Andare, Partire, Tornare

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My mother the wackjob

Home again, home again, sickety-sick. My sinuses feel like wet cement, and I think I need to make a run to the pharmacia for some generic Claritin-D, which seems to do the trick. A hot shower is also in my future.

Had possibly one of the oddest conversations with my mom last night. She's had a lot of work done to her house recently (most of it necessary, some of it highly unnecesary) and has been over the moon with her contracter, Mr. Ambiguous. He's so nice, and he's so chatty, and maybe he's gay and she wouldn't like that, because yuck, but maybe it would be better because then she could go to the movies with him and it wouldn't be gross because he couldn't be interested in her, and yadda yadda yadda. (This is an interesting peep into the mind of mom, actually.)

So last night she calls me and describes a falling out she's now had with Mr. Ambiguous, that is just very strange. She apparently made a comment about wanting to buy a Lincoln Navigator, and he took over, saying he knew a place and could get her a deal, tell him what the options she wanted were, he'd take care of everything. Mom, naturally, got a little weirded out by this. She thinks about it for a while and, when talking to him on the phone later, jokes that she already bought the car. According to her, he spazzes out, yells at her, hangs up on her. He shows up later to check on something in the bathroom he's remodeling, she apologises (the fuck?) and he coldly says, "Bad joke." And now, is not answering her phone calls. This is a guy with the key to the house, and, even more unbelievably, thirty grand of my mom's money for a kitchen remodel that was to start after the bathroom was finished - except THERE'S NO SIGNED CONTRACT ABOUT IT.

Pause, and pray silence for the sound of my palm slapping my forehead.

She moans to me that it's all my dad's fault for abandoning her, because she's so lonely, and Mr. Ambiguous was so nice to her and was company and she let her guard down, and now she has to get a burglar alarm put in and maybe change the locks, and she has to play it cool because if she pisses him off he's going to keep her money and god help me, I wanted to leap off my third floor balcony as she was relating this to me, because I can see that she's going to lean on me to move in or something when Boop goes back to college.

On top of it all, I'm in kind of a weird headspace and feeling vaguely depressed. I just finished Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, and I swear to god, I'm depressed about how bad World War I was. Yeah, go ahead and laugh - it was only a hundred years ago, right? But man, try to read about what the Germans did in Belgium and see if you don't get depressed either.

To end on an uplifting note, Gracie and Dexter seem to be getting along well, as the wild careening around the apartment currently occuring seems to indicate.

12:21 p.m. - 2004-07-16

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