My week with my mother has come to a close. I�m happy to say that she was in better shape when I left than when I arrived, but possibly only because I left exactly when I did. I love my mother to death, but by the end of the seven days I was there, it was beginning to get like Chinese water torture with the constant �where are you�s and the serious discrepancies in our television viewing habits.
That second one may not seem like much to you, but I appreciate my television as more than just an escape. I truly believe that a good show can enrich your life as much as a book can�in a different way, of course, but TV is not just a sink of tactless exploitation or brain corroding pap. Not that this entry is intended as my thesis on the merits of television, but my point is that I�m not one of those people that just turns on the telly so as to have some noise in the background while I try to forget about what happened today. My mother? Is. Seriously, if I have to watch one more rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond, I�m going to hunt down Patricia Heaton and shriek at her for a while.
It didn�t stop there, of course. If it wasn�t Raymond or M*A*S*H> or (heaven help us all) The Weather Channel, it was Unsolved Mysteries�which is an interesting show, but also the best way to make me sure I�m going to be stabbed and left to die on the jetty somewhere when I�m all alone during my lakeside jog. That�s the problem with that show�the mysteries are unexplained. People head out to the store for a couple minutes and never come back again. It�s like, one second they�re going for a carton of milk, and then they�re ON the carton of milk, you know? And they�re all, �Everybody liked Susan Gunderson...AND THEN THEY FOUND HER DEAD BODY AT THE SIDE OF THE ROAD!!!� And nobody knows who killed Susan or why. And this, of course, is only on the occasion that Susan�s body is found at all, because sometimes it�s just not, and then they�re all, �Was Susan Gunderson abducted? Or did she disappear of her own free will? Perhaps she was attacked by a passing motorist!� And then there you are, jogging all alone by the lake, and in your head you�re thinking, �Everybody liked [your name here]...� and every time a motorist passes, you�re diving for cover in a ditch at the side of the road, and you almost break your neck, and then it occurs to you that that might very well be what happened to Susan Gunderson, so thanks a lot, Robert Stack.
Anyway, the other thing my mother liked to watch was The Discovery Channel, but only when some gruesome surgery was being performed in utmost gory detail. If it was a major operation, good. If it was an emergency procedure and someone�s life hung in the balance, better. If it was an autopsy? The woman would practically take the phone off the hook so she could watch undisturbed. I don�t get the fascination with mortality, frankly. Particularly since this is the same woman who just about went into conniptions when I turned on the last fifteen minutes of Aliens. She can watch some dude have his multiple stab wounds (which he no doubt received at the hands of a passing motorist) poked, prodded, and plugged up, his lacerated intestines all stretched out over the operating table like Christmas garlands, but a big, rubber, animatronic monster with gooey saliva is too much for her to handle. I don�t get it.
But we had a good time, nonetheless. I kept trying to convince her to go out to dinner with me, because I really wanted someone to ask me about the wicked-looking incision on her neck, just so I could shrug and say, really coldly, �That�s what happens to squealers.� And every time one of her friends would call and ask to speak to her, I�d say, �Well, I don�t know. I�d have to remove her gag, and then she�d probably just start screaming again.� Or, if she�d get all difficult on me, I�d threaten to stop feeding her. Yeah, we had a fun week.
Anyway, my sister is there now, making sure the next phase of recovery goes well. As for me, I�m moving on to something far more challenging and heart-pounding: my life. Hello, unemployment. Thanks for waiting up.
Someone Got Here By Searching For: Cookie Commercial - Where�s the Cake I�m Watching: All the shows I missed from the last week. By which I mean: all the shows from last week. I�m Reading: I finally finished The Lost Continent, which was hysterical, and I�m already two-thirds of the way through Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben