The Odyssey begins

So I leave today for my vacation with my parents, really only the second vacation I've ever taken with my parents.

I fly to Boise today, my flight's at 530p, I haven't packed yet. I think subconsciously I'm hoping that if I don't pack I won't go, but I should probably take care of that sooner rather than later.

So the blog will be on hiatus for a while, I'm gonna try and update a couple times while on the trip, a couple of the rooms do have internet connections (not sure that I'm gonna spend $10 to get it though).

Your last call out for Chinese delivery

We got a flyer for a Chinese takeout place, "Hong Kong Taste," that's just too good not to pass along. I scanned the back of the flyer and put it up here so you can check it out....just don't order from them.

Asking the tough questions

I'm not afraid to do it. Let's challenge the normal thinking about tough subjects, subjects that we all care about, we all think about, that we all have opinions about. I'll get us started, you go next.

Are there dumber people in America than the people who show up for Wheel of Fortune? I don't believe so. Tonight, they guy who spun the wheel first, a writer, guessed "Y" as his first letter. Now, being a writer, I'd think he'd know which letters are a little more common than others and choose a little more wisely than "Y." On top of this awful guess, the first word in the puzzle was "_____'_". Do you really need to be told that "S" would be a pretty good guess for this puzzle? I guess he did.

While on the subject of Wheel, we should also talk about the whole "buying a vowel" thing. In case you don't know how it works, the contestants can spend $250 to "buy" a vowel. If the vowel is not a letter found in that puzzle, they lose their turn. Fair enough. Either way, they lose the $250. That's what rankles me about the whole thing. If there was no such vowel in the puzzle, there was nothing to buy. It seems a little unfair to charge them for the vowel that didn't exist. If I go to Amazon and try to buy something, but it's out of stock, I don't get charged for it. It seems patently unfair to me that they get charged for it. Then again, I suppose that it's not really their money that they're spending, it's the show's, so maybe they should be able to set their own rules.

Sundays in the hotel

Trying not to spend too much money over the weekend, I have thus far stayed in the hotel all day. I grabbed a couple of extra yogurts at the breakfast buffet to have for lunch, and I'm stocked on netflix DVDs to watch, so I've been doing that pretty much all day. Watching 5 or 6 hours of TV DVDs can be exhausting, let me tell you.

Earlier in the day, I had the "No Service" thing in the keyslot so that they wouldn't bother to clean my room. I haven't tracked stuff all over the carpet, and making the bed just seems silly, so I wasn't too worried about it. I got a fresh towel from one of the cleaning people this morning, that's all I really needed. But at some point, when I went outside my room, I must have forgotten to put the "No Service" sign back in.

The housekeeping people knocked earlier, I didn't answer, but when they knocked a second time, I did answer, because I had forgotten to get a bathmat earlier, so I wanted a bathmat. I let her in, and she started doing her thing, I tried to express to her that if she just did the bathroom that would be fine, but apparently I didn't do a very good job of expressing it, because she is currently vacuuming my room (She speaks Spanish, I don't).

To me, there's nothing more awkward than sitting here on my ass while she works around me. I know the company is paying for this service and all, but now I'm thinking that maybe I shouldn't have opened the door. Then again, I could be obsessing over this only because I've watched 6 straight episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm in some sort of Larry David-esque fit.

What's in a name?

I drove to DC tonight, along a familiar path, from my parents' house. South of Harrisburg, on US-15, there is a convenience store. Not just any store. This gas station/convenience mart has a name of "Rutter's."

I passed "Rutter's" fully 3 hours ago at this point, and I'm still thinking about it. I've been going past "Rutter's" for several years now, since it was on the way to my parents' from where we lived in NC, and I've always been mildly amused at the name of it.

"Rutters," I'd think, "I know what rutting is....maybe a rutter is someone who ruts." So here, finally, I have looked up "rutter" on dictionary.com and found that yes, a rutter is defined as (in one sense at least) "That which ruts."

This probably only amuses me, but I think the porn industry should start a campaign to be called the "Rutting Industry" and porn stars should be "Rutters." I imagine fun interview scenes of rutters trying to go straight:

Interviewer: So I see here Ms. Dildoupyourass that you were a rutter for three years. What exactly does that entail?

Interviewee: Rutting, mostly.

Hmm...I'm getting the feeling that this is a sign that I should go to bed, when I'm amused at such insipidness.

"It's pronounced 'nuke-yoo-lar'"

I drove to my parents' house this weekend. It would be a mistake to say that I drove "home", as not only is there no room for me anymore (or anything else), but I can't believe that these idiots (my parents) are related to me.

My little brother is 12, almost 13. He's going into the seventh grade. Except he's not, because he's never been to school. My mom has put him through what I'll kindly call "half-assed homeschooling" (it's probably more like "one-twentieth-assed homeschooling"). Her brand of homeschooling involves her giving my brother a worksheet and then retreating to her bedroom (a complete fucking mess...I'll take a picture tomorrow if I can). Whereupon he starts playing video games or just doing something, anything, other than the worksheet. He doesn't read books, he doesn't write more than a sentence at a time.

Because homeschooling is primarily a Christian nut activity, most of the books that she gets are for Christian nuts. The logic book that she purchased wanted little kids to brand statements such as "Jesus turned water into wine." as either "True Statement" or "False Statement." The math book concept of this amuses me of course, because I imagine problems such as "Q: Andy has 10 apples and Jesus takes 4 from him. How many apples does Andy have left? A: 10, because Jesus doesn't steal." The math books aren't that blatantly religious, but they still definitely reference religious bullshit.

The past few years, it gets to May and my parents say that he will be going to school next year. Then, by July, they've changed their tune and they think it's a good idea to wait another year. Then by the end of July it's not until high school that they're really going to have to send him to school, since my mom "can't teach him Algebra II."

They're at the latter point right now. A couple of months ago when I was here, he was going to school next year. Then apparently one of his friend's friends didn't like him, so he got scared about going to school next year, and convinced my parents (I'm sure it took him saying something only once) to let him stay home again. And why wouldn't he want to stay at home? There are no demands or expectations on him here. Those can only go up if he goes to school.

My biggest complaints though are the lack of schedule, lack of discipline, and a lack of a dedicated workspace (related to the discipline, I think). They constantly move around where his school materials are and where he is expected to work. To me it signals a lack of dedication to the homeschooling and yet another lack of discipline.

So I'm not in the door more than 10 minutes tonight when the argument starts about this whole clusterfuck. I tell my mom that she's not disciplined enough, he's not disciplined enough to carry this out. He's got no desire to learn, obviously she hasn't instilled that in him, maybe school can. She complains about my dad not helping, even though it's her party, she wants to do it. At that point, he did start bitching her out a bit about the fact that the homeschooling should be done by the time he gets home at 3pm. But for the most part, my parents are recreating the dynamic of my grandparents. What she says goes, he doesn't try to argue, even though he knows that she's full of shit.

I continued berating her, and I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but my mom set off the powderkeg. Now, I'm the first to admit that I'm horrible at trying to find a job. Horrible. I'm going to law school because, primarily, I'm awful at trying to find a job. It's really not laziness, it's more that I hate the whole rejection game. I never tried out for plays in high school/college because I don't like getting rejected on the basis of some superficial performance that they've staged for me. All of that contributes to my pisspoor performance during interviews (I can only think of one interview that I've had that I thought went really well....didn't get the job then, either).

So my mom says something about not being responsible and playing video games for two years. Seconds until ignition....3....2....1: We have mushroom cloud. While I lived in NC for two years and didn't have a regular job, I did teach classes intermittently. It was like being retired. I worked 11 weeks the one year, and 4 the year after. At $3k per, I made about twice what she did the first year, and probably a little less than she did the second year. What we made aside, I know where my money went. Rent, electricity, car payments, insurance payments, etc. My mom is someone who has never paid rent, electricity, car payments, insurance payments, etc. My dad has always paid for all that, and she lived at home with her parents during college. She pays for my brother's braces, and her credit cards. That's it. She wants to try to school me on responsibility? Fuck that, I blew up. Ballistic is a kind word for it. "You want to fucking take me on about that??"

I didn't get a real chance to get going about it (though I did say a few things) before my dad came in and calmed everyone down. He didn't do enough about the homeschooling issues, but he said more about it than I thought he would.

My brother was present for most of this, he was crying because he was so upset about me attacking my mother for this homeschooling shit. I'm not sure whether he thought I was attacking him or not (and I talked to him privately later and told him that I wasn't attacking him at all). I had to buy him off with a little Rita's.

After the Rita's trip, things settled down. My mother didn't really talk to me again tonight. We'll see how tomorrow progresses. At this point I'm glad I have the option of a hotel room in DC on Friday.

But at least it did give me something to write about.

Alright already

I've had several people tell me that I need to update my blog, so here it is. I'll try to do it again sometime in the near future, too.

The problem with posting right now is that I'm unemployed. I'm unemployed, school doesn't start again for another month and a half, and all of my friends are away for the summer.

So having none of that to write about, I decided I would try to come up with a list of questions that must be pressing in the minds of the home audience. These questions are not limited in scope to just myself; I think they're questions that any unemployed loafer could answer about himself.

Q: What time did you wake up today?	A: I woke up at about 9:30 this morning, when my landlady called. I'm not sure exactly what time it was, because I answered the phone on the fax machine, and the fax machine's clock is wrong.
Q: Are you going to shower today?	A: Probably. It's 8:35pm right now, and I haven't showered yet, but I tend to like to take showers before going to bed in the summer, I don't like feeling sticky while I sleep.
Q: Did you wear the same clothes as yesterday?	A: Sort of. The boxers and shorts are the same as yesterday, but I did put on a fresh shirt today. The socks I also wore yesterday, though just for 30 minutes while we took the dogs for a walk.
Q: Did you look for a job today?	A: Of course not. I'm working in DC in two weeks, so my availability is somewhat limited right now. Then I'm back for a week, and then gone to the northwest for two and a half weeks.
Q: What did you do today instead?	A: Well, I watched an episode of Cheers, two of Good Eats, maybe an Iron Chef (can't remember, maybe that was yesterday...hmm...."Mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't remember."...Maybe Meursault was just unemployed and had the days running together), PTI, and Jeopardy, and will probably watch an episode or two of Dead Zone or maybe watch the Deliverance DVD that Netflix sent me. I went to Walmart, Barnes & Noble, and Giant Eagle, and for a walk with the dogs. I also played a crapload of DoomII, going through levels 22 through 30.
Q: You really did nothing exciting today?	A: My landlady delivered a new refrigerator to us this afternoon, that was really the high point of my day, sad to say. We've had a real piece of junk all year, it doesn't freeze anything, it doesn't keep anything frozen, it doesn't keep anything cold (pork chops spoiled in 3 days). But now we've got a new one, so that has to be a step up. A new dishwasher is around the corner, too. Sunny days are here again, don't you think?

I'll be sure to try and keep you updated on these and other involvements in "The JDL Story" as the summer continues...