on MTV, and if you're not watching... something's wrong.
- Also, my sister did make an official notice that it took me approximately seven minutes for me to claim the best TV chair and the remote. I think I relinquished control of these two things maybe twice all weekend, and let's face it, that's being generous. Pretty much, if I'm home, I'm either in this chair, or I'm asleep.
- On Friday morning, I played the age-old trick on my sister. I can't believe she fell for it. The sink has this water sprayer thing, and I called my sister over, and I sprayed her with the water. She freaked out. The thing is, I'm shocked, and frankly, disappointed, that she let this happen. We've been doing this game for years, and it's been nearly impossible for either of us to fall victim to the spraying. Poor form.
- My mom, sister, and I took a trip to the mall, where we went to Nordstrom's Cafe for lunch. My sister loves this place. While there, I was reminded of this story. The cafe has this decadent chocolate cake, and it's always on display. When we were younger, my sister and I would look at it like chubbos and think it looked pretty good. We'd never get it - we'd always just get lunch - but it was like this really nice looking dessert. Then, a few years ago, we were in the Nordstrom in Providence with my cousin, and we were having lunch. All of a sudden, this guy sat down at the table next to ours with a slice of the cake and the big glass of milk. He kept looking over at us, inching closer, as he ate his cake. The thing was, though, he kept taking these huge bites and he kept burping and slobbering and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. It was easily the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. All of us kept looking over at him, furtively, in shock that this guy was eating the cake like this. Seriously, if it is possible for someone to violate both food and other diners simultaneously, this guy was doing it. Anyway, the point of all of this is that whenever we see the cake now, we want to puke.
- I'm not sure whether this exists in other families, but in my family, you have to bargain with someone to get a favor. Seriously. When we were kids, you know what we'd bet each other? Slavery. I'm not kidding. If you lost a bet, or a competition, or whatever, you had to be the person's SLAVE for the day/night/week. The worst part? We actually followed this! Anyway, as we got older, we obviously didn't do this anymore (though at some point during the weekend, I have a distinct recollection of asking my brother if he wanted to make the slavery bet, and he opted not to), but still, the remnants are there. If I ask my sister to get me a diet coke, nine times out of ten, I'll hear later that night that I have to do her dishes because she got me that coke. Seriously, I might as well put the diet coke on layaway. It really is that bad.
Me: Steph, on your way back downstairs, will you bring me a diet coke?
Her: No.
Me: Please? Come on, do it.
Her: Ughhhh
Me: Come on, I got you a cookie yesterday.
Her: Yeah, but I'm not going in the kitchen.
Me: Come on, I did your dish last August.
Her: Ughhh, fine, but you have to wash my glass, too.
Me: Fine.
You'd think I'm making this up, but I'm not. My sister used to say she couldn't go get napkins because she had ADD and she would get lost on the way. (And YES, she DID say this. She's probably going to get all bent out of shape about me putting that in, but it's the truth. She used to get bent out of shape when I told her she sucked at violin, when I laughed at her for falling on her face tap dancing, and when I didn't appreciate her bullshit birthday gifts. She'd get my dad to yell at me for insensitivity, and now we look back on this and see how brilliantly she played him. Well, she never put one over me. I knew her game. And I'm serious, she used that ADD excuse every time we got take out, and she knows it.)
(I'm getting over it.)
(It's a slow process.)
- Last Thanksgiving, I saw the movie "Christmas with the Kranks." The mother in there goes nuts every time her daughter calls. She yells out, "Bllllaaaaaaaaaiiirrr!"
I have no idea why, but this struck everyone as hilarious, and when I see my brother, whose name is Michael, after not seeing him for weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, whatever, I've pretty much been yelling, "Blaaaaaaaiiiir!" at him.
Sometimes, I just say it randomly. Not quite sure why I'm including this, but it gets my brother every time.
- Speaking of the infamous Michael, he had this gem to offer at dinner on Friday night: "The day after I turned eleven, I wet the bed. Mom got so mad at me, I never did it again."
- My sister wondered, "Why is it important to have hand-eye coordination in baseball, anyway?" She asks me whether players wear glasses, and questions how someone with bad eyesight can play baseball. Apparently, she had never heard of contact lenses.
- I had written about my sister's follow up to my brother's admission to peeing in his bed, and I had removed it after I thought she would be too angry. But she brought it up after she read this, so I'm editing and adding it. Basically, she reminded us of the time that she peed on her seat at the dinner table, after I laughed so hard at something that water came out of my nose. (Yeah, we're a pretty nasty bunch, I guess.) Anyway, my mom (again) was unhappy at this (shocking!). My brother did a pretty good impression of my mom yelling at my sister to change her jeans and to put them directly on the floor by the washing machine, NOT in the laundry basket with the other clothes.
- My sister and brother go to extreme lengths to make a successful joke. Like on Friday night, they told me they wanted to watch "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" just to see how long I'd sit through it. Well, the couch is comfortable. So I had to watch about an hour and a half of absolute trash. At the end of it, they both looked at me in bewilderment. "We just wanted to see if you'd be able to last through it all." Yeah, nimrods. You wasted the 90 minutes, too. I mean, really, do they think these things through at all?
- This was a fun conversation:
Mom: Michael, are you coming with me at 1 or at 3 today?
Michael: I don't care.
Mom: Well, choose.
Michael: Whatever's easiest.
Mom: It doesn't matter.
Michael: I don't care.
Mom: You have to be here for Stephanie to give you the test. (Oh, right, as a subplot, my sister's been administering IQ tests to my brother. Even worse, my mother has been taking the results seriously. "Did you hear? Your brother's IQ is like, 140," to which my sister responds, "Mom, seriously, I don't think I did the test right." "Oh no," says Mom. "He's a genius." God.) So when do you want to go?
Michael: I'll ask Stephanie.
Stephanie: I don't care.
Michael: Okay, well, I'll just decide later.
Mom: Michael, just choose.
Michael: I'll go at 3.
Mom: You'll go at 3?
Michael: Yeah, I'll ask Stephanie when she needs me.
Stephanie: I want to test you later. I have to do my hair now.
The conversation ends. At 1, my mom and I are in the car.
Mom: Where's Michael?
Me: He's coming later.
Mom: What? I have to come all the way back here for him? Backtrack? No. Where is he?
She beeps the horn.
She beeps the horn again.
My brother opens the door.
Michael: What?
Mom: You're not coming now?
Michael: No, I'll go later.
Mom: But Stephanie wants you to do the test later.
Michael: She doesn't want to test me at all anymore.
Mom: Well, come now.
Michael: Okay.
- I had to pick up the Chinese food for my mom's party. So I went to the restaurant and it was taking waaay too long to pick up this special order. So I tell the host, whom I know, that he's got to speed it up. The place is pretty busy, and he keeps seating people instead of going to get the food. So I grab him before he goes to seat the next family, and I say to him, "This is really taking way too long. It's just not acceptable. I've been waiting fifteen minutes, the party starts in five minutes, this shouldn't be happening. I don't want to see another party seated until I have my order. Even if that means going back and bagging it yourself, I really need the food, okay?" And he goes. I think the guy in back of me was shocked.
Two seconds later, my sister comes in from the car. "Hey," she says to me, "you've got to do something. This is ridiculous. Are you just standing here, doing nothing? You have to be aggressive."
Yeah, my sister doesn't really know me I guess. When I tell her I've got it under control, she leaves.
"Must run in the family," says the guy behind me.
- On Sunday, my dad drove us back. In the car, we were talking about this woman my dad knows. She happens to be a pretty rude peson, in addition to being just plain unattractive. Apparently, my dad went out with her once, without knowing what she looked like. My dad's not a shallow guy or anything, but he just hadn't seen her before. Anyway, I asked him how he could go out with her, she's so awful, and all that. And my dad goes, "Well, I showed up, I had to go through with it. I just kept telling myself, 'Just have a drink, get through the hour.' "
"Eww, what did you even think when you saw her?" I asked him.
"Well," my dad said, "I could tell right away that she wasn't doing a good job of projecting femininity."
Come on, is that not the best euphemism for "ugly" that you've ever heard?
- We decided to go to the movies before going to see my grandmother. So we ended up in Kendall Square. First of all, my dad, a native Boston guy, was like, "Aren't you impressed at how well I know my way around?" approximately 3.2 seconds before he found himself trying to turn the wrong way on a one-way street.
We made it to Kendall Square, but we had no idea where this movie theater was. My dad asked this random woman if she knew. "Oh yeah," she said. "I'm going there now, actually." That was the end. We had to follow her to the movie theater, apparently. This made both me and my dad think about Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm, because this was the perfect comedic situation for him and the show. For a few minutes, my dad had to make this awkward conversation with this woman about what movie she was going to see, what movie we were going to see, etc. It was like he was forced to make small talk with her. Why couldn't she just give the directions to the theater, rather than assume that we had to follow her? I can't decide if she's weird for that, or if my dad and I are weird for thinking there's something wrong with her in the first place.
- I might be ambivalent about her, but Cambridge has got some kooks. While waiting for the movie to start, the guys in back of us were talking about heart palpatations they got from drinking coffee, and how it's nearly impossible to remember to ask for decaf when they go to Dunkin Donuts. One of the guys was like, "They should have a warning about palpatations, just to remind us." Like the palpatations aren't warning enough. Look, I get sick looking at that Nordstrom chocolate cake- just from the memory of watching that guy have a drag-out fight with indigestion. If I had heart palpataions from something, I think that would be enough to trigger the "Must Not Order" reaction.
- You might remember this from "To Grandmother's House We Go," but my family cannot decide where to go to dinner in 250 words or less.
Dad: Where do you want to eat?
Grandma: I don't care.
Dad: Any ideas? We're open to ideas.
Nobody says anything.
Dad, looking at me: How about Kowloon? (Whenever I say I don't care, my father always chooses something he knows I can't stand, because the following happens.)
Me: Eww, no, absolutely not, I hate Kowloon.
Dad: So you do care.
Me: You know I hate Kowloon.
Dad: It's an entirely new menu.
Me: I don't care.
Grandma: You know, they have an entirely new menu. I got sick that once, oh, I was so sick. The food was delicious though. But I didn't go back for a while. But now it's good. They have a new menu.
Dad: See? They have a new menu.
Me: No.
Stephanie: We had Chinese food last night.
Saul (Grandma's "Companion," and the owner of a used Corolla, which is cuter than I expected): How about Applebees?
Grandma: Applebees is good.
Stephanie: I hate Applebees.
Grandma: They have this steak. They used to have it, and then one time they didn't, and I asked the waiter. And the manager came out and they made it anyway. It had.. what did it have on it?
Saul: Peppers.
Grandma: Peppers.
Dad: Okay, let's go to Polcari's. (We end up there every time.) Is that okay with you guys?
Grandma: Polcari's. It's fine.
Dad: Saul, you can get a salad.
Me: What? Why does he have to get a salad?
Dad: Saul has to get a test done tomorrow, so he's worried about what he eats tonight. He can get a salad at Polcari's.
Saul: Whatever. (He had pizza.)
Dad: Do you want to eat here instead, Rita? I'll bring the food back?
Grandma: Eat Chinese food or Italian food?
Dad: Italian.
Grandma: No...
Dad: Would it make a difference if it were Chinese food?
Grandma: I only have six chairs.
Dad: Well, I could sit in the recliner and eat.
Grandma: It's messy.
Dad: What's the difference if you eat Chinese food?
Grandma: You want to eat in?
Dad: If you want to. It might be more relaxing, I don't know.
Grandma: Italian? No, you don't bring Italian in. Chinese, maybe, but Italian? You don't bring Italian in. Even Chinese food...I only have the six chairs. Saul, maybe you could move the chair... I mean, Italian? You don't bring Italian in.
Dad: Okay, we'll go out. Let's go.
Everyone starts to get ready and head out.
Me: You know, if you get the food to bring in, everyone can have what they want... Chinese, Italian, whatever.
Stephanie: WHY did you just do that? We had decided!
Dad: That's true. Rita, what do you think?
Grandma: Bring food in? Italian?
Dad: No. I'd bring you Chinese. You can get what you want. Everyone gets what they want. I'll go pick it up.
Grandma: I only have six chairs.
Dad: Okay, we're going out.
Until next time.
- My weekend began on Thursday afternoon, with my right index finger getting slammed in a door. I swear, I yelled "fuck" in like ten different languages at ten different decibals within about a ten second span. It's all blueish and dead. Only now am I getting some feeling back, and normally that's not so bad, but you'd be surprised how much a person uses their right index finger. Plus, it looks disgusting and people have been telling me I'll probably lose my fingernail and it will take a year to grow back. I love hearing these things. It's only second to hearing, "Ewww, oh man, what's on your finger?!" when you're talking with someone. I wish my middle finger was the gross one, becuase it would be so ironic to flash it right back at these people.
- The Commuter Rail is an interesting place. I took the rush-hour train to Worcester, so I got a good idea of what the average commuter is like. It reminded me of going to jury duty a few years back. When I went to jury duty, and saw what a jury of my peers looked like, I got freaked out for life. Pretty much the same thing on the Commuter Rail.
- My sister, dad, and I went to dinner when we got home. We were at this restaurant, and the waitress came over to take our order. She asked if we were ready, and we all said yes. Then, as she went through each of us ordering, all three of us took about ten minutes a piece to order, change our mind, make an amendment to our selection, and argue with each other over what we were getting. I would have been pretty peeved if I were this waitress.
We also had an interesting conversation topic at dinner, where my sister unveiled her newfound obsession with all things CSI related. She treated our topic like she was the lead detective at a crime scene investigation. I'd go into more detail, but I really can't. Suffice it to say that the couple next to our table kept looking over at us, wondering whether we were crazy or whether they were going to be called in as witnesses during a police investigation. Even writing this is sketchy and weird.
- My sister and I absolutely love the MTV show Run's House. It's on at 10:30 on MTV, and if you're not watching... something's wrong.
- Also, my sister did make an official notice that it took me approximately seven minutes for me to claim the best TV chair and the remote. I think I relinquished control of these two things maybe twice all weekend, and let's face it, that's being generous. Pretty much, if I'm home, I'm either in this chair, or I'm asleep.
- On Friday morning, I played the age-old trick on my sister. I can't believe she fell for it. The sink has this water sprayer thing, and I called my sister over, and I sprayed her with the water. She freaked out. The thing is, I'm shocked, and frankly, disappointed, that she let this happen. We've been doing this game for years, and it's been nearly impossible for either of us to fall victim to the spraying. Poor form.
- My mom, sister, and I took a trip to the mall, where we went to Nordstrom's Cafe for lunch. My sister loves this place. While there, I was reminded of this story. The cafe has this decadent chocolate cake, and it's always on display. When we were younger, my sister and I would look at it like chubbos and think it looked pretty good. We'd never get it - we'd always just get lunch - but it was like this really nice looking dessert. Then, a few years ago, we were in the Nordstrom in Providence with my cousin, and we were having lunch. All of a sudden, this guy sat down at the table next to ours with a slice of the cake and the big glass of milk. He kept looking over at us, inching closer, as he ate his cake. The thing was, though, he kept taking these huge bites and he kept burping and slobbering and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. It was easily the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. All of us kept looking over at him, furtively, in shock that this guy was eating the cake like this. Seriously, if it is possible for someone to violate both food and other diners simultaneously, this guy was doing it. Anyway, the point of all of this is that whenever we see the cake now, we want to puke.
- I'm not sure whether this exists in other families, but in my family, you have to bargain with someone to get a favor. Seriously. When we were kids, you know what we'd bet each other? Slavery. I'm not kidding. If you lost a bet, or a competition, or whatever, you had to be the person's SLAVE for the day/night/week. The worst part? We actually followed this! Anyway, as we got older, we obviously didn't do this anymore (though at some point during the weekend, I have a distinct recollection of asking my brother if he wanted to make the slavery bet, and he opted not to), but still, the remnants are there. If I ask my sister to get me a diet coke, nine times out of ten, I'll hear later that night that I have to do her dishes because she got me that coke. Seriously, I might as well put the diet coke on layaway. It really is that bad.
Me: Steph, on your way back downstairs, will you bring me a diet coke?
Her: No.
Me: Please? Come on, do it.
Her: Ughhhh
Me: Come on, I got you a cookie yesterday.
Her: Yeah, but I'm not going in the kitchen.
Me: Come on, I did your dish last August.
Her: Ughhh, fine, but you have to wash my glass, too.
Me: Fine.
You'd think I'm making this up, but I'm not. My sister used to say she couldn't go get napkins because she had ADD and she would get lost on the way. (And YES, she DID say this. She's probably going to get all bent out of shape about me putting that in, but it's the truth. She used to get bent out of shape when I told her she sucked at violin, when I laughed at her for falling on her face tap dancing, and when I didn't appreciate her bullshit birthday gifts. She'd get my dad to yell at me for insensitivity, and now we look back on this and see how brilliantly she played him. Well, she never put one over me. I knew her game. And I'm serious, she used that ADD excuse every time we got take out, and she knows it.)
(I'm getting over it.)
(It's a slow process.)
- Last Thanksgiving, I saw the movie "Christmas with the Kranks." The mother in there goes nuts every time her daughter calls. She yells out, "Bllllaaaaaaaaaiiirrr!"
I have no idea why, but this struck everyone as hilarious, and when I see my brother, whose name is Michael, after not seeing him for weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, whatever, I've pretty much been yelling, "Blaaaaaaaiiiir!" at him.
Sometimes, I just say it randomly. Not quite sure why I'm including this, but it gets my brother every time.
- Speaking of the infamous Michael, he had this gem to offer at dinner on Friday night: "The day after I turned eleven, I wet the bed. Mom got so mad at me, I never did it again."
- My sister wondered, "Why is it important to have hand-eye coordination in baseball, anyway?" She asks me whether players wear glasses, and questions how someone with bad eyesight can play baseball. Apparently, she had never heard of contact lenses.
- I had written about my sister's follow up to my brother's admission to peeing in his bed, and I had removed it after I thought she would be too angry. But she brought it up after she read this, so I'm editing and adding it. Basically, she reminded us of the time that she peed on her seat at the dinner table, after I laughed so hard at something that water came out of my nose. (Yeah, we're a pretty nasty bunch, I guess.) Anyway, my mom (again) was unhappy at this (shocking!). My brother did a pretty good impression of my mom yelling at my sister to change her jeans and to put them directly on the floor by the washing machine, NOT in the laundry basket with the other clothes.
- My sister and brother go to extreme lengths to make a successful joke. Like on Friday night, they told me they wanted to watch "Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen" just to see how long I'd sit through it. Well, the couch is comfortable. So I had to watch about an hour and a half of absolute trash. At the end of it, they both looked at me in bewilderment. "We just wanted to see if you'd be able to last through it all." Yeah, nimrods. You wasted the 90 minutes, too. I mean, really, do they think these things through at all?
- This was a fun conversation:
Mom: Michael, are you coming with me at 1 or at 3 today?
Michael: I don't care.
Mom: Well, choose.
Michael: Whatever's easiest.
Mom: It doesn't matter.
Michael: I don't care.
Mom: You have to be here for Stephanie to give you the test. (Oh, right, as a subplot, my sister's been administering IQ tests to my brother. Even worse, my mother has been taking the results seriously. "Did you hear? Your brother's IQ is like, 140," to which my sister responds, "Mom, seriously, I don't think I did the test right." "Oh no," says Mom. "He's a genius." God.) So when do you want to go?
Michael: I'll ask Stephanie.
Stephanie: I don't care.
Michael: Okay, well, I'll just decide later.
Mom: Michael, just choose.
Michael: I'll go at 3.
Mom: You'll go at 3?
Michael: Yeah, I'll ask Stephanie when she needs me.
Stephanie: I want to test you later. I have to do my hair now.
The conversation ends. At 1, my mom and I are in the car.
Mom: Where's Michael?
Me: He's coming later.
Mom: What? I have to come all the way back here for him? Backtrack? No. Where is he?
She beeps the horn.
She beeps the horn again.
My brother opens the door.
Michael: What?
Mom: You're not coming now?
Michael: No, I'll go later.
Mom: But Stephanie wants you to do the test later.
Michael: She doesn't want to test me at all anymore.
Mom: Well, come now.
Michael: Okay.
- I had to pick up the Chinese food for my mom's party. So I went to the restaurant and it was taking waaay too long to pick up this special order. So I tell the host, whom I know, that he's got to speed it up. The place is pretty busy, and he keeps seating people instead of going to get the food. So I grab him before he goes to seat the next family, and I say to him, "This is really taking way too long. It's just not acceptable. I've been waiting fifteen minutes, the party starts in five minutes, this shouldn't be happening. I don't want to see another party seated until I have my order. Even if that means going back and bagging it yourself, I really need the food, okay?" And he goes. I think the guy in back of me was shocked.
Two seconds later, my sister comes in from the car. "Hey," she says to me, "you've got to do something. This is ridiculous. Are you just standing here, doing nothing? You have to be aggressive."
Yeah, my sister doesn't really know me I guess. When I tell her I've got it under control, she leaves.
"Must run in the family," says the guy behind me.
- On Sunday, my dad drove us back. In the car, we were talking about this woman my dad knows. She happens to be a pretty rude peson, in addition to being just plain unattractive. Apparently, my dad went out with her once, without knowing what she looked like. My dad's not a shallow guy or anything, but he just hadn't seen her before. Anyway, I asked him how he could go out with her, she's so awful, and all that. And my dad goes, "Well, I showed up, I had to go through with it. I just kept telling myself, 'Just have a drink, get through the hour.' "
"Eww, what did you even think when you saw her?" I asked him.
"Well," my dad said, "I could tell right away that she wasn't doing a good job of projecting femininity."
Come on, is that not the best euphemism for "ugly" that you've ever heard?
- We decided to go to the movies before going to see my grandmother. So we ended up in Kendall Square. First of all, my dad, a native Boston guy, was like, "Aren't you impressed at how well I know my way around?" approximately 3.2 seconds before he found himself trying to turn the wrong way on a one-way street.
We made it to Kendall Square, but we had no idea where this movie theater was. My dad asked this random woman if she knew. "Oh yeah," she said. "I'm going there now, actually." That was the end. We had to follow her to the movie theater, apparently. This made both me and my dad think about Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm, because this was the perfect comedic situation for him and the show. For a few minutes, my dad had to make this awkward conversation with this woman about what movie she was going to see, what movie we were going to see, etc. It was like he was forced to make small talk with her. Why couldn't she just give the directions to the theater, rather than assume that we had to follow her? I can't decide if she's weird for that, or if my dad and I are weird for thinking there's something wrong with her in the first place.
- I might be ambivalent about her, but Cambridge has got some kooks. While waiting for the movie to start, the guys in back of us were talking about heart palpatations they got from drinking coffee, and how it's nearly impossible to remember to ask for decaf when they go to Dunkin Donuts. One of the guys was like, "They should have a warning about palpatations, just to remind us." Like the palpatations aren't warning enough. Look, I get sick looking at that Nordstrom chocolate cake- just from the memory of watching that guy have a drag-out fight with indigestion. If I had heart palpataions from something, I think that would be enough to trigger the "Must Not Order" reaction.
- You might remember this from "To Grandmother's House We Go," but my family cannot decide where to go to dinner in 250 words or less.
Dad: Where do you want to eat?
Grandma: I don't care.
Dad: Any ideas? We're open to ideas.
Nobody says anything.
Dad, looking at me: How about Kowloon? (Whenever I say I don't care, my father always chooses something he knows I can't stand, because the following happens.)
Me: Eww, no, absolutely not, I hate Kowloon.
Dad: So you do care.
Me: You know I hate Kowloon.
Dad: It's an entirely new menu.
Me: I don't care.
Grandma: You know, they have an entirely new menu. I got sick that once, oh, I was so sick. The food was delicious though. But I didn't go back for a while. But now it's good. They have a new menu.
Dad: See? They have a new menu.
Me: No.
Stephanie: We had Chinese food last night.
Saul (Grandma's "Companion," and the owner of a used Corolla, which is cuter than I expected): How about Applebees?
Grandma: Applebees is good.
Stephanie: I hate Applebees.
Grandma: They have this steak. They used to have it, and then one time they didn't, and I asked the waiter. And the manager came out and they made it anyway. It had.. what did it have on it?
Saul: Peppers.
Grandma: Peppers.
Dad: Okay, let's go to Polcari's. (We end up there every time.) Is that okay with you guys?
Grandma: Polcari's. It's fine.
Dad: Saul, you can get a salad.
Me: What? Why does he have to get a salad?
Dad: Saul has to get a test done tomorrow, so he's worried about what he eats tonight. He can get a salad at Polcari's.
Saul: Whatever. (He had pizza.)
Dad: Do you want to eat here instead, Rita? I'll bring the food back?
Grandma: Eat Chinese food or Italian food?
Dad: Italian.
Grandma: No...
Dad: Would it make a difference if it were Chinese food?
Grandma: I only have six chairs.
Dad: Well, I could sit in the recliner and eat.
Grandma: It's messy.
Dad: What's the difference if you eat Chinese food?
Grandma: You want to eat in?
Dad: If you want to. It might be more relaxing, I don't know.
Grandma: Italian? No, you don't bring Italian in. Chinese, maybe, but Italian? You don't bring Italian in. Even Chinese food...I only have the six chairs. Saul, maybe you could move the chair... I mean, Italian? You don't bring Italian in.
Dad: Okay, we'll go out. Let's go.
Everyone starts to get ready and head out.
Me: You know, if you get the food to bring in, everyone can have what they want... Chinese, Italian, whatever.
Stephanie: WHY did you just do that? We had decided!
Dad: That's true. Rita, what do you think?
Grandma: Bring food in? Italian?
Dad: No. I'd bring you Chinese. You can get what you want. Everyone gets what they want. I'll go pick it up.
Grandma: I only have six chairs.
Dad: Okay, we're going out.
Until next time.
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