Déjà Vu

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm too sensitive, too easily annoyed, or just too quick to exaggerate my Mom's quirks. The blog helps-- having everything documented provides evidence that it's not me... she really does harp on the same things over and over again. In one set of phone calls just over twelve hours apart, my mother showed how true to form she could be.

Saturday night, circa 11pm, she leaves the following message on my voice-mail:
"It's almost 11pm on a Saturday night! Why are you unavailable to take my call??"

I'll let the unworthy-of-a-response nature of that question sink in on its own, but I will actively point out that she leaves variations of this message all the time!

This morning I returned her call. To her credit, she did not ask me whether I've applied to Google. (Although earlier in the week, when I called to wish my father a happy birthday, she asked whether I'd received the magazine and whether it made me see things differently. I said, "no, I still see that Google does not have openings for foreign policy analysts. When they do, feel free to send me the supporting literature.")

She did say, "well, I've been reading up on nutrition, and I do have to tell you, it's very healthy to drink coffee..." [suppression of inner screaming on the other end of the line, little do I know it's about to get worse]..."coffee has all the [sic] anti-oxygens. And you have to get out and be in the sun, without sunblock, just for a few minutes every day, especially in the morning."

For those of you who are new to my mom stories, she has been lecturing me about coffee and sun for years. This is actually an improvement because there's tacit acknowledgment on her part that we've had the conversation before. Just like I'm not going to apply to Google, I'm not going to start drinking coffee regularly (I do drink it occasionally when I'm especially unlikely to stay awake otherwise). And the irony, for lack of a better term, of the whole sun discussion is that I agree with my mother-- I do not buy in to the 'sunblock 24/7, all seasons' hype. I don't usually wear sunblock. I wear sunblock when I need to wear sunblock-- when it's the middle of the day, when I'm in the tropics, or when I'm out in the sun for more than half an hour. And each and every time I apply sunblock under one or more of those circumstances in my mother's presence, I get a lecture about how sunblock is unnecessary. After many years, I'm getting just a little wary of my mother's coffee-and-sunlight routine... and even warier of the non-stop, unsolicited nutritional lectures.

Anyway, upon sharing her new ideas about coffee and sunlight, she moved on to update me about her dishwasher saga, and asked me if I'd heard of PayPal. This is also great-- it happens with movies, books, and now financial services. When I lived in Boston, I used PayPal to pay my rent, and I'd told my mother about it several times because she'd mentioned situations in which it would have been useful to her. Perhaps her belief that I'd benefit from unrelenting repetition is projection: she doesn't hear anything the first ten times, and assumes I don't, either.

Anyway, in describing her discovery of PayPal, she mentioned their generous money market rate; I told her Amtrust Direct is actually better... which launched me into the saga of my Citibank (which is a nightmare)/TD Ameritrade (which is wonderful) adventure of the last week. In relating the saga, I used the words, "the mutual funds that I'd bought." These words led to near-hyperventilating and fainting on the other end of the line, and I cut short a lecture on how mutual funds are too slow-growth (I don't think I even had to say, 'slow growth is better than a 60% loss!' which was the result of her management of my previous IRA account).

Then the icing on the cake... I don't think I've yet shared this element of the repertoire because it hasn't been around long enough, but here it is:

Mom: Do you have any plans?
A.: I'm going to a bridal shower.
Mom: Oh, I mean do you have any travel plans? Are you going anywhere?
A.: No. I wouldn't be "going anywhere" and not tell you if I knew.
Mom: Where's the bridal shower? [this is a regular occurrence... always asking where things are... and I usually ask why it matters because it's not like she has any understanding of DC neighborhoods, but I thought this one was well-known enough that I would actually answer.
A.: In Capitol Hill.
Mom: Oh, is that a neighborhood?
A.: It is. [I'm going to guess that she just didn't hear me or recognize the name, and that probably was the case... but my point remains: if Capitol Hill doesn't immediately ring a bell, why is she always asking me about things in every other DC neighborhood or suburb that she hasn't heard of?]

Anyway, off to get ready for the shower (I enjoy these things about as much as I enjoyed getting stitches)... hope everyone's having a good weekend!