May anyone's cow moo...

Mom did bring up my hair today, but only once.

Mom: Do you put your hair up to go to work?
A.: Sometimes.
Mom: Because it looks better down.
A.: Okay.

You have to understand that mom fully believes in the power of manipulation. She admitted to it earlier--she was calling my name repeatedly when I didn't answer right away, because I was in the middle of a sentence in a conversation with dad, and she said, "you should have answered earlier if you didn't want me to keep calling you." But I digress.

Oh, I learned a new expression today: the Russian equivalent of "the pot calling the kettle black." It's "may anyone's cow moo, but may yours shut up." In Russian, this sounds better; it even rhymes. It came up because I asked why she had a gazillion bottles of glass cleaner lined up on the ledge, and dad said I should check the basement for more. To which mom responded that dad never cleans, so he shouldn't talk. This came up over and over again because we couldn't understand what she wanted at the hardware store, and in frustration, she kept saying that that was because dad never vacuumed.

Which is kind of true. But dad has been doing all the cooking since mom sort of checked out of that kind of thing a couple of years ago. They bicker about the fruit fly situation--dad accuses mom of buying more fruit than they can consume before it starts to attract flies, mom accuses dad of something tangentially related, and so on. I haven't been helpful--you have to understand that snark and sarcasm are very normal in Russian culture; I kept commenting on how the used up fly strips really add color to the kitchen. But I do turn on dad about food, because he doesn't listen. You may have heard me bitch about his bread habits: every time, I tell him not to slice the entire loaf at once because it goes stale faster, but no. This time around, I keep arguing with him about what to refrigerate and what not to refrigerate. He doesn't refrigerate peppers, but felt the need to stick tangerines in the fridge. Who does that? You never refrigerate citrus. I'm also trying to train him not to fry the $hit out of everything. This is a very Russian thing to do. He then tells me to use more oil; I point out that I want to taste the food, not just the oil. And so on.

***
Later

Dad: Why not watch [whatever crappy movie we stopped on when we got sick of flipping channels].
A.: I'd just as soon watch, on repeat, that video of animals urinating.