I wonder how mom feels about my haircut

Well, I heard about the hair again first thing Saturday morning. And asked her to please drop the issue, as I didn't want to hear about the hair all weekend. She tried to claim that that was the first, maybe second mention of the hair, and maybe even added the usual, "you shouldn't be so sensitive." Maybe she didn't-- various repeated criticisms of my appearance tend to run together.

I headed downstairs to do yoga before everyone was ready for breakfast. Although I always feel better once I'm doing or have done yoga, it's often hard to motivate to do it, especially since you're not supposed to eat for a few hours beforehand and I often get hungry-- and start thinking about food when I'm supposed to be concentrating on my breath. So I have to just do it because if I start doing other things, I lose my motivation.

I'd brought home my yoga tape, because it's poor quality and about to be eaten by my VCR any day now, and my mom offered to burn it to a DVD for me. Also, with a tape, we could both do yoga-- she'd said she'd wanted to the last time I did yoga at home.

So I said I'd wait for her, but told her not to dilly dally (frequent readers will recall that my mother is a chronic dilly-dallyer). She has so much technology going on that it takes about 15 minutes to find all the right remote controls and arrange for the display to feed from the VCR. At various points in the process, mom gets distracted and starts watering her plants and doing other things. I make no secret of my wish to get on with the yoga so we can move on with our lives. Finally, about 45 minutes after I first said "I'm going to do some quick yoga," we're about to start (45 minutes is also, ironically, the duration of the program)-- we're sitting down, about to start breathing and everything-- and she starts complaining about a thin stripe of display information along the top of the screen. I plead for her to just sit down and let it go-- and she gets up again to try to fix it. I say, "okay, forget it. Just drop it. I'm starting now, with or without the tape."

She throws down the remote and says, "even yoga won't help you!"
"Yoga is all about concentration, and you're breaking mine!"
"Exactly, yoga is all about concentration! Learn to concentrate!"

And storms off. Which is just as well, because this morning she opted to do yoga along with the tape as she burned it. I opted to do it alongside. And she narrated throughout the entire tape... "this I can do, because my issues are in the knees, not the back.... this I used to be able to do... this I remember." I almost said, "if you could LISTEN to what she's saying instead of narrating what you can and can't do, you'd have an easier time with the poses," but it wasn't worth it.

Later that morning we headed out for a walk. We'd eaten an absolutely huge breakfast and I'd just brushed my teeth. My mother insisted that I try some juice-soy milk concoction that she had, and I said no. She said, "just try it." I said I didn't want to. She repeated that I should just try it. And so it went. And so it goes with EVERYTHING-- clothes that obviously don't fit me, clothes that fit me that I don't like, etc.-- she latches on and saps your will to resist.

***

That evening, we're flipping channels. We end up flipping between three movies that are playing: Finding Nemo (curiosity... I'd seen it, they hadn't), Lord of the Rings (family favorite) and Zoolander (my preference at the time). Now, part of the reason I was nudging us away from LOTR was that my mom just LOVES to narrate how every part of the movie is different from what happened in the book, which makes for a less than enjoyable viewing experience. Luckily, I wasn't trying to enjoy Finding Nemo, because I had to listen to a barrage of logistical questions ranging from "how come all the sea creatures speak the same language, and why is that language English?" to "why would the torpedo cause that kind of explosion," as well as ethical issues such as "now children are going to think that parent fish actually care about their offspring, and that fish as a whole cooperate with each other." When the movie ended, she asked whether the dad and the annoying forgetful fish got married. I told her that that was left to the imagination. She said the storyline was left unresolved unless they specified the relationship between the two.

The other films must have been in commercials when the credits rolled, because were watching them, prompting my mother to ask, "who's she?"

A.: "Who's who?"
Mom: "She?"
A.: "??"
Mom: "The she in the song."

The song was "Beyond the Sea"-- just the song that played while the credits rolled. I really didn't have an answer for that.

The best part of the whole thing was, in my flipping, I'd stopped on the Discovery Channel, which was showing a gorilla, with some sort of narration about that gorilla's life. My mother, hearing the narration, said, "what, the gorilla's talking, too??"

See, this is a whole other issue, of my mother not-- ever, really-- taking the time to assess the situation before either freaking out or asking someone else. Case in point: there was some small, plastic tube-like thing with a label that she tried to give me this morning to take with me.

"Isn't that your bee-sting kit? Why do you leave these things lying around the house"
"I don't even know what that is. It's not mine."
"Yes it is."

I then read the label. It was some sort of funnel for pouring motor oil.

***

I thought I'd maybe get through a whole weekend without a major screaming fight (the one over yoga was medium-grade). The big ones usually end in my father getting involved, only to be yelled at to stay out of it and be called an idiot who doesn't understand anything. In the interest of avoiding such a fight, I'd let my mother rant on about politics (and how right glenn beck is about everything, etc.), but she said something (I'll spare you the details) that I couldn't resist responding too-- it was just my civic obligation. I wasn't interested in getting into a discussion of the issue-- as much as it bothers me that my mother thinks the way she does, I'm not going to change her mind... I do wish I didn't have to hear about it all the time, and I've asked her to spare my the political verbal barrage, especially at mealtime. So it was ironic that at one point, she said, "you know what, this conversation is over! I'm not going to talk to you about this anymore!" I should have just let it go then, but I had to open my big mouth and say, "thank you! that's what I've been asking you to do all weekend!" After all, if I wanted to listen to people ignorantly discuss issues that they don't understand, I may as well go to work. I believe I said as much. Anyway, that just encouraged her to keep going.

For some reason, my pleas to escape her indoctrination campaign fall on deaf ears. Did I tell you (I know I've told some of you, but have I documented to all of you...) about the time she called me to ask me why I'd sent her something by e-mail? I'd sent her a review of restaurants in a city that she was about to visit (I got a similar response when I sent her, a year or so ago, an Economist City Guide that profiled galleries in Buenos Aires, as she was headed there). If you're not interested, delete the e-mail and move on with your life. Instead, she calls me full of hostility to make me justify why I sent her that e-mail.

I said, "I thought you might be interested in restaurants in Jerusalem."
"You KNOW I don't like to eat at restaurants."
"Fine. Delete the e-mail. I'm not trying to get you to eat at restaurants. I don't understand why we're having this conversation. I've asked you myriad times not to send me all the crap you forward on."
"Fine! I won't send you anything at all!"
"Please don't."

But she still DOES.

Anyway, as I'd probably mentioned before, as much as my mother's backwards political ideas bother me (and this is almost objectively backwards, to the extent such a thing is possible), it bothers me as much that I'm constantly subject to her expressing them, and even move that when I can't take it anymore and decide to argue back, she's impossible to talk to because she argues like O'Reilly, i.e. she simplifies and extremizes your argument to try to delegitimize it. (Easy case in point-- as part of her campaign to prove to me that evolution is impossible, and in response to my response of, "could we just drop this, I'm not going to agree with you and I don't want to talk about it," she'll say, "so you think we've come straight from being amebas?" I just refuse to stoop to that level of discourse.
***

That's all for now, and hopefully, for the weekend. Since I'll be home for a week, starting next week, I'll put these on an actual blog so as not to overwhelm your mailboxes. Happy Sunday!

A.

P.S. Over lunch, she mentioned that she didn't like my haircut.