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my family is so weird.
this morning started off with an ongoing, stop-and-start fight with my mother. the fight continued on the way to my grandparents' house, it circumstantially briefly abated when my father and i departed the premises to go pick up my coat that was supposed to have been dry cleaned, and on which the lining was supposed to be fixed. once we got to the dry-cleaners place, it turned out that that coat was a) unfixable, b) missing (along with the dry cleaner man that had to be paged and sounded like he was crying when he was telling my father that the lining could not be salvaged), then c) found with an attached tag that said, in big letter, SKIRT, and turned out to be d) uncleaned. my father immediately made a whole gogol "overcaot" moral out of it and deployed me and my mother to bloomingdale's to get a new coat. it is important to sidetrack here and to explain that over the period of the last week that we spent in mexico, my mother inexplicably became obsessed with this possibly apocryphal story about some russian actress, who, according to my mother, really hated growing old, and hated being in a nursing home and treated like an old person, and one time when she tripped and fell into a ditch, instead of calling for help, she started talking about herself in third person in a TV announcer voice "Attention! Atttenion! Please take note of the fact that [her name] is lying around in this ditch. She fell down."
So my mother became obsessed with this story, which became this weird Saussurian metonymy for her whole verbalized discourse of maternal love. I don't know why. She would just start quoting the whole sentence in a plaintive voice at random intervals as expressions of affection. So the whole car ride to Bloomingdale's, the conversational input from my mother alternated between a) backseat driving, b) accusing me of various horribile evils and c) busting out with that quote (b and c together being this schizo dyad of meanness and very, very weirdly expressed affection), which finally plateaued into a solid and loud B, until we got to the mall, and while driving around in the parking lot, a very sartre-esque "no exit, no parking situation" we saw a duck, that for no reason clear to me was strutting around in front of barnes and noble, i exclaimed "look! a duck!" and my mother started gushing over it and then we both got concerned that it would get cold which facilitated a truce, then i said that i would like a duck, and my mother said "don't be ridiculous, where would it live, in your dirty bathtub?" and i said "why do you assume that my bathtub is dirty" and she launched into her whole false synecdochy theory about how you can tell the whole from the part, but furthermore, by extension, since the whole is composed of the parts, by a state of a part you can tell the state of any other part in that whole. hello, logical fallacy, table for two. anyway, according to my mother's logic, since my room is messy, it also means that my appearance is unkempts and my SOUL and MIND are messy, but it also means that my BATHTUB is dirty (since i don't really see how a bathtub can be messy).
no, the above is not brainstortming for a homage to pinter. it's just a day with my family.
this morning started off with an ongoing, stop-and-start fight with my mother. the fight continued on the way to my grandparents' house, it circumstantially briefly abated when my father and i departed the premises to go pick up my coat that was supposed to have been dry cleaned, and on which the lining was supposed to be fixed. once we got to the dry-cleaners place, it turned out that that coat was a) unfixable, b) missing (along with the dry cleaner man that had to be paged and sounded like he was crying when he was telling my father that the lining could not be salvaged), then c) found with an attached tag that said, in big letter, SKIRT, and turned out to be d) uncleaned. my father immediately made a whole gogol "overcaot" moral out of it and deployed me and my mother to bloomingdale's to get a new coat. it is important to sidetrack here and to explain that over the period of the last week that we spent in mexico, my mother inexplicably became obsessed with this possibly apocryphal story about some russian actress, who, according to my mother, really hated growing old, and hated being in a nursing home and treated like an old person, and one time when she tripped and fell into a ditch, instead of calling for help, she started talking about herself in third person in a TV announcer voice "Attention! Atttenion! Please take note of the fact that [her name] is lying around in this ditch. She fell down."
So my mother became obsessed with this story, which became this weird Saussurian metonymy for her whole verbalized discourse of maternal love. I don't know why. She would just start quoting the whole sentence in a plaintive voice at random intervals as expressions of affection. So the whole car ride to Bloomingdale's, the conversational input from my mother alternated between a) backseat driving, b) accusing me of various horribile evils and c) busting out with that quote (b and c together being this schizo dyad of meanness and very, very weirdly expressed affection), which finally plateaued into a solid and loud B, until we got to the mall, and while driving around in the parking lot, a very sartre-esque "no exit, no parking situation" we saw a duck, that for no reason clear to me was strutting around in front of barnes and noble, i exclaimed "look! a duck!" and my mother started gushing over it and then we both got concerned that it would get cold which facilitated a truce, then i said that i would like a duck, and my mother said "don't be ridiculous, where would it live, in your dirty bathtub?" and i said "why do you assume that my bathtub is dirty" and she launched into her whole false synecdochy theory about how you can tell the whole from the part, but furthermore, by extension, since the whole is composed of the parts, by a state of a part you can tell the state of any other part in that whole. hello, logical fallacy, table for two. anyway, according to my mother's logic, since my room is messy, it also means that my appearance is unkempts and my SOUL and MIND are messy, but it also means that my BATHTUB is dirty (since i don't really see how a bathtub can be messy).
no, the above is not brainstortming for a homage to pinter. it's just a day with my family.
