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Family: The Horror… Archives

May 25, 2008

Gay Wedding

I had this whole big post planned about the cultural weirdness of my cousin’s gay marriage. I had been under the assumption that it’d be not only a flamboyant, bizarre event that would involve Elton John in some way, but that the disapproving, highly Catholic portion of my family would show up to throw stones and hurl obscenities.

But it turned out like every other wedding I’ve ever been to: boring as shit and endless. You non-Catholics may not understand the extent of trauma involved in attending a full-on Catholic wedding. Despite the papal stance on the subject, this was a Catholic ceremony, although an abbreviated one. But still fucking endless, dammit! Probably the only entertaining part was the confused non-priest pastor attempting to both fumble his way through the Catholic portions of the ceremony, then attempting to bridge Catholic ideals with a gay marriage.

Meanwhile, none of the vehement religious people in our family showed up, so the biggest drama was when my uncle turned around for the retarded handshake of peace and came face to face with two gay dudes making out.* His face twisted in horror, then he turned back around. Not exactly epic.

*And, seriously, I’d say the same of any straight couple: you don’t make out in church. Even I have enough respect to not do that.

Posted by Stan on May 25, 2008 10:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 12, 2008

Ugh

My sister called me up tonight and gave me two suggestions:

1. Join the Peace Corps
2. Teach English abroad

I know she’s trying to help, but…seriously? Seriously?!

Posted by Stan on May 12, 2008 10:07 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 12, 2007

Some Shit Is Going Down

Grampa, who has generally remained quiet (using Aunt Matriarch and others as his voice), finally wrote back. In brief: remember how I praised Becky for not resorting to txtspeak or Ebonics? Grampa doesn’t believe that e-mail could be written by “a high school dropout” (I thought she graduated!). He also laid out, in exact dollar figures, what has happened:

• All told, Aunt White Trash owes $113,884 that she can’t hope to pay back. This deprives the rest of her siblings around $4000 for their estimated inheritance.
• Becky, individually, owes $5411, plus another $2000 for instances where he paid to bail her out of jail.
• Darlene owes ~$1200 for some reason.

He capped the letter by referring to her family as white trash and that they aren’t getting any more money. Good times!

Posted by Stan on May 12, 2007 11:48 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 11, 2007

YahooGroup Throwdown

My extended family has had a YahooGroup so long that it was started before eGroups got bought by Yahoo! It’s typically used as a resource for everyone to keep in touch, and while interest in using the YahooGroup has waned proportionally with the family’s interest in keeping in touch with each other, it’s still used on occasion. It’s nowhere near the insanity of election fever circa 2000, when we peaked at more than 650 e-mails per month (seriously!); in fact, at this point we’re lucky to get more than 100 posts in a year.

A lot of that has to do with being secretive. Many of the issues with Aunt White Trash were sent privately by Aunt Matriarch to just the brothers and sisters, to shield their children from the family issues. Of course, this was an unnecessary step since all the brothers and sisters just told their kids everything, but I guess Aunt Matriarch didn’t want to thoroughly humiliate Aunt White Trash by spreading the information onto a YahooGroup filled with young adults who might still respect her (ha!). Also, I think YahooGroups are public, so she’s pretty much airing the dirty laundry and if anyone actually cared, they could read all the posts.

Apparently Aunt Matriarch doesn’t care anymore, because last night she sent an e-mail to the YahooGroup last night containing the following information:

• Aunt White Trash e-mailed Grampa on May 5th asking for more money, which is what elicited this response in the first place. This is the only communication she’s had with him since they arrived at their destination.
• Aunt White Trash refuses to talk to Grampa on the phone or give him a phone number. Also, her last communication with him involved her screaming incoherently and hanging up.
• Aunt White Trash is stressed and depressed about the events of the past few months. She requires monetary compensation to alleviate both of these feelings.
• All told, the total cost of getting her the fuck to California was $4400, with an additional $5000 spent to clean the house and return it to saleable condition.

A few hours later, Becky (the eldest of the white trash brood) wrote back, explaining:

• Aunt White Trash “put her life on hold” to “lovingly take care” of Grampa. As I observed in my earlier blog entry, the loving care last for all of a month before they decided to use him as a human ATM and only help him out when they absolutely had to. You might remember this anecdote: The only clear incident I recall of them “taking care of him” is when he fell down on the driveway and got disgusting, old-man welts and cuts all over his arms, knees, and face. And instead of bandaging him up, they ran and got the camera, uploaded the photos to the family’s Yahoogroup, and wrote a few sarcastic comments about how useless old people are. That about sums it up.
• She actually made some valid points about how family should be there for each other (in reference to the entire extended family turning their backs on Aunt White Trash & Co.), but it falls under the heading of “pot kettle black,” what with the rampant abuse of Grampa.
• Aunt Matriarch is “losing it” and “needs to get a life of [her] own.”
• Bottom line: Becky took issue with Aunt Matriarch using YahooGroups for the reasons I pointed out above: the humiliation factor and the tainted opinions of “[her] cousins.” But she spun it that Aunt Matriarch doesn’t have her facts straight and her whole e-mail is tantamount to libel.

Why would she care about our opinions? Because, as she stated in the following paragraph: she had a kid. She has started the “next generation” of the family, and most family members haven’t even acknowledged the baby’s existence. And, if you want to dig deeper, the cousins are all she has left — monetarily, her siblings are as useless as she is, as is her own mother, so what can she use as a cash cow other than the welfare department? The cousins. Well, the joke’s on her! None of us have any money, either!

Oh, and also: we already know all the negative stuff. The YahooGroup only circumvented information trickling down from parents to children to significant others/spouses. Instead, it’s all right there for us to see, together; everyone already knows the shit that was going down, which is why nobody except my dumbass sister* acknowledged White Trash: The Next Generation. And at least she has a husband who’s smart enough to point, laugh, and not hand over any of his money.

Seriously, we all know I love playing conspiracy theorist and finding terrible, convoluted motives for pretty much everything. But trust me when I say this e-mail reads like shrill pandering to those (like my sister) who might feel pangs of guilt for cutting this entire family out of our lives. The entire subtext is: Even though I had a baby now (after three abortions) solely because I’m old enough to qualify for welfare benefits, I am not my mother. Don’t lump me in with her, and by the way I am still registered at Bed, Bath and Beyond and The Container Store if you want to get a gift for the new grandchild.

Becky’s e-mail ended with a line I’ve deemed a family classic. It seems like the only genuine emotion in the e-mail, and it’d be heartbreaking if not for the sloppy and baffling wording:

This isn’t really like you and because I have love for you which doesn’t seem to be reciprocated anymore this really hurts my heart.

There hasn’t been a response from Aunt Matriarch or anyone else. I was tempted to respond specifically because of the bits about the cousins, but it’s really Grampa and Aunt Matriarch who are being dragged through the mud. If they want to reply, that’s their prerogative; I have a feeling they’ll respond in the best possible way: by not giving them money.

As a side note, I will give my cousin Becky credit for not resorting to horrible, unreadable “txtspeak” or weird “gangsta” chatter.

*The thing that cracks me up about my sister feeling sudden sympathy is that when the pregnancy was first announced — six months into it — she was really pissed off that she and her husband were waiting to have kids. She’s currently the only one of our generation of cousins who is married, and maybe we’ve all given up the Catholicism that was beaten into us as children, but we didn’t give up the idea that having babies outside of wedlock doesn’t count.

Posted by Stan on May 11, 2007 10:27 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 7, 2007

Another Stakeout

Well, this morning we (yes, my mother insisted on going with me again) went back to spy on the college girl who theoretically still worked there. And, at 8:01, she showed up. Pretty disappointing for my mom, even though we all saw it coming.

Other news? Somebody from high school who I don’t remember at all added me on Facebook. Will this lead to an interesting adventure or more boring rambling? Stay tuned!

Posted by Stan on May 7, 2007 9:07 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

May 3, 2007

Worst Sleuth Ever

The Internet is great for stalking. With the combination of social networking sites, instant messaging, message boards…that’s not even getting into all the stuff that makes it great for identity theft as well as stalking. As part of my ongoing mission to spy on my mother’s former coworker, I got her AIM screen name from her Facebook profile and added it so I could have a rough idea of when she was online. I thought it might help to identify whether or not she still worked there. I also have an instant messaging program that lets you open up a tab for a user, whether they’re signed on or not, and then it keeps a running log of when they’re on, off, away, or idle. This has sort of worked: on Monday, she didn’t sign on until after five o’clock; on Tuesday and Wednesday, when she has the day off and has to go to classes, she popped on and off an assload of times throughout the day. Like everything else, it’s circumstantial, but it seems at least reasonable to conclude that she was offline most of Monday because she was working.

So the big goal this morning was to get there around 9:45 and wait and watch, to make absolute positive the car my mom saw on Monday was indeed her former coworker’s car. The only way to make 100% certain was to physically watch her get out of the car and walk into the building. I got a good enough sense of the layout of the business park to know whether or not this was feasible; I had a perfect place to park so I could watch.

Unfortunately, my mom insisted on going with. I told her I know what the girl looks like thanks to Facebook, and I have at least a vague sense of the car she drives — it’s not rocket science. But whatever, it’s her job and her “investigation,” so that’s fine even if it means it’ll be ridiculously easy to catch her in the act.

So we drove into the business park and…a landscaping truck was parked across about five spaces right where the perfect vantage point was. So that sucked, but in retrospect it was probably a good thing; we had to park in a slightly different spot, but it was less noticeable. There was shade on the car; with the other spot, the sun would have been shining right through the windshield, making it obvious two people were sitting there staring. And if one of her coworkers had come by, it would’ve been obvious she was the one in the car.

So we were in the shade, backs to the compound, but my mom was freaking out because cars kept going by and people kept walking around. We were pretty far from any other cars or a desirable parking space, and nobody walking around paid any attention to the two people sitting in the car. In fact, they didn’t even glance in our direction (following one of my many worldly observations, that nobody will give a shit about anything out of the ordinary unless they’re looking for something out of the ordinary — an unfamiliar car with two people sitting in it for no reason? Only a security car would care).

But as 10 o’clock rolled around and the coworker didn’t show up, things got a little disheartening. My mom decided to stick it out until 10:05, but the girl was rarely late (in fact, she was usually early). I was about to suggest continuing the stakeout until 10:30, just to let any mitigating factors (maybe a car accident on the expressway?) work themselves out, but then I remembered something:

Last night, I was yammering on AIM with a couple of people, and my mom’s coworker signed on. After a few moments, she put up a cynical away message that would have endeared her to me if not for the fact that she’s skanky: “As I come home from the South Loop at 9:00, it occurs to me that I’ll have to go back there in less than 12 hours. Suburban life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” A sentiment I thought many times (yeah, she went to my alma mater — needless to say, I had to correct a lot of spelling and grammar to make her away message readable), but usually I shrugged and thought, “Deal with it.”

But then, it occurred to me at 10 a.m. that if, at 9 p.m., she said she’d be back in the South Loop in less than 12 hours…that pretty much meant she wouldn’t be showing up to work. Or, at least, she wouldn’t be anywhere near on time. Finals are gearing up, and I imagine she has a lot of projects due, probably needs to use school resources and can only find the time to do that during time she’s normally working. So she took a day off…

You’d think that’s a pretty big clue that a real, semi-competent investigator would hone in on and say, “Yes, she’ll be down in the city,” and if I had really wanted to I could have used my former college connections to track down where she’d be and when and tail her and/or have her kneecaps broken. But it didn’t occur to me until after we drove all the way out there and sat around for half an hour. And I was going to suggest we wait even longer.

I have no right to continue pretending to be a private detective. I am deleting my Rockford Files ringtone and setting fire to my Raymond Chandler books.

Posted by Stan on May 3, 2007 5:54 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 30, 2007

Inept Investigation

People who know me well are aware of my sad delusion that I will, one day, be a grizzled and world-weary private investigator, using my profession to confirm my most cynical doubts about the world and as an excuse to never get close to anyone. That’s the life for me. That, or riding around the U.S. Highway system on a Harley, going from town to town and performing odd jobs until I have enough money to move on (and solving many mysteries along the way).

But here’s the thing about me solving anything resembling a mystery: I’m not good at it. I’m also not experienced, so if (for instance) somebody decides to tail me, I can’t outmaneuver them in eggplant-colored 1993 Chrysler Concorde. I probably couldn’t even outrun them in a gold ‘74 Firebird, no matter how well it corners.

As a result, we get the situation I had this morning. You might recall that last week my mother was laid off, and I talked her into waiting until Monday to go and stalk her coworker. If you are too lazy to read the other entry, here it is in brief: my mom was hired to do a job, a young and cute girl was hired to help out (doing the same job) despite being fairly incompetent, and my mom’s boss had a huge, not-so-secret crush/flirtation with the new girl. When they laid my mom off, they said the college girl would also be laid off, but since they’ve also proven to be huge liars, she didn’t believe it.

So we drove over there this morning, shortly after the college girl would arrive but also early enough to avoid anyone leaving for a lunchbreak, sticking to the backroads and driving my car so they wouldn’t recogize my mom and/or her car. In traditional private detective fashion, I insisted on being highly caffeinated during these proceedings (the drunkenness usually comes later, to wash away the bitter stench of failure). Unfortunately, a stop at Krispy Kreme for mochas ended in disaster. Note to Krispy Kreme employees (who I imagine read this blog because I am the fat trendsetter): mochas are not the same as hot chocolate. Thank you for the caffeine-withdrawal headache.

The primary objective was to spot the college girl’s car in the parking lot, without being seen. It’s in a business park littered with one-story buildings, some of which (like my mom’s former place of employment) face the parking lot. My mom knows they have a tendency to stare out the windows at the parking lot, so she was afraid that stopping or slowing down too much would give us away. Sort of a big issue when the secondary objective was to photograph the girl’s car in case something lawsuit-esque ever happens. (Mom seems to think there’s a case for age-discrimination; she might have someone if she can get other employees to testify in her behalf, but even then it all just seems like a lot of hearsay without any hard evidence.)

The other big problem with the primary objective? My mom has no real idea what kind of car the college girl drives. She knew the color and that it has a spoiler. That’s it. She also knew that there was another car with an identical color, but it was fancier and more than likely belonged to someone working in the law firm next door. Did she have some idea of the college girl’s license plate number? No. Make and/or model? “Well, it was sort of sporty, but not too sporty — the other one was really sleek, like a Corvette but not actually a Corvette.” That narrows it down!

I weaved my way through the parking lot, following her instructions on how to get to her particular building. As we approached, there weren’t many cars, and none of them were the “sort-of blue” color she had attempted to describe. Then, past a big minivan, there was a dark-blue car. I barely got a look at it, but what I saw looked “sleek” to me, and not in a “sporty but not too sporty” way. Like the kind of annoying sports car where the seats are practically horizontal, like a bed, because the windshield and ceiling are so low-slung.

“That’s it,” my mom said glumly. “That’s her car?”

“Are you sure?” I asked, slowing down so she could snap a —

“Don’t slow down!” she snapped. “She’s parked right in front of the windows, and they’ll see her.”

“But —”

“Just keep going!”

I kept going, circling around to the other side of the building and exiting to go home, and then we got into an argument about it. I thought, based on the descriptions of the two similar cars, that she had identified the wrong one. I wanted to swing back around for a second pass, but she got all paranoid and told me to keep driving. Then, when we were about halfway home, she started hemming and hawing that maybe she had rushed to judgment. She didn’t want to go back again and risk being seen, though. We agreed, since she got the make and model of the car in the parking lot, that we’d look it up online and see what it looked like.

That didn’t end well. I was driving, so I didn’t get a look at the car; my mom misidentified the car model (and possibly the make) so we had no luck tracking down a car that doesn’t exist. What the hell? This is why Jim Rockford always tried to avoid his clients getting too involved with the investigation.

In my quest to use real investigative tactics, I’d stake the place out on Thursday (the college girl’s next scheduled work date). I’d show up 20-30 minutes before she was supposed to start and watch; that way, the car doesn’t matter. I see her, in the flesh, walking from her car into the building. Thanks to the magic of Facebook stalking, I already know exactly what she looks like. The way the business park is laid out, there are several vantage points where I could watch the building and its little sub-parking lot and not be seen.

Also, if I did need to figure out the make and model of the car, or snap a photo, I wouldn’t care about stopping. They would have no idea who I am, assuming they could even see me inside the car (I think they could see the car slow or stop, but based on the angle, I doubt they could see inside).

So, new plan and new story!

Posted by Stan on April 30, 2007 3:12 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 26, 2007

Mom Gets Canned

Hilariously misguided paranoia may run in the family, but there are occasions when they’re still out to get you. For months, my mom’s been bitching because she felt like her superiors were trying to oust her from her job. It’s a part-time job, nothing special, and last summer they decided to hire a new girl when they needed extra help but my mom (foolishly, in retrospect) didn’t want to increase her hours. She was a perky, extroverted college student, in contrast with my mom’s frumpy, irritated housewife.

Then there’s the office manager, whose bizarre, attention-whorish behavior has forced me to assume he is Michael Scott, Steve Carell’s character from The Office. The immaturity, the thinly veiled (or not veiled) racism/homophobia/misogyny stemming more from ignorance than from real hate, the obsession with being the center of attention and the most well-liked boss on the planet, the aversion to doing any actual work…the only differences are that he’s a fundamentalist Christian and he’s married with three or four kids. Oh, and he used to own a business that tanked when he lost a discrimination lawsuit after firing a black employee for, apparently, not being white.

It probably goes without saying that he’s a liar. This was confirmed about a week after my mom started working there. He’s new, happens to have moved into the same town (not a huge coincidence considering the job is only two towns over) so initially he attempted to bond with my mother over living here; she hated him right off the bat, though, so it didn’t work terribly well. One story he told her shortly after she started was about going to this water-park in town. He said he went to take a shit in the public facilities and was apparently by himself. A trio of junior-high-aged kids ran into the bathroom, screaming and heckling him, beating on the stall doors, throwing paper towels around, whatever. Eventually, somehow, it reached a point where they crawled underneath the stall walls and into his stall, and basically stood there making awkward, Beavis & Butt-Head-esque jokes while watching him attempt to take a shit.

After this, he claims to have flipped out and (one of the many holes in this story — nobody seems to know how he magically escaped from a tiny restroom stall containing three other people) went to tell an employee, who filed a report. Then he supposedly had a conference call with the “top dogs” at the Park District on the morning he told my mother (and the rest of the office) this story; it was a long-winded, bizarre, pointless explanation of why he was half an hour late. I’m sure everyone in the office relished the mental image of him taking a shit.

Inconveniently for the boss, it happens that one of my best friends from high school works for the Park District, and specifically manages the water-park when it’s open during the summers. Her exact quote: “That didn’t happen.” She would have, at the very least, known about the report and the conference call; more likely, she would have been involved in the conference call. To sum up: that didn’t happen.

Which begs the question: why make up such an outlandish story to explain something like, let’s say, “Oh no, I overslept.” Why would someone go into detail about something as humiliating and privacy-invading (both in the context of what happens in the story and in retelling it) as three 12-year-olds terrorizing you while you take a shit? Especially when it didn’t even happen. See that whole attention-whore thing? I would say he’s just trying to pull one over on all the employees, but after a long time hearing these crazy stories, his problem is that he’s not a practical jokester — he just thinks he’s smarter than everybody and can make up insane, pointless stories to remain the unquestioned center of attention. Unlike The Office, nobody in reality has the balls to point out that he’s full of shit and his stories are littered with logic gaps and continuity problems.

And then there’s the new girl. The boss became enamored of her pretty quickly, flirting with her in that sleazy disgusting way fat, middle-aged, married men flirt with women half their age; and she flirted right on back because, hey, he’s the boss. If he can be flirted with, he can be manipulated, and she had very little problems manipulating him. Soon enough (whether it was her doing or not), it became pretty clear that the boss was trying to hustle my mom out the door.

Unfortunately, he had no grounds to actually fire her. Even worse, as the college girl settled into the routine, it became pretty clear that she was both lazy and incompetent, so if he were to say, “We don’t really need two people for this job, so we’re keeping the college girl,” my mom would at least have some grounds for an age-discrimination lawsuit; the dude’s a jackass, but after having his own business fail as a result of discrimination, one would assume he’s smart enough to not fire her over that. Furthermore, my mom had her direct supervisor (just below the office manager) and the owner of the company on her side, so his hands were tied and all he could really do was fight like hell to keep the college girl.

Then he tried not-entirely-subtle ways to get my mom to quit. Treating her like crap didn’t work, so he finally just decided to ignore her. It’s always funny when people who are really self-obsessed and in constant need of attention think that by ignoring people, it’ll hurt them; if the person they’re ignoring can’t stand them, as my mom can’t stand the office manager, it’s pretty much win-win. Their jobs barely coincide, so it’s not like him ignoring her would cause huge problems with her getting the job done.

So things went on like that for a few months, with my mom bitching about the unfair, preferential treatment of the college girl, being treated like shit by the college girl herself, and basic “I’m a disgruntled employee” complaints like not being told specific things pertinent to her job (by her direct supervisor), being aware people were talking shit about her behind her back, having her desk moved out from under her like Milton from Office Space — all of these things led her to elaborate conspiracies about how they were going to fire her and she was just waiting for the ax to fall.

My dad and I tried to reassure her, using things like logic (which should never be applied to workplace scenarios) to say that there’s no way they’d fire her, and then, on Wednesday…the ax fell. Twenty minutes before she was supposed to leave, the office manager and her direct supervisor took her into the conference room and explained that they were laying her off, they had already laid off a customer-service people and would be laying off more, and that the college girl would be laid off Thursday (today, because she has Wednesdays off). They also said maybe in a month, if business picks up again, they’ll hire her back.

What happened? Why all the layoffs, even beyond my mom and her problems with the boss? Funny story: the boss is 100% incompetent. Remember how I said he doesn’t want to get any actual work done? He literally doesn’t do any work, and as a result the customer-service team he supposedly manages were not providing adequate customer service, and they lost a huge chunk of business from a big company, then several smaller companies withdrew their business completely. This is entirely his fault, and my mom saw his getting fired coming and just hoped she could outlast him.

Here’s where the paranoia kicks back in: my mom doesn’t think they’re canning the college girl. She questions the customer-service girl they laid off on Tuesday, wondering why they didn’t lay my mom and the college girl off on the same day. Wednesday is the only day the college girl takes off fully, so my mom’s theory is that they’re laying her off on Wednesday, they’ll lay the college girl off on Thursday but lying. She’s been lied to enough that it’s at least somewhat reasonable to argue that they’re full of shit, although it seems odd that her direct supervisor would go along with it. Maybe her theory is “at least half-assed help is some help.” Technically the office manager is her superior, so if he says, “We’re keeping the college girl,” she can argue but can’t do much else.

Again, trying in vain to apply logic to a workplace scenario, I argued that maybe they’re just rolling the layoffs so that people start disappearing but nobody knows why until they’ve been cut loose. This doesn’t work practically — usually all the employees know the second someone else has been fired — but it doesn’t stop employers from attempting it.

It also seems reasonable for the “surprise” factor that they’d let the customer-service person with the least seniority go, because they are liars and they have a hard time holding on to customer-service employees. They could easily say, “I guess she’s just not coming back” and pretend to be all surprised and just hope none of the other employees have had time to befriend her. They told my mom, who isn’t in customer service but it’s all the same cubicle clusterfuck even if they’re jobs don’t overlap, that she was sick. They could easily tell the college girl my mom is sick, if she even asks, and then, “Okay, sorry we had to lie [ha!], but we have to lay you off.”

Unfortunately, thanks to my voyeuristic tendencies and the Internet revolution, I made the mistake of looking up the college girl on Facebook, because, as it happens, she goes to my school. I didn’t bother for awhile, when all I had to go on was a first name and the knowledge that she went to my school. When my mom finally found out her major (which seemed vitally important to her, I guess because she was trying to gauge whether or not the college girl would just up and quit in two years when she graduates), I figured the needle in the haystack had just gotten a lot bigger, and I managed to find her profile. I wanted to see if she had a blog or LiveJournal or something that explained her perspective — was she really trying to manipulate my mom out of a job to protect her own ass, or did she (as I suspected) just not give a shit? I didn’t find a blog or anything, just the job under her “occupation” heading, along with a pretty glum description of her duties.

Now I find myself checking her profile constantly to see if she’ll update it once she finds out she’s canned; so far, nothing. My mom, I shit you not, wants me to drive her (so they don’t recognize the car) to the office tomorrow to see if her car is still there. I kinda think that’s stupid because her supervisor told her specifically she could come on Friday to get her last check; that either means that they’re really laying her off, or they already know the college girl won’t be there. There’s a possibility that they slipped, but really the only way it’s a sure thing is if she is there. It’d be safer to wait until Monday or Tuesday and catch them off guard.

It’s pretty sad how much I enjoy pseudo-investigation events like this.

Posted by Stan on April 26, 2007 3:23 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 23, 2007

My Sister’s Dog

Several months ago, my sister and her husband bought a puppy, an Irish terrier who is about the cutest little puppy in the history of time.

Click the image for a larger size

I mean, come on! How is that not cute?

They bought her from a farm in Oregon, and took her back to the big bad city of Seattle. And here’s where the big problem comes: they both work full-time, so they crate her, for almost the entire day, and all night, only letting her out for maybe 20 minutes while they’re on lunchbreaks, then all evening until they go to bed. Meanwhile, the puppy develops odd anxiety issues like a serious fear of humanity, cars, and rain. Granted, she wasn’t exposed to “city things” (like an overabundance of people and cars, and perhaps she lived in the three-mile stretch of Oregon where it doesn’t rain constantly), which is what they attribute the anxiety problems to, but…imagine if you were trapped in a darkened box most of the day and all night, with no way out escape?

I’m not a pet psychologist (or a human psychologist), but it just seems like basic logic that this would cause some angst and stress. My parents and I expressed our distaste for the crate, and in one of my sister’s trademark instances of goofy irony (and a trademark instance of her not reading carefully), she forwarded us a website that explains how crating animals is a good thing. And true, a bit of it is pro-crate, but near the bottom it says the following:

Never crate your pet longer than you know he can wait to eliminate, and definitely less than 4 hour intervals during the day.

…

1. The use of a dog crate is NOT RECOMMENDED for a dog regularly left alone all day, although some individual animals can tolerate it. If it is attempted:
   • The pet must be well exercised before and after crating.
   • The crate must be equipped with a heavy, non-tip dish of water.
   • Your pet should get lots of attention and complete freedom each night.
2. If you do not have time to take a puppy or dog outside to eliminate and exercise as recommended here, you should reconsider getting a dog as a pet. Crate or no crate, any dog consistently denied the attention and companionship it craves, may still find ways to express bored anxiety, and stress

So there you go: they leave her locked up for more than four hours at a time, the definitely don’t take her out for exercise in the morning and are, more than once a week, too lazy to take her out after work, so as this guide says they should have “reconsider[ed] getting a dog as a pet.” It even says right there that crating causes anxiety and stress!

But no, it wouldn’t be being locked up all day. Clearly she’s just having trouble adjusting to the city. Oh wait, that’s not even it — they took her to a puppy training course, and the instructor suggested after the third or fourth week (when the puppy showed no signs of improvement regarding the anxiety) that they put her on medication. My sister put her foot down about this.

Believe it or not, despite her hilarious self-absorbtion, Tracey usually seems reluctant about the crate. Sure, she sent the article defending it, but you can usually catch a hint of “I don’t think this is right” in her voice when she talks about it, to the extent that she decided to call it “the spaceship” to make it “fun” for the puppy (and to justify the cruelty to herself). However, she went along with it because she and I never had a dog as kids; Jack did, so she’s deferring to him in most cases. He thinks the crate is fine — they do the crate. He is gung-ho about the anti-anxiety pills — Tracey rebels.

While she never blamed the crate, she did talk him into letting the puppy out, to roam around the house at night. They figured if she can do that without consistently waking them up or getting into trouble, after a month or so they’d start letting her out during mornings, then all day — and she’d be free, at least within the confines of the house.

Still, on the recommendation of their training instructor, Tracey and Jack had a dog behaviorist come over, check out the environment, check out the dog, and see if she really needed medication. His inexpert diagnosis: she could have House favorite Addison’s disease. It’s rare in dogs, even rarer in puppies, but apparently the puppy came from “a litter of one” (I believe this is the slogan of the U.S. Army’s surprisingly successful canine unit), and this is a “special enough” circumstance for the behaviorist to suggest that Addison’s could be the culprit.

According to a 100% accurate website that was the #1 Google hit for “Addison’s disease in dogs,” here are the symptoms of Addison’s disease in dogs:

Most dogs with Addison’s disease initially have gastrointestinal disturbances like vomiting. Lethargy it also a common early sign. Poor appetite can occur as well. These are pretty vague signs and it is extremely easy to miss this disease. More severe signs occur when a dog with hypoadrenocorticism is stressed or when potassium levels get high enough to interfere with heart function. Dogs with this problem will sometimes suffer severe shock symptoms when stressed, which can lead to a rapid death. When potassium levels get high heart arrythmias occur or even heart stoppage which also is fatal. In some cases, especially secondary Addison’s disease, there are no detectable electrolyte changes.

Apparently their puppy has “two of the four main symptoms” (I’m not sure which two — it doesn’t say much about anxiety, though the “severe shock symptoms when stressed” is discouraging), so they took her to the vet for the first in a three-stage test: a blood test. The blood work came back “suspicious enough for the vet to proceed to step two.” So I think it’s good to check for Addison’s, since it’s a serious disease that could kill the puppy if it’s unchecked…

…but it seems pretty unrelated to the anxiety/stress. It says many of the symptoms worsen (or new symptoms appear) when the dog is stressed, but the disease doesn’t cause the stress. So let’s say they save the puppy’s life…what next? Will they stop the constant crating? It’s been about four months since my sister said “maybe in a month we’ll let her out during mornings,” and the last we heard — a couple of weeks ago — they had just bought a new crate because the dog was outgrowing the old one.

The thing about the dog that really bothers me is that it seems like they bought her for the wrong reasons. They treat her like a toy, not a living creature, and then they wonder why she has issues. They bought her because my sister’s nurturing instincts are kicking in, but (according to Jack) they aren’t ready to have kids. Solution? A dog. But they aren’t treating the dog in the same way they would treat a child. I’m not saying you would necessarily leave a baby to her own devices when you leave for work, but that’s exactly the issue: they’ve always said that they’ll have kids when they stop traveling and when my sister is ready to give up her job, because those are the sacrifices they need to raise a child. They aren’t willing to make similar sacrifices for the puppy, and while they don’t really have to in the sense that Tracey needs to quit her job, they could split the difference by dog-proofing their stupid house and letting her run wild. Or locking her in the big downstairs bathroom so she has more room to breathe. Why does she have to be locked in a crate that’s barely large enough to fit her and a water/food dish? Especially when they won’t acknowledge that maybe the crate is part of the problem?

I mentioned jokingly to my parents and to Lucy (who knows more about the puppy situation than anybody ever wanted to) that I should e-mail my sister and say if they let me live there for free and give me a fat per diem (that’s a fancy word for “allowance”), I’ll be a dogsitter. Even though I’m allergic. Supposedly Irish terriers are one of those hypoallergenic dogs, so it won’t be too bad as long as I’m not constantly fondling her. Which ruins all my fun.

Anyway, both my parents and Lucy actually jumped on that idea, thinking — in all seriousness — that it is a great idea for the benefit of the puppy, and that if I’m just there for a few months the dog will adjust to some semblance of normalcy and can put her traumatic childhood behind her. I’m not sure if I’ll actually do that, but now that I’m committed to blogging daily, I’ll keep both of my readers posted.

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2007 12:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

April 21, 2007

White Trash Jamboree

The Players

Grampa: Spent many years as an accountant, eventually reaching the point where he was responsible for auditing banks for the city. Since it was during the most corrupt period of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, it goes without saying that he made far more money than he should have, and much of it was probably ill-gotten.

Aunt White Trash: The second of ten children. She was very sickly as a child, and as a result became my late grandmother’s obvious favorite. A serious coke addict in the ’70s and ’80s, she finally met a man who got her clean by beating the hell out of her, then knocking her up. Three times. Then he left her, so she accepted an excess of “secret” handouts from my grandmother. Around the time my grandma retired to Arizona, Aunt White Trash hauled her kids to Berkeley to live off the state of California while she spent ten years trying to get a bachelor’s degree. This was not ten years of hard work and part-time work; this was ten years of being a full-time student, with nothing resembling a full-time job, and no real parenting (her usual M.O. was to lock herself in her bedroom and turn up Pink Floyd when the kids were being particularly obnoxious, which was often). When the state of California decided they no longer wanted to support her, the post-collegiate plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech off of her full time. Unfortunately, she died before that could happen, so she moved back to Illinois to leech off my grandfather. Despite him being a hard-ass who didn’t particularly like her, Grampa gave her way more opportunities than anyone expected. We have the feeling he made some deathbed promises.

Becky: White Trash Aunt’s oldest daughter, now 20. She had a baby two weeks ago. I’ll reluctantly admit that she’s really smart; in fact, she’s way smarter than her mother and has been since roughly the age of four. The combination of tricking and outsmarting her mother and having an obsessive desire to be the center of attention has led her to rule her entire family, like Billy Mumy on that Twilight Zone where he could make mysterious things happen…with his mind! She stayed with her family until she graduated from high school, at which time she moved back to California as quickly as humanly possible. She got pregnant and threw her back out, and has now quit her job and is living off a disability check and the earnings of her manseed provider. Nobody knows what he does, but based on his Middle Eastern name everyone in the family except me and my sister assume he’s part of a sleeper cell.

Darlene: The forgotten middle child. I barely know anything about her except that she has serious anger issues. Oh, and she’s 19.

D.J.: Or as my dad calls him, Damian. My dad seems to think D.J. has demon eyes and is a potential serial killer; I never got that vibe from him. He’s 17, into skating, video games, playing terrible faux-punk, and being a jackass.

Aunt Matriarch: The de facto matriarch after my grandmother passed, in charge of finances and mediating goofy-ass family affairs (of which there are many in a family of ten kids with a lot of ridiculous history).

Aunt Twin: My mother’s twin sister, who has lived for many years in New Jersey. Last summer, she decided to buy a house in Rockford, where Grampa lives. She had been talking for years about moving back to Illinois and has finally made good on it now that both of her daughters are out of college and away from home (in addition, her oldest daughter moved to Chicago). She chose Rockford because, in addition to the proximity to Grampa, it’s also far enough away from Chicago that she can separate herself from the rest of the family when they get too irritating.

Uncle Drunk: The baby of the ten, who has made a lifelong career out of embarrassing, Arthur-like drunkenness. He had a wife, two kids, and a good job, all of which were lost many years ago because he chose the bottle instead. Now he lives in Grampa’s basement and acts as a manservant in lieu of paying living expenses.

There are other bit players in this story (including my immediate family, but these are the most important figures. Now, on with the story…

The real inciting incident here happened in late 2001. Unexpectedly, my healthy, active grandmother passed away. She had been doing a lot of traveling and, as a result of many hours spent on disgusting airplanes, got a disease that wouldn’t have killed her if she’d gotten it checked out sooner; she didn’t have it checked until she got back home to Phoenix, but by then it was too late. A House-like diagnostician attempted in vain to figure out what was wrong as she withered away in the ICU, even going so far as having a team at the Mayo Clinic try to figure it out (this is where ill-gotten Grampa money, plus his late-in-life career-switch to auditing insurance companies, comes in handy). By the time they figured it out, it was either too late or still a misdiagnosis.

She was pretty much the rock holding the family together. Grampa was always the kind of guy who would hide in his sanctuary-like den, watching television, during family parties. Not to say he didn’t love his family; he just didn’t like all the “excitement” of having 800 relatives over, which happened often when I was a kid. We had scheduled family parties every month for birthdays, but I seem to recall family parties breaking out for no particular reason; if more than three of their kids showed up at the house, it was a party. I could see how someone who likes to quietly smoke a pipe and watch Rockford Files reruns would be annoyed by the chaos.

So the family splintered; many animosities that had existed for years came out at her rather unpleasant, alcohol-fueled wake, and that was that. A few clumps of siblings got along, but for the most part everyone was separated by either physical or emotional distance (or both). Aunt Matriarch was forced to step in as “the rock,” but her heart wasn’t really in it. Not as much as my grandmother’s, anyway.

As I mentioned, Aunt White Trash’s big plan was to move in with my grandmother and leech full time. When that didn’t happen, she tried to beg Grampa for money; he said he’d co-sign on a condo if she did two things: graduate from college and get a decent job. She did both of those things, but the job she got was back in Illinois. They bought a condo in a slum in the suburbs of Chicago. Aunt White Trash worked for about three months, then remembered how much she liked not doing anything ever. She faked an illness and, after many weeks of calling in sick, was finally shitcanned.

Somehow, Aunt White Trash managed to work her crocodile tears on the usually-tough Grampa. Was it because he reclaimed his faith when his wife died? Was it because he made some kind of odd promises to his wife or to God or possibly to a nurse’s aide he mistook for Jesus? Nobody has the answer there; we’re all pretty baffled as to how her usual manipulations worked on someone who was, for much of his life, a total hardass (especially when it came to money). But she called him and wept, and he made a deal with her: he’d buy a house in Rockford, where the housing market was starting to boom, and she could be his tenant. She’d need to find a job, but in the meantime he’d lowball her on the rent as long as she took care of him in his old age.

Perhaps now is the time to explain why he ended up “retiring” to Rockford, commonly regarded as a shithole, in the first place. You might have noticed that my grandmother retired to Phoenix. Well, Grampa had a mistress for a few decades, and they had an “arrangement” for the sake of the kids. Plus, they’re Catholic; divorce doesn’t happen. Even when she moved to Phoenix and Grampa moved to Rockford, into his mistress’s home, they were still married according to the laws of both God and man, preserving the sanctity of marriage.

She passed on about two years after my grandmother, so Grampa was left alone and semi-terrified in his old age. Having somebody out there permanently would be good for his own sake. Unfortunately for him, having Aunt White Trash and her brood out there was not good for anyone, especially him. The only clear incident I recall of them “taking care of him” is when he fell down on the driveway and got disgusting, old-man welts and cuts all over his arms, knees, and face. And instead of bandaging him up, they ran and got the camera, uploaded the photos to the family’s Yahoogroup, and wrote a few sarcastic comments about how useless old people are.

Say, did I mention Aunt White Trash never got a job? Yeah, so she was freeloading and then accusing the freeload of being useless. Hardass Grampa would have tossed her ass onto the street (and they live on a busy street, so that would have meant instant death by Rockford-pickup), but Loving Old Man Grampa just took it.

So, shocker of shockers, about a year after Aunt White Trash moved out there, Uncle Drunk moved in. If you’re following the timeline, this is around early 2004. Uncle Drunk had been leading a confusing, largely itinerant lifestyle. He had a somewhat secure job at a glass shop (the kind of place that does things like, for instance, airbrushing the Bears logo on a mirror), and an apartment over that shop. So he had a small source of income that, 99% of the time, he’d blow pretty quickly as soon as he met some woman on the Internet who agreed to meet him. He’d run off with them for a few months, but inevitably he’d end up back at the glass shop, until the glass shop finally canned him for taking too much time off (they didn’t care much about him being a drunk, so don’t think he cleaned up or something).

Having lost his only prospect, who put up with a lot more than he should have, Uncle Drunk moved into the basement. He was a freeloader, too; this can’t be denied. But he was doing crazy things like cleaning the house, running errands, making food, and making sure Grampa was all right. Which begged the question: if he was doing all that, what the hell was Aunt White Trash doing?

Answer: nothing. She certainly wasn’t having a job to support herself, wasn’t taking care of her kids, wasn’t helping Grampa in any way, and then constantly lied about everything to make herself out as both victim and hero. Which is something she’d been doing since her coke-addict days, so by this point everyone was used to the lies and just kinda smiled and nodded while talking shit about her behind her back.

The entire White Trash brood, as well as Grampa, were pretty quiet for awhile. Nobody liked the situation in Rockford, but there was little to be done about it; Grampa was the man in charge, and if he wanted to waste his money supporting her and Uncle Drunk, that was his prerogative. A few of his greedier children were obsessed with the money, which is why Aunt Twin moved out to Rockford: if he was going to be leeched dry before he died, she was going to get while the gettin’ was good. But then the bombs started to drop.

Last summer, just as Aunt Twin was finalizing plans to return to Rockford, Aunt Matriarch sent a long, detailed e-mail to all of her siblings explaining what, exactly, had been happening in Rockford since they moved into the house in mid-2003. Some of the highlights:

• Darlene had never been to high school. Ever. They moved just after she finished junior high, and they never signed her up. Rockford’s school system is such a clusterfuck that nobody called her on truancy. Which is not to say public education is the greatest, especially not in Rockford, but it wasn’t like she was sitting around with her nose in books, educating herself (unless Meth Labs for Dummies counts); she just didn’t want to learn and her mother didn’t care enough to force her to go to school.
• D.J. had a live-in girlfriend for reasons nobody could explain.
• The entire White Trash family had basically become shut-ins in the house they didn’t own, not allowing Uncle Drunk or Grampa inside, and they rarely left the house, especially Aunt White Trash. She only left occasionally to go to Grampa’s house (across the street) and demand money from him. Because of the nasty tone, which was so serious it constitutes verbal and emotional abuse (we’re unclear as to whether or not this escalated to physical abuse), Uncle Drunk would intervene, but he’d usually end up getting berated by Grampa until he went back down to the basement. He stopped intervening except when it got really severe, but again he’d be insulted and told to go away.
• Because of the shut-in thing and complete and total laziness, the new house — you know, the one that was supposed to turn a huge profit in Rockford’s booming market — was a den of filth.
• There’s approximately a $75,000 inheritance set aside for all the kids; Aunt White Trash, in less than four years, has spent double that. This doesn’t include back rent (because Grampa qualifies the house as an “investment,” so the rent they never pay would really just cover a mortgage he would be paying anyway; yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me, either) or the untold thousands given to Aunt White Trash in the past, before our grandmother died.

The purpose of the e-mail was to go into details about what had been going on so we understand why they served Aunt White Trash with an eviction notice, giving her 30 days to pack her shit and leave, and why they might be escalating this to something a little more serious because the 30 days had already passed when Aunt Matriarch sent the e-mail. She was urging the in-state family to rally together in a demented intervention to show Grampa we are not overly fond of him being abused and bled dry, which was guaranteed to be the greatest family event in the history of time. I was really looking forward to it, and I was allowed to go because they wanted as much support as they could get (they also wanted potential movers, since one strategy was to stage an intervention, but if that didn’t work we’d just move all their stuff out onto the front lawn).

But the intervention was canceled. Apparently it’s a slippery legal slope to evict tenants, even if they don’t pay you rent for three years and trash your property. They wanted to “do it right,” so things were a little more complicated than forcibly removing them. On top of that, Grampa was wishy-washy to a confusing degree: every other day he seemed to change his mind, going from extreme “get them the fuck out of here now“-type rage to “they’re family, we can’t just throw them out on the streets”-type kindness. With such mixed messages, Aunt Matriarch e-mailed on several occasions that she was “washing her hands” of the business; she never quite did, though.

Meanwhile, Aunt Twin moved to Rockford with the intention of protecting Grampa (and her all-important inheritance) from Aunt White Trash, documenting nasty behavior and generally being around him at all times for protection. Believe it or not, while she did want to leech quite a bit, she had a hefty chunk of change from a surprisingly successful home-business and an even more successful divorce settlement, so with the help of a small per diem (mostly in the form of free food), she could buy a house without having anything resembling a job but still come across as less of a freeloader.

Several months passed where nothing was accomplish; we’d hear a lot of weird stories about the White Trash brood sneaking around, wait until Aunt Twin and Uncle Drunk let their guard down so they could sneak in and demand more money. We’d hear about continuing efforts to get them out but Grampa being thoroughly unhelpful with the process. Aunt White Trash mysteriously broke her leg trying to get a suitcase from the attic (to pack!); unfortunate “accidents” like that kept giving them a stay of execution. Not much was resolved until things reached critical mass a month ago.

Sitting in her van, just about to pick up her seven-year-old product of alcohol and a broken condom from school, Aunt Twin caught a rare glimpse of the White Trash kids leaving the house. Darlene, D.J., the live-in girlfriend, and…Darlene’s mysterious Texas boyfriend, whom she met on the Internet and had gone to visit on several occasions, who had apparently moved into the house. The freeloading was bad, the live-in girlfriend joining in on the action was worse, but now there were five people holed up in that house, and two of them weren’t even family.

Livid, Aunt Twin called Aunt Matriarch, and they phone-treed the hell out of the family until the intervention was back on. But there was a downside: no grandkids. They figured the situation would be humiliating enough, they didn’t want to worsen things by having us around. I was pretty disappointed; I wanted to film it. Cops would love this kind of thing.

When the intervention happened, unfortunately nobody thought anything had come of it. In a preemptive strike, Aunt Matriarch had led the siblings to the police to ask if there was any way they could have a police escort. None of them knew the live-in girlfriend or the Texas boyfriend, but they already knew of Darlene’s penchant for violence and D.J.’s “demon eyes,” so there was obvious suspicion that their choice in lovers would have similar issues. Plus, with them being half as old and with Winnebago County’s hilariously relaxed gun laws, they had real safety concerns.

The police told them they’d have a squad car coming by, but they don’t generally do security detail for domestic squabbling. Ironically, Aunt White Trash refused to leave the house or let anyone inside, didn’t want to talk to anyone. She called the police with the intention of having them all arrested, but the surprisingly fair-minded cops took both sides of the story and used their intuition to realize something shady was happening. They were allowed into the house to talk with Aunt White Trash and her kids; when they came out, they were asked about the condition of the house. One of the cops non-answered that he’s seen young children returned to worse environments.

With that, they were sent packing. Grampa was enraged by what he perceived as jealousy from Aunt White Trash’s sibling, the cops refused to do anything, so they all drove home a little disillusioned…

…until they heard word a few days later that the cops were just trying to keep the situation from reaching a Cops-esque shirtless battle royale. My dad didn’t misread the cops’ nauseous looks as they emerged from the White Trash domicile, and they surreptitiously went back to the station and contacted the whoever it is (the EPA?) who investigates squalor pits. Nobody actually looked at the house; the White Trash brood pretended to not be home, so whoever came by just dropped a business card in the mailbox.

Aunt White Trash called Grampa with a fictitious story that the EPA condemned the house and they’d be forced out; she was doing this to get more sympathy, but the plan backfired: the combination of his kids’ anger (which he finally realized was jealousy) and the supposed condemnation of his investment snapped him out of it. He kinda-sorta cut her off, giving her only enough to get the fuck out of the state, to get back to California, move back in with Becky, and never bother him again. Oops!

But it wasn’t over yet. They continued to squat until Grampa literally called up a moving company and had a truck parked out in front of their house. It sat there for three days until they finally decided to load it up. This was confusing since Aunt White Trash had stated several times that at this point, with the family turned against them and Becky giving birth a few days earlier, she just wanted to get back to California. So she demanded $5500 for a “fresh start,” plus another $1000 to repair Darlene’s car (which had mysteriously disappeared, along with Texas boyfriend — nobody knows where either of them went, and it’s assumed that the $1000 is just her wanting to milk it).

We breathed a sigh of relief; with them on the road, at least they couldn’t continue to be abusive and bilk Grampa out of more money. Right?

Wrong. Aunt White Trash demanded a wire-transfer of $700 on the road because her shoddy minivan broke down in Springfield, Illinois, and she wanted to buy (not rent) a new van. I’m no expert on cars, but I’m pretty sure any minivan you buy for $700 might get you as far as St. Louis before the transmission falls out. Again, we’re operating under the theory that it was a lie to get more money.

Ten days passed with no word; we assumed they had made it to California and ditched the family who had turned on them “for some reason.” Then we received an e-mail from another uncle, who pretended to be neutral so he could hear both sides of the story. They had made it to the Arizona-California border when, trying to exit, both cars were rear-ended by a truck that was out of control. Even if we’re ignoring the fact that, even in a jalopy, it doesn’t take ten days to get from western Illinois to the Arizona-California border, the way the accident was described made no sense.

Here’s the scoop: one car had rear damage, the other car had front damage. Neither car had both front and rear damage. I’m not an expert on the laws of physics, but I’m pretty sure if a truck slammed one car from behind and it rear-ended the car in front, both ends of at least one car would be damaged, or if we’re to assume the truck somehow hit both separately, how is it possible that one has front damage? The obvious conclusion is that these two cars hit each other and then they made up a story about a truck for more sympathy; it’s harder to sympathize with “we suck at driving and all have substance-abuse problems so we may or may not have been driving under the influence of something.” Uncle Drunk actually called local hospitals until he found one where five people has been admitted after a car accident and the rough descriptions matched. So that, at least, means the car accident really happened.

I have no way to explain what transpired next. Grampa wired more money for them to rent a car to “tool around town.” I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of car rental agencies, but don’t they all require credit cards for transactions? I guess I could see them accepting cash if you slip them an extra hundred or something, but it struck me as fishy. Even fishier, both cars were irreparably totaled, so…what’s the deal with the layover? Why do they need a car to tool around town? Why do any of them need to stay in town for any reason? They were discharged from the hospital, they have no usable vehicles…

This leads back to conspiracy theories about substance abuse issues and people being arrested and the cash more likely being used for bail or bribe money. Finally, we were left with a still-shady-but-far-more-likely scenario: they needed an additional one-way car rental to get them all the way back to San Francisco, the rental contract for which was purchased over the phone with a credit card and corrupt, silver-tongued Grampa talked them into charging his card without having to be there in person to sign for it.

There are so many logic and continuity gaps here that you can tell most of this information was provided by liars and then interpreted by confused people trying to create a coherent story out of shit that makes no sense. The one thing that’s clear is, now that they’re back in San Francisco, they have been cut out of the family. All of Becky’s not-even-veiled begging for gifts and money after having her baby? Unanswered. Baby photos? Unacknowledged. Nobody really knows what will happen to them now, and it’s unfortunate to say this, but nobody really cares. After decades of lies, manipulation, and laziness, they’re on the opposite end of the country, and everyone’s okay with that.

It’s really a weird feeling, being so numb to family, not sharing in the joy of a new life because we know that Becky is only keeping this baby to start up White Trash: The Next Generation. Yes, she’s on disability and has no plans to go back to work; worse than that, she’s had several abortions and is only keeping this baby because she’s finally old enough to exploit California’s overly generous welfare program. How are we supposed to feel good about bringing new life into the world for such disgusting reasons?

And then you realize that, just as they’re using the first granddaughter of my parents’ generation as a cash cow, they’ve done the same with the family — not just my grandparents, but everyone, when they could, only reaching out for fistfuls of cash or free gifts whenever they thought they could get something out of us. How do family members get to be like that?

I have no choice but to blame Matthew Lesko.

Posted by Stan on April 21, 2007 1:57 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

January 19, 2007

401K

My sister just called. “What’s your Social Security number?”

“Why?”

“Because if Jack and I die in an accident, you’re getting our 401Ks.”

“Why?!”

“Because you don’t have any money.”

I gave her the number.

Posted by Stan on January 19, 2007 4:17 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 13, 2006

The World Is Way Too Small

One of my reasons for not liking The Manager’s script: it read like propaganda for an actual, real-world dance contest he sponsors. It creates a bizarre, goofy mythology for the competition and beyond that has no real reason for existing. That was one of my main sources of disappointment, but I felt like I couldn’t use that as a criticism because The Manager didn’t know that I’ve spent enough time Googling him to find loads of information about him, his hopes and dreams, and this particular dance contest.

Yesterday my sister called me up. I haven’t talked to her in a long time, mostly because every time she calls my mom puts it on speaker phone so the whole family can enjoy scintillating conversation about University of Illinois sports and other things I don’t give a shit about. Also, she’s a total motor-mouth, and the speaker phone makes us hard to hear, so it’s impossible to get a word in edgewise. We mostly just sit and listen while she rambles, interjecting once in awhile when she pauses for a deep breath. It’s amazing to me that a severe asthmatic can talk for so long without breathing.

It’s easier to hold a conversation on an even keel when we aren’t on speaker phone. The only way to take part in the conversation is to flat-out interrupt her (which she does to me as much as I do to her), although when it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken she does usually ask questions about what I’ve been up to. So I explained to her the entire saga of what’s happened over the past week, everything about Mark, The Manager, the script, et cetera. I finally told her a few reasons why I didn’t like the script — chief among them, that it’s propaganda for a real dance contest he’s sponsored in a major city near Seattle.

“Wait a minute,” she said, recalling the title and making note of the city, “I think I’ve heard of that.”

“No shit.” It probably won’t surprise you that I was flabbergasted.

“Yeah,” she said, “I think they play that on public access, on the same channel where they show all those weird Japanese game shows.”

I couldn’t believe it. A lot of the advertisements and shit I had seen while Googling had mentioned the competition was also a “hit TV show,” but I figured that was bullshit.

“I didn’t realize it wasn’t based in Seattle,” she continued, “but I’m sure I’ve seen it before.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “So it’s like, people dancing in what looks like a big boxing ring —”

“Yeah, and the winner is picked based on the scream-o-meter!” Both of us were getting excited at this bizarre, amazing coincidence. She was thrilled and amused I’d heard of this stupid public-access show; I was shocked and amused that she’d heard of it.

I agreed with her on the scream-o-meter; while there’s no reference to that in the script, it’s definitely made clear that the winner is chosen based on audience reaction.

“I’m not kidding, Stan, everybody around here has heard of this stupid thing,” she said. “We’ve all seen it, to the point where I’ve actually had a long conversation with the girls at work about just what the fuck it’s supposed to be. It’s even weirder than the Japanese game shows.”

I couldn’t believe it. Not only did it strike another blow to my waning fear that The Manager is a some kind of small-time con artist, I was once again amazed that The Manager really does have this amazing passion for what he does. I’m not a dance fan, so I’m not exactly leaping on board the lovefest with him, but his intensity and passion for it — so much so that he wants to make a movie about it to make the contest even more popular — goes a long way toward making me more comfortable with him as a Manager.

Mark e-mailed me the other day saying sometimes he doesn’t bother writing coverage on a script that’s truly awful, but if The Manager is hyping it up, he’ll do the coverage no matter what. We both see that passion, and even if something has a bunch of problems it not only makes us want to do the coverage instead of just saying “This is a waste of time” — it actually inspires us to try harder to solve the problems and make it good enough that we’re passionate about it. The Manager is just starting out, maybe he’s not totally sure what he’s doing, but if he could be as passionate about mine (or Mark’s) scripts as he is about these other projects, that’s a desirable element to have: our advocate, always rooting for us and wanting us to get better. That’s what makes a good manager.

Well, that and business sense. He’ll get there someday.

Posted by Stan on August 13, 2006 10:38 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

July 17, 2006

Pepper

Growing up, I spent a whole lot of time at my grandmother’s house. With both my parents working much of the time (at one point, my dad was working three jobs and my mom was working another), and my sister and I getting in trouble all the time, my mom decided to nip that shit in the bud by sending us to our grandmother’s house. My grandma had two dogs: Maggie, a black half-poodle, half-puli; and Pepper, a gray miniature schnauzer. I hated Maggie because when I was six years old, she bit my finger for no particular reason. But I loved Pepper. I’ll spend my entire life trying to reach a point where I can have my own dog, just so I can get another gray miniature schnauzer and hope that he’s half as awesome as Pepper.

Pepper and I were inseparable for a few years, but then my dad got a better job, so he could quit all three of his and my mom could quit hers and be a stay-at-home mom. We didn’t need to go to my grandmother’s as often (not every day, anyway), so I didn’t see Pepper as often. A few years later, he started getting decrepit. He went blind and started to go deaf. He never went nuts or anything like the yappy dog from next door (which finally died, thank God), but it was pretty sad to see him always walking into walls or getting into wacky trouble because he couldn’t hear the call to “take a break” (which became his command to take a fucking hike when he got annoying).

His death was pretty tragic for me, even though we only shared a close bond for maybe six months. But I still kind of miss him every once in awhile, which brings me to the ultra-depressing dream I had last night. I think it may have been prompted by Oy’s mournful behavior in The Dark Tower, because I’ve never really had such a vivid and depressing dream about a dog before. I think it was Pepper in dog-heaven — which looks suspiciously like the long, dark-wood, dimly lit, L-shaped hallway in my grandmother’s house — mourning the death of my grandmother. For some reason I was there, too (is this a sign of my fate?), trying to comfort his sadness, but he refused to eat, refused to play, wouldn’t let me pet him. He just slept all the time and eventually withered and died.

I awoke disturbed, but I didn’t think much of it until I tried to explain it to my sister. I realized my eyes were rimmed with tears and that this dream had had a more profound effect on me than I had originally known. I guess it just saddened and disturbed me that I was so thoroughly unable to comfort the depressed dog in his time of need. I think that reflects on my hilarious lack of sensitivity in my waking life. But as I look back on a life of cruelty and insensitivity, I do realize that I feel the most regret for a household pet in a dream that never happened and never will. Take that, people I’ve wronged!

Posted by Stan on July 17, 2006 5:45 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

March 2, 2006

The Only Story About a Fat, Jolly Man and Fireplaces That Doesn’t Involve Santa Claus

In high school, I spent two summers working in my dad’s warehouse, and oh, the stories I could tell. It was like working in an office-set sitcom, with all the archestereotypes you could possibly imagine: the grizzled Vietnam vet, the struggling single mother, the Italian-American boss with Mob connections, the unattractive bookkeeping woman that nobody wants to make direct eye contact with, the guy who can barely speak English and either causes or is blamed for most workplace accidents — I could go on (no, seriously, there were more), but the point is this: much as I hated that job, it was both entertaining and educational to watch this hilarious soap opera unfold before me every day after summer school.

And who was my dad, in the midst of all this? Drew Carey: the fat, bespectacled, disgruntled middle manager who does all the work of his boss but gets none of the credit. His boss — Frankie, the aforementioned Italian-American boss with Mob connection — was a little bit abusive of my father’s workaholic nature. Because Frankie wanted to spend all his time going to Sox games, and as it happens, most Sox games happened during work hours.

Shortly before I resumed work in the summer of 2000, Frankie hired Nia as a secretary. Nia didn’t help me concentrate on an already boring job: she was gorgeous, and while I could think of a thousand reasons to hire her, none involved her typing skills. Which was probably good, since she had no typing skills. Or phone skills. Or any interest in work whatsoever. Because, if you’ve caught on, she wasn’t really hired as a secretary — she was hired because Frankie was cheating on his wife and wanted easy access to his “broad.” Also, she probably said something like, “I don’t want to be a cocktail waitress anymore, so give me a job or I’m telling your wife!”

When the hiring of Nia came to the attention of the big-wigs in Gary, it was pointed out that no other branch manager in the entire company had a full-time secretary (that’s what the assistant manager is for; just ask my dad), so if he wanted to keep her on the payroll, she had to do something else. Frankie thought she should learn the sales trade. It seemed like a good match: who better to sell HVAC supplies to fat, sleazy contractors than an exceptionally well-endowed woman in a tight dress?

The problem was, Frankie left my dad to teach her sales, and she had no interest in learning anything. Her feeling was that her job was protected. In a way, it was, because Frankie really liked to toss around his Mob connections. Apparently, his father was killed by a rival Family, so Frankie is Protected For Life. I don’t know much about organized crime, but I gather than “Protected For Life” means “if you want your ‘broad’ workin’ in the same joint as you, we’ll make that happen by any means necessary, capiche?” So Frankie would walk around implying that if anyone complained to headquarters, uh, he’d have the Mob come and kill them and/or their families. Nobody believed him, exactly, but that isn’t the kind of thing you want to be wrong about.

So Nia kept her job, and every few days my dad would attempt in vain to teach her about sales. He never got very far, but he didn’t really have to: as I mentioned, the bazongas hanging out of her dress meant instant sales. Contractors would put up with anything from her — and the longer it took her to look things up or ask questions, the better, because that meant more staring time. This kind of infuriated my dad, who is under the misconception that hard work should be rewarded in business.

Things reached a boil in the fall of 2000, when I was away at college. I missed all the good stuff, but my dad said that headquarters figured out that Nia was a stool-pigeon who existed as Frankie’s plaything. It also turned out that the warehouse manager — who also kept disappearing to Sox games with Frankie and often Nia — was also involved. Frankie was cheating on his wife with Nia; Nia was cheating on Frankie with the warehouse manager. The warehouse manager was also married.

When this came out, headquarters got pissed off at Frankie, but they couldn’t really do anything. It seemed like they should have been able to, but Nia actually had reasonably good sales, and although my dad’s company likes to be a “family company,” there doesn’t appear to be any law that says two married men can’t have sleep with one single employee at the same time. Consenting adults and all that.

But they didn’t know about the Sox games, or my dad’s Drew Carey status. When the shit hit the fan with Nia but nothing seemed like it would come of it, various “anonymous tips” came from my dad’s branch, basically saying, “Frankie doesn’t do shit, [my dad] is doing all his work.” Headquarters investigated this and learned that it was true. Frankie probably gave my dad the kiss of death before taking himself “and all his customers” (for the record, he had no actual customers because he did no actual work) across the street. That’s another sitcom element: the prime competition to my dad’s business is literally across the street.*

That was the end of Frankie, but most of the people were disappointed when my dad was passed over to be the actual branch manager. No, the company had a better idea to reward my dad’s service: he’d be launching a new branch out in Rockford.

The interesting thing about Illinois is that the people in our state outside the Chicago area seem to view the city as something out of The Sting or The Untouchables: a crime-ridden cesspool protected by the hippy-dippy liberals in power. This…isn’t that far from the truth, much the way the Chicago perspective of the rest of the state (as Green Acres with more guns) isn’t far from the truth.

Rockford is a strange place, too. It’s the second-largest city in the state — and they’re damn proud of that fact — but they have a “small-town” mindset in certain ways, like loving hunting and NASCAR and hating black people. For the purposes of this story, another example is their fear and hatred of outside influences, specifically the influence of city slickers trying to peddle their wares in the city. So when a citified company like my father’s sets up shop in Rockford, the business owners of Rockford — basically the small-town version of the Mafia, so let it be said that we aren’t the only ones with organized crime — try to shut them out.

In summary, my dad’s company sent him on a suicide mission to lead a branch to success — as he had almost single-handedly led the Arlington Heights branch to success — where there could be no success. So after struggling for about six months, to such an extent that one of my dad’s employees (who transferred from a different branch) had a stress-related heart-attack that killed him, Rockford contractors finally decided to start doing business with them. But it was business on their terms, loaded with all-expense-paid (by my dad) dinners, extreme discounts, and then came the really bizarre stuff: my dad had to go to the Winnebago County Fair and bid on — and win! — a live pig one contractor’s daughter had raised. He won it — at a cost of over $500 in company money — and we had loads of pig carcass in our freezer for months. It was fairly disgusting, even from a meat fan. Also, he had to pay for sponsorship of a local racecar driver.

Maybe it seems innocuous, but it was always done in the shadiest possible way: “You don’t sponsor this racer, we don’t buy from you.” That was the bottom line: there were plenty of other HVAC wholesalers in Rockford, and plenty of them are Rockford-and-Rockford-only, so the only way they’d do business was if my dad danced while they shot at his feet. And so my dad let that happen, because his success at this job depended on the success of the branch, so he would do whatever it takes to be successful.

Adding insult to injury, the regional manager was brothers of the assistant manager. So when my dad, for example, needed help swaying Headquarters toward doing something risky, he didn’t get any help from his regional manager, who wanted his brother to take over as branch manager. If my dad failed, his dream would come true, so he did as little as possible to help. Also, if the regional manager did say to go ahead with something risky and that he’d help them come around to it — if it was successful, that was easy enough, but if it failed, he’d blame my dad and say he had no part in it. My dad was a renegade branch manager who played by his own rules.

So here’s what really fucked my dad in the end, over two years after he had started there: they have these fake fireplaces** that heat homes with that fun fireplace ambience, but they don’t require expensive home-destruction to install a chimney. A group of contractors, undoubtedly after “accidentally” pushing their previous HVAC dealer into a cement mixer, told my dad that if he invested in these fireplaces — which his company doesn’t normally sell — they would sell like hotcakes. Apparently they were all the rage in Rockford, but once they started selling them, my dad would have to keep up with demand and keep them displayed prominently.

My dad proposed this idea to Headquarters, who nixed it. He went to the regional manager, who bottom-lined it for my dad: if they invested in these fireplaces and they didn’t sell, the Rockford branch was finished, and so was my dad. So if he was absolutely sure they would sell, he should go ahead with it. If not, he should just tell the contractors to fuck off.

My dad went with it, and here’s the problem: he was absolutely duped by those contractors, one of whom (apparently) had a stake in a manufacturer of these fake fireplaces. So my dad had a ton of them, nobody was buying them, and one or more of the contractors was laughing all the way to the bank. See, because it didn’t really matter if the contractors bought them and installed them in homes — my dad had already bought them and was just reselling.

True to the regional manager’s word, my dad was finished in Rockford. He would have been finished in the company, but to reward him for many loyal years of service, they merely double-demoted him, back to being the warehouse manager in Lombard. Then, when he proved that he couldn’t wrangle the ragtag bunch of assholes in the warehouse the way he had in Arlington Heights, they demoted him again, back down to driver. Then they actually promoted him, back to the assistant manager at Arlington Heights position he had had three years earlier. Kind of a humiliating experience, and one of the many reasons I have a problem with letting jobs — especially jobs I don’t want to do — suck me in. I know corporate loyalty and enthusiasm is rewarded, but I always feel I have to keep a distance, or else I’ll get so involved in the job that I wouldn’t even notice if people were conspiring against me, like the regional manager and assistant manager were in Rockford.

As an ironic postscript, the Rockford branch did remain operational, with the assistant manager stepping up to the plate. And it became one of the most profitable branches in Illinois. Shortly before my dad received his demotion and left Rockford, he started dealing with some dot-commer who went bust. Dot-commer knew a bit about the contractors’ world, so he had spent time developing a website — basically, a contractors’ version of Amazon.com. Everything they ever needed, shipped right to their warehouse or jobsite.

But he needed some suppliers in on the ground floor, and since he was based in Rockford, he started checking out the bigger businesses in the area — the ones that would have the most “stuff.” And essentially, the website works like this: contractors find what they want, buy it, pay for it, et cetera. Dot-commer receives the order, which he then sends directly to whomever would be the supplier. And the suppliers would actually ship it direct, not unlike Amazon’s Marketplace sellers. In the meantime, Dot-commer’s selling price would be a bit more than what the suppliers charge him, to ensure a healthy profit. And since apparently the website was massively successful, as a result so was the Rockford branch. If my dad could have stayed a few more months, perhaps they would have forgiven the fireplace fiasco.

But probably not.

*I suppose I should state here that this entire lump of bullshit involving Frankie and Nia, plus all the other bizarre and hilarious interpersonal bullshit I witnessed during that summer, eventually became the subject of a screenplay I wrote a few years ago. Despite the sitcom elements, it wasn’t (really) a comedy. It was kind of a dark, depressing look at working life, and how everybody gets caught up in these soap operatics, but at the end of the day, it’s all meaningless. Or at least that’s the way I feel: you can make and sometimes keep friends while you’re working, but sometimes they’ll stab you in the back, and most of the time you stop being friends as soon as one of you leaves the job. So in the end, all the relationships that are forged mean jack shit, so why get wrapped up in the drama?

**Link Note: I have no idea if this is what my dad was rambling on about or not, but it seems like the right thing, so I’m gonna go with it.

Posted by Stan on March 2, 2006 12:19 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

March 1, 2006

Systems Support Specialist

I’ve been a nerd for awhile, but never really a competent nerd, in the sense of writing code or soldering diodes to, uh…thingies that make stuff go. In fact, I’m not even strictly competent at the one thing I’m kinda good at: fixing shit I break. Usually I figure it out, but sometimes it takes me hours, days, even weeks, and oftentimes I have to go and ask nerd friends on the Internet probing questions until I have the answer.

Because of my incompetence, I’m always hesitant to find jobs in the general computer-nerd world, even though my Microsoft-employed brother-in-law has been encouraging me to do so for years, saying things like, “You know more than I do.” (MSN users: clearly you’re in good hands.) I’ll apply for them once in awhile, usually when they have such low qualifications that any idiot could do the job. And even then, I don’t get called.

So when my sister first told me of a job opening at her place of employment, and that the title was “Systems Support Specialist,” I said, “Sounds good,” while thinking, “I hope I can successfully ignore this until the position is filled.”

But at the same time, I need a job. Not necessarily a job in sunny Seattle, but I’ll take it. I’ve been there before, and while I don’t have the fondest memories, I didn’t strictly hate it. Okay, I did, but I really need a job. I’ll go anywhere and do anything. And, in point of fact, I’ve even submitted a few resumes out in Seattle, because I know I’ll have a place to stay until I get on my feet. So far, I’ve heard nothing, but the icy silence on the other end of a resume submission has never discouraged me before. In fact, it encourages me to continue reshaping my resume into a more appealing series of lies.

So I told her, “E-mail me the information.” She…didn’t do that. Instead, she called me again while I was five miles away from my cell phone and didn’t leave a VoiceMail because she assumed I was ignoring her again. What the fuck is with this family? “I really think you should get this job and want you to have it.” “Cool, e-mail me.” “No, I’ll call you, oh FUCK YOU FOR NOT ANSWERING!”

But finally she e-mailed me the info, and I checked over the job listing and said to myself, “I can’t do this job.” Granted, it specified “entry level” and none of the qualifications involved any actual employment experience in the field, but “Mac OSX, Solaris and Linux experience is also preferred”? I lost interested in Linux six years ago, and I barely even know what the fuck Solaris is! It was a George Clooney movie, right? “Experience with Wireless networking is required. 802.11X PEAP, LEAP, WPA, WPA2, WEP”? I don’t know what any of that means!

But it’s cool, I can Google and figure it out. I know what wireless networking is, I think I’ve heard of WEP, I’m pretty sure 802.11x is…something involving infrared? Heat vision? Okay, I can play it cool in the interview. When they ask, “Are you familiar with wireless networking standards?” I’ll say, “Yes.” Easy as pie. I can’t imagine them having any follow-up questions after that response.

Actually, I mostly assumed I’d send off my resume and never hear from them again. Until my sister called me on her lunch hour and said, “I’m going to see if my supervisor knows who in HR to contact so I can expedite your resume and try to get you to the top of the list.”

Top of the — oh shit.

She e-mailed me an hour later, saying she printed out a hard copy of my resume, put it in a “fancy envelope,” and sent it through inner-office mail to exactly the person who does the hiring. And suddenly I feel terrible, like I’m going to let my sister down. She’s so excited for me, and yeah, maybe I can do this job, but I really don’t think there’s any chance in hell that I’ll get it. The one positive is that when I e-mailed her the spiffy MS Word version of my resume and cover letter, she didn’t send it back with editorial comments.

So I dunno, she launched into this whole tirade about what a hard time she had finding a job, and how based on her experience and the experiences of everyone else she knows, the only way anybody has ever gotten a job is through a friend or relative who is pulling some kind of strings. Which is kind of a “duh” thing, and it’s cool that she — for the first time ever — wants to be the string-puller to help her li’l bro, but still…I’m totally gonna let her down on this one.

At least, that’s my feeling. It’s making me put so much pressure on myself, because I want to do well so she doesn’t, once again, cast her head down and take pity on her loser li’l bro. I also want to do well because, if I break the phone-interview barrier and they want to meet me in person, I’ll feel like such an ass if I spend all that money on a short Seattle trip just to blow it.

Man, I hate job-hunting.

Posted by Stan on March 1, 2006 9:40 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

May 1, 2005

Trauma

I couldn’t have been more than seven years old when my father burst into the bedroom that my sister and I shared, waking us both from a sound sleep with the noise and sudden brightness of the kitchen lights. “Come on out here, children,” he said lightly. Though raised for 13 years in the backwoods of eastern Kentucky, my dad had lost most of his accent, but he still has certain bizarre affectations you don’t often hear in suburban Chicago.

Bleary with sleep, my sister and I slowly got out of bed and wondered what, exactly, was going on. We had a rather odd childhood, with my father being an unruly alcoholic, so being awakened in the middle of the night for strange reasons was — well, still strange, but not as questionable as it maybe should have been.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” my sister asked through a yawn.

“We’re goin’ down to Kmart, getcha some toys,” he said pleasantly. Excited, we slipped on our snowpants, boots, coats, hats, scarves, mittens, and were ready for a trek out into the winter night. The idea of toys made us dismiss any potential concerns we may have had at the fact that it was after 11 o’clock, long past our bedtimes.

We followed Dad outside, and he walked right past his rusty, red pickup truck. My sister and I exchanged confused glances. “C’mon,” he said, gesturing for us to follow without stopping or looking back.

“Are we walking?” my sister whispered to me. I shrugged; she was the older one, so if she didn’t know, I figured I should be concerned. Kmart was at least 20 minutes away by car, so walking in the middle of winter seemed like a silly idea.

We followed him up the slope behind our house to the big soccer field where the Park District usually held games on summer Saturdays. He continued, huge footprints in the deep snow, until he reached a tall lightpost flooding quartz illumination all over the white field.

“Get down,” he said when we caught up.

“What?” I thought in my Daniel Stern, Wonder Years internal monologue. “Why are we out in this field? What’s happening?”

“Your mother says you been bad again,” he said. It was true; we were often caught sneaking out of the house or watching television when we weren’t supposed to. In this particular incident, I don’t remember what we did; I just remember the gory aftermath. “Get down,” he repeated sternly.

We got down, sitting Indian-style, as we usually did in school.

“Flat on your bellies,” he instructed; we obeyed. “You know how to do push-ups, right?”

My sister and I exchanged nervous glances. Sure, we had done push-ups in gym class for the stupid Presidential physical fitness thing, but neither of us were particularly athletic. My sister was generally more concerned with her hair and clothes, and I was concerned with not caring about sports. So yes, we knew how to do push-ups, and at this point it had dawned on us that maybe we weren’t getting the Ghostbusters firehouse playset after all, but would we do well enough to please him?

“Gimme 10 push-ups,” he said.

We set our hands down on the cold, hard-packed snow, making prints in it. And we started doing push-ups.

“One!” he called after we had — eventually — completed the first. “No girly ones, son,” he said to me.

“Two!” he called after the second. “Come on, we got all night, and you’re doin’ a hell of a lot more than 10 — this’s just a warm-up.”

“Three!” We continued, I don’t remember for how long, but eventually he was satisfied, and our faces had turned a pale shade of blue, so he trudged us back to the house and sent us to bed, freezing and probably dehydrated.

The next morning, whatever we had done, my sister and I made a pact never to do it again. And it’s really one of those childhood traumas that stick with you because, yeah, my dad was probably drunk out of his mind at the time, but that doesn’t stop the fact that this brought out the absolute worst in who he was. Was he normally — when he was sober — a caring, loving father? Yes, but if you crossed him, he’d take you to the dark side, which in this case involved a seven- and nine-year-old doing manly push-ups in the snow in the middle of the night, for something that was most likely as simple as refusing to eat peas.

It was this incident that really made me lose my trust in most people. Yes, I still trusted people, but this caused the downward spiral, and as more and more people — adults in places of authority, in almost all cases — began to betray my idea of who they were and show me their worst faces, I pretty much lost faith in humanity. Consequently, few things make me happy, as anybody who’s given even a cursory glance at this blog knows. I get depressed a lot, and I isolate myself a lot, because I don’t want to blindly trust somebody and end up doing more push-ups in the snow.

Posted by Stan on May 1, 2005 4:15 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

November 3, 2003

Cingular Cigh

Okay, so I’m on the Cingular family plan with my parents. I thought it’d be a really good idea because it’d cost me $10 a month and I’d get an assload more minutes (600 anytime, 5000 nights and weekends, and they roll over, as opposed to non-rolling-over 250 anytime and 1000 nights and weekends for $40).

But it’s a really, really bad idea to share a cell phone plan with your parents.

“Why?” you, my one and only fan, ask. You’re genuinely confused, as indicated by your single arched eyebrow and furrowed forehead. Plus, you’re a 28-year-old loser who still lives with his parents and mooches nearly everything off of them, including your phone service. (That’s right, my only fan is me, reading back on my archives six years later while burping and most likely scratching my crotch. So nothing’s changed.)

The answer is simple: my mother is pure evil. We all know she hates Lucy with a furious passion, so it comes to no surprise that she also doesn’t like me talking on the phone with her. Which I do. A lot. Usually on the weekends, but also a lot while I’m at school.

Now, for those of you who don’t know — I intentionally decided not to blog about it — last week, Lucy was in a car accident. Nothing serious, but she had a minor spinal injury and was put on some exciting loopy medication. We talked on Tuesday, and she explained what happened and then fell asleep. And then I called her back later and she almost fell asleep again.

Then she told me not to call her anymore. She said she’d call me when she was feeling better. Why’d she do that? Because I have a tendency to overreact to things, and then to freak out. She explained that, while she was recuperating, she thought it best to not have someone calling her every 30 minutes and explaining the many different ways she was probably going to die as a result of her insignificant back pain.

This is an overwhelmingly accurate assessment of my behavior during what I deem a “crisis situation,” and for the record, I deem a spider on the ceiling a “crisis situation.”

So, when Lucy called me today, I lunged onto my cell phone with the fervor and raw sexual power of a rabid pit bull. I would have — and, for the love of God, should have — been at work, but I took the day off because I’m not feeling well and they don’t pay me enough to come in sick. I was home; my mom was home. Lucy called and ruined everything.

I picked up the phone and started talking to her. As always when I’m on the phone in my house, I spoke in hushed tones because I maintain my mother still eavesdrops on my phone conversations, despite her protests to the contrary. I also remained as monosyllabic as possible. Fortunately, Lucy’s a talker. A big talker, so it’s really not difficult to let her carry an entire conversation without having actually said a word to her.

But there were things I wanted to say to her. I had told her some things, and I wanted to elaborate, and I can’t do it at school because the film department is an orgy of rumor and innuendo, and I can’t do it at home because my mother is evil. Usually, I end up sitting in my car and talking to her. It’s a sad, horrible life, the one I lead.

So, my mother, aware I was on the phone, started parading around my room, under the guise of dusting. Seriously, how transparent can you be? Especially when I’m in charge of dusting my room. Before she left, she said, very loudly, “DON’T USE UP ALL OUR MINUTES.”

I said, “I won’t,” in whiny, emo tones.

“What?” Lucy asked, and then dismissed it and continued talking about her lighting project.

Noticing that I wasn’t planning on getting off the phone any time soon, my mother stalked out of the room. A short time later, she arrived in the bathroom — we have a half-bath that adjoins my room and my parents’ room, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds — and decided to take the opportunity to wash her hands and brush her teeth. Normally, she closes the door so she doesn’t bug me (it doesn’t work), but knowing I was on the phone and knowing she wanted me off, she let the door hang open. I could hardly hear Lucy, but it didn’t really matter that much since I didn’t know who or what the hell she was talking about, anyway.

When that tactic didn’t work, she decided to simply stand in the doorway and stare at me for at least a full minute before shaking her head in what I imagine was disgust and then walking away. I pretended to ignore her the entire time.

A few minutes later, I got off the phone. I cut the conversation off early because I still wasn’t feeling well, so I wasn’t in the mood to talk (or, rather, to listen). Also, I was irritated by my mother’s nonverbal haranguing, so I wanted to get on the phone so I could fight with her. Also, I’d only been on the phone for 10 minutes. I could understand her bitching if I’d been on with Lucy for an hour or more, but what the fuck? Ten fucking minutes.

So, blah blah blah, same old shit, “Don’t waste all the minutes,” “I’m not,” “Yeah, you are,” “I only talk for a long time on the weekend or at night,” “That’s a lie,” “No, it’s not!”

Believe it or not, she actually got out the last billing statement and checked it.

“Ah-ha!” she shouted, having found the evidence she needed to convict me of the crime of having friends. “Fifty-nine minutes!”

“When?” I asked.

“Um…it was a Sunday,” she explained sheepishly. “But here — thirty-seven minutes! Also on a Sunday.”

“Are there any calls longer than 20 minutes that I didn’t make on a Sunday?”

“Well, there’s this call — 28 minutes, on a Tuesday,” she said. “To your sister.”

I actually won a fight. I’m glad the new bill hadn’t shown up yet, because I’ve actually spent a lot of time talking to Lucy on weekdays at school. I suppose I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, though.

In the meantime, I really think it’s time to find somewhere else to live.

Posted by Stan on November 3, 2003 9:52 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (1)

August 23, 2003

I Command You to Sleep!

For those of you wondering why, specifically, I feel like I simply have to move out and cannot wait another year (or two…) until I finish college, I have a brief illustration ripped from my life circa 20 minutes ago.

I woke up around 9:40, which is kind of late for me recently. I decided this summer that I would start getting up earlier for two reasons: (1) I usually do better work in the morning, and (2) my mother started working a 6-10 a.m. shift, so I have the entire house to myself. I’ve been waking up at 7, which came in handy, because most of the time I end up leaving for school around 7:30.

Because of this, I’m tired on Friday nights, so I go to bed early, and the residual of getting up early all week usually ends up waking me up some time between 7 and 8. Which it did today. However, I decided it would be a better idea to go back to sleep than to stay up. I was really tired, and I really had to pee, so I went and did that, but instead of caffeinating myself instantly and trying to stay up for no reason, I went back to sleep.

Flash-forward to 9:40. My mother goes into my parents’ bathroom, which is right next to my room, and starts banging around, intentionally loudly. This didn’t really wake me up because I hadn’t really fallen back asleep. I had drifted off for a few minutes here and there, but it was mostly me “resting my eyes,” as they say. I just figured, at that point, it was time to get up. So I did.

I went to the kitchen to get some breakfast, and my mother came in — I thought — to greet me on this fine summer morn. Instead, she asked, in a harsh and accusatory tone, “Why did you sleep so late?”

“Uh…” I explained.

“You never sleep this late,” she said. Apparently “never” does not include any times prior to June 2003.

“I was tired,” I said. I had been going down to edit most of the week, and in addition to the strain the commute puts on me, editing is no picnic either. It’s not like it’s manual labor, but it’s just as tedious and irritating. Consequently, all of this is sort of catching me up and turning me into more of a slug than usual. I thought it would be a good idea to get a few extra hours of sleep, because when I do it all over again next week, maybe it’d be a little less irritating.

“What, did you stay up all night online?” she accused.

“Uh…no?” I didn’t. I went to bed around 10:30 and pretty much fell asleep.

She did that thing Moms do where she put her arms on her waste and cocked her head to the side. This indicated that she didn’t believe me.

“What were you doing all night, then?” she asked.

She really set herself up, and I was pretty close to saying either “Talking on the phone with Lucy” or “Sleeping with Lucy,” but instead I said, “Sleeping. I went to bed, Mom. I was tired.”

“Usually, when I want to sleep until 10, you say you won’t do that and get up early,” she said.

“That’s right, I do,” I said. I was following her line of argument; I just thought she was being an idiot.

“Why’d you sleep so late? Why’d you get up at 8?”

“I had to pee, and I went back to sleep because I was tired,” I said.

“Well, the least you could have done is come and told me you were going back to bed,” she said. “You know I always get up with you.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. It’s true, she doesn’t. I don’t know why she even said that. There have been times where I’ve gotten up around 8, and she doesn’t slink out of her room until after 10.

“Yes, I do,” she said, not taking fact for an answer.

“Whatever,” I said.

“You could have just come and told me. A little information would have been nice,” she said. “You got me up at 8, and I was just sitting there, waiting for you to come back out of your room.”

And here we hit upon one of the things that bugs me about her. I didn’t get her up at 8; she got herself up at 8, because she’s so obsessively paranoid that she can’t allow my father or me to be awake and moving around the house if she can possibly help it. Sometimes, she’s too tired, but most of the time she is there, not letting us get away with whatever it is she assumes we’re trying to get away with.

Furthermore, there has never been a time in the history of the universe when I’ve woken up, gone to the bathroom, and gone into my bedroom, closed the door, and locked it. I usually leave my door hanging wide open, unless I’m really pissed off, but I wasn’t, at that time. There was no reason for her to think that I was, I dunno, masturbating or something, and I’d be out in a little while. The only assumption she could have made was that I had gone back to bed.

At any rate, my main gripe is that there are two things I don’t really like happening when I wake up: (1) people grilling me about my sleeping habits when I’m still trying to wake up, and (2) people demanding that, for some reason, I have to be extremely courteous and explain to them every time I’m going to go back to sleep so they don’t stupidly get up.

These are reasons why I want to move out; I shouldn’t have to answer to people every time I just want to roll over and go back to sleep. Or, as it were, take a whizz and then roll over and go back to sleep. And I really don’t understand why my mother can’t put two and two together and realize this. It seems pretty simple to me. The “you could have told me you were going back to bed” line is almost as classic as the “gosh, when you go out, you should call me more than you already do.”

A few minutes ago, as I was typing this little entry, my mom walked into my room and started slamming shit around.

“You aren’t going to treat me like shit for the next year, are you?” she asked.

Apparently, in her world, treating me like shit over something that is utterly worthless is all right, but if I get even slightly irritated with her, I am instantly treating her like shit and I may as well be tossed out on my ass.

“I do a lot for you, you know,” she said, “and I won’t be treated like shit.”

Ugh. I know she does a lot for me, and I don’t treat her like shit. I don’t treat her nearly as badly as most of my friends treat their parents. I just got sorta pissed off when I hadn’t been up more than 30 seconds before she’s interrogating me and insinuating that I was involved in some sort of all-night cybersex parade. I think I have the right to get pissed off about that.

Although, to be fair, I have been getting a lot more pissed off at her lately than I usually do. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s really gone off the deep-end, or because I’m a little more tightly wound because this class is stressing me out, or if I’m just sick of the bullshit and desperately need to get out of here.

I guess I’ll figure that out soon enough.

Posted by Stan on August 23, 2003 10:31 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

August 22, 2003

Apologies

My dad called me this morning while my mother was at work. He took a brief opportunity waiting for clearance to dock his truck to inform me that I should apologize to my mother for a little tiff we had on Wednesday. He didn’t really seem to know the details, but that could have been because right when he called, he was cleared to dock, so he needed to make things brief.

“I know you were right about some things,” he said, but then quickly corrected that, “or, at least, you think you were, but your mom was more-than-average upset, so you should at least think about apologizing.”

“I will,” I said, neglecting to tell him that I already had but decided not to because, for once in my life, I didn’t actually do anything w