When You See Your Mother Scared For Her Life, It Changes You

So the weekend after Mother got her knee replaced, I was woken up by Father knocking on the door.  My sister, who was still home at the time, told him to wake me up.

When I got myself together and went to the dining room, I saw Mother sitting straight up but with her eyes closed.  My sister asked me to hold her because, according to my sis, she was feeling really dizzy, and she wasn't responding.  While my sister called the clinic at which she got her surgery, I started to hold her in case she fell over.  Mother continued to close her eyes, but all she could do was mumble.

Father thought she was just tired and needed to go back to sleep.  But after getting only the clinic's voicemail, my sister decided to call 911.  That's when, I think, Mother's mumbling started to get worrisome, like she was trying to tell us she was scared, but couldn't say the words.  Suffice it to say, I have never seen her like this before in my life.

The paramedics came.  They saw that her blood pressure was very low, caused by a combination of dehydration, constipation, and the pills she was taking.  But this wasn't a case where they give her some medicine and she'd be OK; they decided they had to take her to the ER.

Then, I saw something I'd really never seen before ... and something from Mother I had never seen before.  The paramedics needed her to get on this hammock they laid on the floor; from there, they would carry her into the ambulance parked outside.  We reminded them that she had just gotten her knee fixed; they knew, but this had to be done.

So, like ripping off a bandage, the only way to get her to lie on this hammock was to do it right in one straight shot, even though it would hurt like hell for Mother.  And it did.  Finally, Mother was able to speak, and loudly; in Chinese, she screamed, "Ow!  It hurts!"  (All this time she didn't speak English.  She must have been in some pain so deep that it made her revert to the long-term memory spots in her brain where she only knew Chinese.)  And she was really, really screaming, as if she was a little girl, howling for her suffering to stop.  I have known My Mother all her life as a domineering and even mean woman, oftentimes indifferent to other people's feelings.  But her she was, begging, even pleading for help, almost to the point of tears.  I've never seen her sound so ... well, helpless before.

---

We met Mother at the ER about an hour later.  Her eyes were open, she seemed awake and lucid, and she could even speak English again.  She was released several hours later with advice that she should drink water and electrolytes a lot more.

Mother hasn't been in that dire straits since, thank Buddha.  But the memories of that day are flooding back now that our family friend passed away unexpectedly.  While I was seeing her act like a little girl, I was thinking, "No, this can't be serious.  She can't be in real danger, can she?"  And while I don't know all the details about our family friend's death, I wonder if her relatives thought the same thing.  Maybe I haven't appreciated how close Mother was to the end.  But maybe her cries for help are something I have to heed if ... no, when the time really comes.  And that scares the hell out of me.  Because I am not ready for that, at all, and I don't think I ever will be.

Addendum To: My Fucking Parents Are Fucking Psychos

What I truly hate about my parents, especially right now, is that they do things, and make me do things, with no advanced warning.  Yesterday, I was woken up by both My Fucking Mother and My Fucking Father to help them clean up my former bedroom, which, for some goddamn reason, is going to be the bedroom My Fucking Mother recuperates in when she gets knee surgery.  She says she can only go up the stairs after surgery and not down.  That's bullshit.

Anyway, even though this surgery hasn't even been scheduled yet, they both decided, out of the blue, that they're going to redesign it.  And that meant both shitty parental units woke me up to move heavy, heavy things around.  That was bad enough because I had a long day working a Gopher football Game.  But when My Fucking Father decided to bang his hammer to get the bedframe aligned, I sighed loud enough for My Fucking Mother to lose her goddamn mind.  "I do everything for you!  I cook and clean and give you beds!  And I ask you to do this one thing, and you get so mad!"  And I realized yesterday that she is a fucking toxic narcissist.  It has always been about her, her, her.  And after years of insulting me, acting hurt over shoving gifts in my face for which I didn't ask is the ultimate sign of mental manipulation.  And she and My Fucking Father tore my bags into shreds because they wanted to get into a locked part of my desk.  They call me unreasonable???

I don't bother arguing with either of them anymore because they can't speak English well enough to understand my nuanced emotional points.  Now, I don't bother arguing with them because they are too goddamn narcissistic to see how hypocritical dicks they are.  Fuck them both.  If they want to throw me out of the house for throwing my stuff on the floor, they have to kill me.  What assholes.

What I Am Describing Happened When I Phoned My Mother Just Now

No, it doesn't matter now that they're coming home 2 1/2 months early.  And I can see that Mother is telling me not to worry about it, and that she can take care of it once they come home so I don't have to do it.  But she is old and doesn't completely understand English, so this payment that needs to be made is something I'll eventually have to do, and I wanted to do it this weekend while I have the time because I don't work.

There is one overriding disappointment when she rebuffed my wanting to pay these payments for her.  It's a chore, but it's something I wanted to do.  Instead, her wishes won out, even if those wishes are, essentially, "I'll do this responsibility, you don't have to do it."  Mother (and Father for that matter) minimizing what I want to do has been a cornerstone of the nature of our relationship, and as anodyne as this interaction seems, there is a burning rage inside of me over what she (albeit innocently) said, and right now I am as frustrated over how she made me feel after the phone call as I feel over needing to be careful of myself around the house again.  I can never quite be free from the parts of my relationship with Mother that I hate because it keeps rearing its damn ugly head.

Glad Last/Sunday Night Is Over

So after lunch and learning that I'm helping Father stick an EKG monitor on his bare chest, I hear Mother screaming at Father, over something.  I have never known what they've ever argued over, but I haven't heard Mother yell like that in a long, long time.

We eat a very early dinner (four hours after lunch, which is insane).  I was the one who attached this EKG on Father; Mother was in her office doing her own thing.  I go up to my bedroom and eventually take an early-evening nap before going out to exercise.  Mother bangs on my door to wake me up.  I'll expound on this hopefully in a different blog post, but never wake me up from sleep.  I hate that.

She gets me out to the dinner table.  She needs help booking their flight, although she actually said, "You promised to help me with my frequent flier miles," which is something I don't ever remember her saying.  It was obvious she was in the kind of mood she has often been in after yelling at Father -- wounded, feeling like a victim and lashing out because she felt entitled.  And this type of thing My Fucking Mother ropes me in to doing for her is the type of thing she usually ropes me in to do for her, which is something that has to do with not understanding English words and some elements of the task I believe she knows how to do, but doesn't want to do them because she wants to act helpless.  Besides all that, I feel like I've been dropped in unfamiliar territory, and so I'm figuring what the hell I need to do, but, and this is also typical of her, whenever I run into a roadblock or something I don't understand, she goes, "Well, what are we going to do?"  And I've gotten a little better at pointing to her, "Um, we are not doing anything.  You brought me into this because you don't want to do this.  I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do."  (She also has this tick where I say something to her and she goes, "I know."  She clearly isn't using that phrase when she's supposed to, but I still get triggered because I take her literally at her word, and I want to say to her, "No, you don't know!"  But that's another blog post.)

I can't book a flight online.  Mother asks me to call for her, fuckin' A.  The call wait time is 2 1/2 hours.  They invite me to text instead, so I tell My Mother I'm going to leave for the gym and just text the airline about this.  So as I'm putting on my shoes, my sister calls My Mother.  There is another matter my sister wants to talk to her about.  "Has Unforgivable Wetness talked to you about it yet?" my sis says.  "No," Mother replied, "He doesn't want to talk to me about it."  And I had to shout from the bottom, "That's not true!" and I went back up to the dining room to get my face on Mother's phone to tell my sister Mother's lying, and then to tell Mother that if she wants to talk about this other matter, she should talk to me, otherwise I'm assuming she's handling it herself.  Goddamn.  I've always thought I've gotten my self-pity from Father.  But I might be wrong.

Anyway, I got the gym but had to delay exercising because I was busy texting with the airline rep, or the bot, who knows?  There are no flights available.  So I come home, see Mother at the other side of the front door ... and she's all calm and stuff.  If she weren't calm, she wouldn't even look at me.  So maybe she's gotten over what she needed to get over.

At any rate, this was a Sunday that was a little too eventful.  Glad it's over.

My Final Blog Post Of 2024 Is Another Reminder Of Why My Fucking Mother Has Ruined My Life

I was going to neatly tie up 2024 into a bow (well, as well as I can), but My Fucking Mother fucking had to send this shit off the rails with her goddamn anxieties again.

She bugs the fuck out of me while they're here, but it appears as though she bothers me even more when she's in Vegas.  I think that's due to expectations: Since they are so far away from me, I presume that we would talk less.  And I think we do; for example, even though I thought we would talk Christmas Day, we didn't, probably because we talked Christmas Eve.  And that's A-OK with me.

But when she texts me saying she needs help ... goddamn, the thing she needs help with is such a huge energy drain.  It literally takes hours to deal with her issue.  And it's an issue only she believes is an issue.  But I have to help her because that bitch acts so fucking helpless.

She texted me at work yesterday/Monday afternoon: "Need help!"  I get home and call her.  She tells me these real estate forms need to be filled out.  The government wants them, and she's scared as hell that, like, the FBI will arrest her if we don't do it before the end of the year ... even though the stuff she said told her that actually said she had a couple more weeks.  These forms are in English, of course, so she immediately ran to me, only to switch up her tone and just fuckin' saddle me with all this bullshit I need to deal with with an urgency only she has.  So fucking typical of her and her goddamn "issues."

These forms the government wants filled out I didn't even know existed until today.  And I had to waste two motherfucking hours with My Fucking Mother to do them online.  Worse than that, I screwed up one of the forms, and I'm not sure the website on which I did these forms took up the corrected information.  So I think I have to follow up today, some time after work, to see if some AI chatbot can let me know if the "government" has the correct information.  And who knows how long I'll have to fucking waste on that.  It's New Year's Eve, for fuck's sake.  I'm supposed to mark the death of the old year and say hello to the new one.  I don't want to spend it dealing with goddamn forms.

---

This year was bad because I lost my uncle.  I feel bad because I hadn't contacted him much before he died.  I think the last communication I had with him was wishing him a (Western) New Year via text.  He was gone within two months.  He didn't want anyone to talk to him in his decrepit state.  I don't care; I wanted to at least say goodbye to him and tell him I love him.  And I'll be honest (if I haven't stated this here in WAF already): I'm mad at him for not talking to me before he went.

Come to think of it, 2024 brought more signs my body is breaking down.  I saw someone for my knees after work yesterday/Monday.  She said it's probably arthritis, which everyone my age is going through.  Use exercises to get manage it.  I think I heard that before when my physical therapist told me to exercise my back.  I was given a referral for physical therapy for my knees, and there's a chance it's the same person who I met with five years ago.  I don't think the guy likes me, though, so I don't think I'll take up the referral.

Gaining weight, too.  I know I should eat better, but I'm still holding onto the delusion that I can eat what I want and not get too fat.  That's not happening, but I'm not changing my diet.  Oh, and I'm still dealing with trying to do my desk job with bifocals on.  Had a lot of trouble seeing with my eyeglasses in 2024.  My eyes got so strained looking at my computer screen that it began to hurt.  I even take them off and see my screen through blurry eyes.  It beats getting a headache.

Everything else, I guess, is the same, including dealing with My Fucking Mother.  Every fake emergency she makes me deal with reminds me that I got my anxious state of mind from her.  She has grafted every part of her insecurities onto me, and I cannot and will not forgive her for that.

Happy New Year!!!

#1! Trusted News!

Those stupid billboards for The Epoch Times suddenly arose about a couple months ago (maybe?) and they're still around.  Wonder how many Minnesotans know that this is a Chinese-originated newspaper built by Falun Gong, that weirdo pro-tai chi Chinese cult that wants to overthrow the Chinese government?  I wouldn't mind a coup to take those Communists out as well, but I sure as shit won't vote to put the fucking Falun Gong in there.  Those people are fucking nuts!!!

And yet it's nutso groups like these that seem to have all the money these days.  Hence, the billboards.  But there are so many crude, if not primitive, elements to these billboards (which are basically all the same) that I have to point them out.  For one thing, their slogan, "#1 Trusted News," sounds like broken English ... as if a Chinese person was trying to speak English without understanding the language's syntax.  That bothers me to no end.  And second, there is a headshot of some White guy right next to "#1 Trusted News."  Doesn't seem like anyone famous, but this guy's fucking head is in every billboard I have seen in the Twin Cities.  Who the fuck is that guy?  Was he created from AI?

Can't wait to see this cult's advertising end.

Immigrants' Son Riding To The Fucking Rescue Again

I love my parents.  I love them most of all right now -- when they're half a world away, and I don't have to be near them.  They can hurt me emotionally, but it doesn't hurt as bad when I know I can just end the call and be at peace at home.  Now, when they are physically at home, I get uneasy and count the days till they begin their winter sojourn around warmer places on Earth.

Still, they can reach out and touch me, and when they do, they can ben annoying as fuck.  And they were last/Wednesday night, when Mother wanted to see if I was home.  There were a couple of photos she wanted me to snap of bills she's kept from a couple of their rental properties -- kind of a pain-in-the-ass, but understandable as to why she would want them.  But then Father chimed in and asked, as he has done all my life though not lately, to write another complaint letter.  This time it's about other rental properties they own from which they believe they haven't gotten enough income.  He asked me to write to the Better Business Bureau about it, and he has asked me to write to them before, and it's gone nowhere.  And then Mother gets back on the horn and asks me to call the property management company and ask them why they're not getting as much money as they think they should get.

This, in essence, is one of the main reasons why I hate my parents: They are permanent drama queens.  I have had to deal with and live under their anxieties and their misplaced sense of entitlement.  Moreover, they add a patina of helplessness to these demands: Since I can speak English like a native, I have always been asked to write, and in this case call, and ask for what they want on their behalf.  I've always been sent out to do their dirty work, oftentimes when they have only half an idea as to what they're mad about, sometimes when they have no proof that they're getting screwed.  But I have to do it anyway because I'm their son, while they go relax or fucking gallivant around China or somewhere.

With that being said ... I have looked over these income statements, and they may have a case.  It appears as though both rental properties in question were rented out for most of the month.  Yet, I see fees here and there, and they add up to a vast majority of the income both properties supposedly generated in income.  They're getting money, but it's a piddly amount.  Now I don't know what questions I can ask this management company, and there might not be anything I can do because my parents supposedly signed an agreement.  But I still call bullshit, and if my parents are right, this management company has reneged on any promises to get back to them when one of them has called asking why these fees have taken such a huge bite out of the revenue.

I think I need to call.  If these fees aren't mistakes, maybe they need to find a different management company, or even sell the properties.  But I'll call them Friday.  I have time then.  I need to formulate questions to ask.  Also, I don't want to call before then; I want to go out for a bit tonight/Thursday night.  If they can party, I can fucking do the same.

Grandmother's Friend ... I Don't Know

Saw Grandmother's best friend at the home on Saturday.  Glad I did because ...

Like I'm sure I've said here on WAF before, as she has aged, communicating has gotten a lot more difficult.  Before she would speak English to me, and we could talk about things.  Then she would begin to repeat herself over the course of the hour I usually spend with her.  Then she wouldn't speak English, just her native Vietnamese.  Still, she would talk incessantly to me as if I was able to speak Vietnamese, which I cannot.

That slow (and I hate to use this word) deterioration was hard to take, but it was, you know, OK.  That was in March.  In April I popped in only to see her asleep, and since I don't want to be waken when I'm asleep, I left the home early without talking to her.  This time around she was napping, but she did wake up, or at least open her eyes.  I said hi, and she just looked at me.  When I asked her if I could sit and talk (well, more like look at her), she nodded, but she didn't speak.

Things are different with her, if things I saw in her room are any indication.  She had the TV on (well, an orderly turned it on for her, I'm sure), but for the first time I can remember, the TV was muted and instead someone popped in an old iPod Mini and blared old time music from the 40's and 50's in the room.  (It was tuned to A&E, and there was this footage of a car crash on the road.  But since big band music was playing, and I didn't know the TV was on mute, I thought that big band music was the music bed for this found footage of the car crash.)  She has been given packages of Lay's potato chips to eat, but there were about a half-dozen unopened ones on her tray and dresser.  And on the drawer upon which sits the television set, there sat unconnected parts of what appears to be a breathing apparatus.  I don't recall her ever having any issues with breathing.

As soon as I saw her, with the skin around her mouth drooping to the point where it creased an inevitable frown, I knew things may have taken a turn for the worse.  For some time she no longer was the vivacious, even plucky, woman with the well-coiffed hair (she was a hairdresser) who gossiped about all the men who wanted to talk to her all day.  Her hair, straggly for a long time, settled stiffly on her head.  And while this was the first time in a long time I spent some time looking at her, intently looking at her, she nodded off a few times.  She was still responsive; whenever she heard a noise in the hallway, she would open her eyes (if they were closed) and look up.  But there was no talking while I was with her.  Her energy has flagged significantly, and now it looks as though she needs help breathing, and that scares me for her future.

I had to go.  I told her, and she surprised me when she asked, in English, "Where are you gonna go?"  I said home.  I took a couple photos of the both of us in case it was the last time.  I kissed her forehead and cheek, and I whispered in her ear, "Thank you for everything.  I love you."  And then I grasped her hand for a long time, if indeed this truly was the last time.  And then Grandmother's friend kept gripping my hand, and started touching and pinching parts of it.  That actually lasted another 40 minutes; the 1:40 is the longest I ever stayed with her.  Finally, she stopped holding my hand, and I took that as an opportunity to truly say goodbye.

Except that I didn't.  I turned her wheelchair toward the window so I could get good pictures of the two of us, but as I left her room it looked as though she wanted to watch TV, but she had to look up and to her left to do so.  So I went back into her room and reoriented her and her tray so that she could look straight at her set.  And I just had to kiss her and tell her I love her again, but thankfully, she didn't hold onto me for dear life.  However, I did say something I hesitated to say the first time: I told her I will see her again next month.

Bad Driver: 707 JUP (Plus, The Annual Christmas Song Breakdown)

Ah, yet another little bitch.  I just was taking advantage of you starting from a dead stop at a red when I was still driving when it turned green.  I had to take a quick left and get into your lane.  And yet you wouldn't accept that and cut right in front of me.  You petty little fucker -- you're just like me!

And of course you were going to take that left, too.  Man, I'm telling you, I was about to light you the fuck up -- get on your ass, turn on my high beams, honk my horn, hound the shit out of you, and if you wanted to step out of your car and try something, I would have loved to throw down.  But ... I had a family vacation to get to later that week, and anything that would have prevented me from seeing my sister graduate would be my fault.  You're not worth that much trouble.  I can only console myself by guessing, with reasonable certainty, that you're stuck in Minnesota where, right now, it's (checks Weather app on phone) -5 and it feels like -21.  Meanwhile, for the past two weeks, I've been (for the most part) living in paradise, where other people besides me are paying for most of what I see and what I eat.  It's 72 here at a quarter to 1 in the morning.  We don't have a wind chill, we have a heat index; it feels like 74.  And despite getting emasculated by My Fucking Mother (theme!), I think you'd be so fucking jealous of where I'm at right now.  You do you, asshole.

---

Alright, alright.  Where is here?  Might as well tell you; here is the Big Island of Hawai'i.  I've been in the state of Hawai'i for about the past two weeks now.  Started off in Honolulu, went to the Big Island, go back to Honolulu in a couple days, then fly back shortly after that.  There was a snowstorm just before I left followed by a dip in the temperature, then this bomb cyclone happened last week and now Minnesota (along with most of the rest of the mainland) is still recovering from all the snow, the blizzard conditions, and the dangerously cold temps.  But it's going to warm up above freezing on Wednesday ... and that's when I get back home.  Maybe that'll knock the snowpack down to a manageable level to plow.  Hell, I have to make sure the pipes in my house didn't freeze up.

---

Oh yes, it's Christmas!  Since I am in Hawai'i, I have to break down the Bing Crosby (with help from The Andrews Sisters) classic "Mele Kalikimaka!"

So the deal with this song (and I am totally cribbing this from the song's Wikipedia page) is that in 1949 a stenographer for Hawai'i-born composer R. Alex Anderson (and I assume all of this took place in Honolulu, the city where he was born and died), who was an expert in making Hawaiian-themed songs, wondered aloud why there wasn't a Hawaiian Christmas song.  Anderson got to thinking and then to writing and came up with "Mele Kalikimaka," which wasn't a phrase he made but had been in use since at least 1904, when the greeting was found in a Hawaiian-language newspaper called Ka Nupepa Kuokoa.  Anderson showed it to Bing Crosby, with whom he played golf.  Sometime in the next year, Crosby showed him the recording.  The song got onto Crosby's 1955 compilation album Merry Christmas, and it has been a somewhat overlooked classic since.

By the way, the term "mele kalikimaka" appears to be a phonetic (if not literal) translation of "Merry Christmas."  The Hawaiian alphabet only has 13 letters, and the two most popular in the English alphabet, "s" and "r," are not in that alphabet.  Furthermore, there is a litany of rules one has to follow; every consonant has to be followed by a vowel, and all syllables must end with a vowel.  Because of that, someone determined (as appears to be the case in the citing in Ka Nupepa Kuokoa) that if you ... uh, "translate" probably isn't the right word but "derive" might be ... anyway, if you take "Merry Christmas" and you try and say "Merry Christmas" using the Hawaiian alphabet, it was determined that it would become "Mele Kalikimaka."  The Wiki has a good step-by-step breakdown on why the "r"'s in "Merry Christmas" are replaced with "l"'s, for example.  You have to admit that the syllables in "Mele Kalikimaka" lends itself to being sung, right?

Merry Christmas!

Things Fall Apart -- Again

So Monday night Father is trying to repair this leak from our old copper pipe in the basement.  He bought some pipe repair kit contraption, the instructions to which he couldn't understand because they were in English.  He asked for my help, but I couldn't understand the instructions because I couldn't understand them.  I remember when there was a pinhole leak in the same copper piping some years back when my parents weren't here, and ... frankly, I don't remember how I dealt with it before Father came home from Las Vegas to fix it.  I don't remember if I tried fixing it myself, but if I did, I failed.  At any rate, I came home from work yesterday/Tuesday and he didn't seem to be working on the pipes, so I guess it worked, or something.

Later last/Tuesday night I tried to open and clothes my blinds, but instead of opening and closing, one side of the blinds moved up and down.  Often you see the bottom of blinds be crooked.  Nope -- for mine in my bedroom, the top of my blinds are.  And I finally saw tonight that a string holding up one section of the top of the blinds snapped.  I don't know what to do besides keeping the blinds closed so that no one sees.  I don't want Father to fix it because that means going into my bedroom, where he eventually will tell me to clean my damn room again, pffft.

Oh, and I lost my set of keys, the one that has the key that opens the desk drawer to my porn and the one to my storage unit.  I have another set, but I want to find my first set.  I hope they'll turn up; they sort of seem to do that.  But I looked through the pants that I wore and they're not there.  Did they fall in the car?  Did they make it to the washing machine?  Hell if I know.

Yeah, things are falling apart now.

Sprinkler System Follies

I still don't understand why in the hell my parents put in an automated sprinkler system for our house.  Sure, moving around a sprinkler to make sure all parts of both front and back yards got water was a pain in the ass, but does that mean we need to install a whole automated sprinkler system?  What would the neighbors think about us?  And what if there's a drought?  Climate change is bringing ever closer the possibility that we won't be able to water the grass whenever we want, so why in the hell would we ever want an automated sprinkler system?

No matter, the 'Rents put them in.  And therefore I wasn't that cognizant that, once they left before watering season began almost a couple months ago, I would have to tend/worry about it.  Hell, if I had my druthers, I would just let the grass yellow and die.  It would save me from mowing, that's for sure.  But I think my folks would prefer green grass because apparently it's an ostentatious sign they achieved The American Dream.

Problem is, I barely know anything about how it works.  What I do know I had to learn because my parents asked me how the system worked and if there are any instructions to do this or do that.  It's one of those times where they essentially say, "You're an American boy!  Why can't you read English?  I can't read English!" moments throughout my life that have made me resentful towards them.  That doesn't mean I can fix a problem if something really bad happens -- say, for example, a flooded basement, or leaks on the outside pipe, the latter of which appeared to have happened when I checked said outside pipe just after work on Tuesday.  Had no idea what to do, so I turned a handle, and the water stopped shooting out all over the place.  Then I re-screwed some, uh, cap thingy because water was squirting out from under it.  I did my best to screw that cap in place, then I turned that handle the other way, and there was no leak.  Score for me, I guess.

However, I still don't know if everything works.  And because operating the sprinklers is a seasonal thing, matters about it that I would be on top of in the summer I have totally forgotten after a winter.  For example, the pipes are closed off for the winter, so if you want to water the lawn, you have to turn all the handles to open.  That creates an ominous-sounding whooshing sound throughout the house.  That's the water that had been cut off close to the, uh, main standpipe up to the edge of the house's pipe.  I thought the basement was going to flood, and indeed, parts of the pipe system at the back of my house was gushing with water ... and then it stopped.  The water had to achieve a new equilibrium, or something.

And then I have to worry about the grass itself.  There is the far corner of the front lawn, one that's next to the street and bordering along the neighbor's driveway, that always gets dry and yellow and brittle every summer.  If we're installing a sprinkler system, you use that system to prevent such things from happening.  And so I need to adjust the run time cycle of the sprinklers that do both yards so that that part of the frontyard gets some wet lovin'.  Haven't had time to figure that out yet.

And then I remembered that the last cycle/routine, the one my parents wanted, shut down the sprinklers in the backyard.  They wanted to water the backyard, and in particular the garden back there, manually.  Well shit, man, why in the hell do we even have an automated sprinkler system if you want to sprinkle water by hand?  Anyway, I forgot about this skipover, and so I see the backyard getting all dry and yellow.  I need to edit the cycle so that the sprinklers in the back go operational.  But I'm paranoid as fuck that because of a whole year of dormancy, those sprinklers won't work.  They'll keep watering well after the run time is over, or the hoses underneath the surface of the grass rupture and, well, flood the basement.

So, do I add the back sprinklers and risk a leak, or do I not get them operating and see the grass die?  Those were the choices I thought I had.  At first I compromised by bringing down the run times for each station and then adding the back sprinklers Tuesday night.  That way, I figure, if there is a huge rupture in the guts of the system, that particular, uh, operation won't last more than five minutes before it automatically shuts down and goes to the next set of sprinklers.  Or something.

And then yesterday/Wednesday morning, I realized something: I'm filling in for someone yesterday, today and tomorrow, and that entails a two-hour shift in my start time.  The cycle begins at 8 a.m.; I don't need to get to work until 9 the rest of the week.  So why don't I just shorten the cycle times for each set of sprinklers, cycle through all of the stations to see if they work, get the peace of mind I need to go on in life, and get to work on time?  The only way to do that is to shorten the three pre-determined cycles for the frontyard even further than I did Tuesday night.  Turns out that you can change run times for stations mid-routine, like I did, but only if that particular station hasn't started up yet.  Good to know.  Unfortunately, I didn't change the times before the routine began, and so I couldn't see all three backyard cycles start spritzing before I had to leave for work.  But I was able to see the first two, and they all seemed to work.  More important, after I got back from work I checked the basement and the pipe that leads outside -- no leaks.

Good.  Now (assuming there are no disasters coming down the line), the next pressing matter is finding the right times to water all parts of my yards without overdoing it and overpaying for it.  And then some of the sprinklers should have its spray radius adjusted so that it could spit out more water to the parts of the lawns that need it.  And all I need to do to figure all that out is some time and space -- neither of which I have right now.

She Spoke In English (For Once)

Visited Grandmother's best friend this afternoon.  Before she was incommunicative and, sometime, irascible.  She wasn't today, although I still couldn't understand her.

Except ... when I wheeled her chair back inside (she spends most of her days now with her wheelchair at the edge of her door, table of Lays and generic lemon-lime pop, watching everybody go up and down the hallway -- it's like people-watching from your front porch, except, you know, she's in a nursing home) today and she began to talk, she spoke in English.  First she said, "When you come up here, you have to think about what you're going to say."  Huh.  And then she said, "No matter what you say or what you do outside, tell people I am happy to be here."

And then she reverted back to Vietnamese and, like several times before, her voice started to crack and her eyes began to moisten.  She was sad about ... something, but again, because I can't understand her, I don't know what.  Maybe she isn't happy to be there as she said.

I wonder sometimes how lonely she is.  Also, are they drugging her up in an effort to make her docile?  Because that might make her even more confused and lonely.

I don't know if growing old is worth it.

I Can't Go Any Faster

I am now getting the feeling that the slow pace at which I grade papers has finally been noticed.  And by "getting the feeling," I mean my supervisor on Wednesday asked me online why I've been so slow.  I told him it was a combination of me wanting to go over training papers again to get my mind straight (even though I had two days to do that) and long and early hours at work (which is true).  Man, if they ever find out I'm whole hog just listening and/or watching sports, I'd be one screwed shrew.

I don't know if I am the only one who brought about this move, but the leaders of this test scoring project did something uncharacteristic (at least as far as I know them) on Friday.  We have a chatroom, what I think Slack looks like (I have never used Slack), and our supervisor dropped a message at the beginning of our shift, something he has done maybe three times in the past three months of the project.  He gave us a goal to meet.  "Let's do 100 papers tonight!" he said.

On Thursday, I did something I had done when I did test scoring projects in-person, and it's something I should have done at the outset of this project.  I took a Post-It note and ticked every paper I scored for that shift.  I started doing it many years ago when, well, we scorers on the project were warned by that project's boss to pick up the pace, and that tracking your output for that day would be the smart thing to do.  It is smart.  And after my boss "noticed my work" on Wednesday, I remembered that, so on Thursday, I started tracking myself.

And do you know how much faster I went?  By, uh, ten essays.  That's it.  And on Friday, once my supervisor's edict came down, I tried to go even faster, and I squeezed out five essays more than the night before.  It was well short of 100.

Yeah, I'm slow.  But I will defend myself.  We are reminded by the company (well, companies -- I should try and get in touch with the other one to see what they're up to) that behind every paper we grade is a student.  Regardless of how we score, we need to recognize the humanity behind the writing.  And so I imagine a kid, looking down at a paper, being presented then and there with a question that he or she needs to answer in the time allotted -- and, by the way, this project involves grading responses from children for whom English is a second language.  And you should see these papers.  Not all, but many of these papers are at the least well-thought-out.  You can tell that because, of course, those answers are long.  But a kid had to spend some time, and thus some thought, on writing out such a long answer.

No, sometimes those answers don't fulfill the requirements of a good score no matter what she or he writes.  And, there is a sameness to the papers that make me space out, and space out frequently.  But I have a lot of difficulty thinking of the time and thought and care a student puts into writing an essay, only to then take five seconds to speed-read it just to see if he or she used phrases that were complex enough or a sufficient number of words in order to receive a good-enough score.  If the child put some thought in writing it, I have the obligation to take at least some time in reading it -- in full.  And what I say next might get me in more trouble, but so be it: For ever essay I read -- not just in this scoring project but in past ones as well -- I read it again.  We have specific, objective things we need to look for, thus I look it over a second time to make sure I'm not missing something.  But I am regarding the paper a level of respect it deserves for being right in front of me, and by extension, I owe the kid who created that paper some consideration and deliberation.

Again, I try to be as commensurate as possible.  There are students who either can't or don't write long answers.  Those are easy and quick to grade, and so I don't waste my time on those.  But as boilerplate as these answers tend to be, there are ideas in them, and there is a structure to those ideas, and so I think they (the children and their responses) are entitled to some time evaluating those creations before I score it and move on to the next one.

Maybe this will cost me involvement in future projects.  But, I've been told I've been slow before, and I still keep getting jobs.  Now, it might be different this time because this in an online project as opposed to an in-person one.  But, bottom line is, I can't go any faster.  I gotta be me, man.  I gotta be me.

Do They Know I'm Wearing No Underwear?

I went to get a HJ from *****a this afternoon.  Wanted to pack in a visit to the cemetery to see my date to the junior prom.  Promised her that I would visit her gravesite twice a year; my second visit usually is just before Labor Day, but I got busy, so I have been welling up with guilt not spending the 15 Minutes I usually spend with her all this fall.

One other thing kind of fell in my lap last night.  Father, out of the blue, asked me to call my uncle, who lives in Philadelphia and is, according to him, "lonely."  My uncle is Father's older brother.  He has a drinking problem.  He also doesn't know much English, and my Chinese sucks, so if I do call, it won't be much of a call.  But I haven't spoken to him in years, and he's getting up there, so I wanted to give it a shot.

Now, the question was, when?  I wouldn't know when I would be done at *****a's place, and I wanted to get home some time in the afternoon.  But the more important consideration I had as to whether or not I could call uncle and see my prom date is, well ... see, I wear my porno pants -- and no underwear -- when I visit my stripper girlfriends, because I'm perverted like that.  However, do I want to visit my prom date and call my uncle while not wearing underwear?  Isn't that, you know, weird?  No, neither my uncle nor my dead prom date knows that I'm not wearing underwear, and I sure won't tell my uncle, of course.  But I would know.  It seems so ... impolite to talk to them sans underwear, you know?

Well, I decided to to call my uncle and to visit my prom date at the cemetery after spending almost three hours at *****a's place (and eating ice cream).  I got home an hour later than I initially told Father I'd be home by when I left in the morning, and a half-hour later than the new time I texted Father I'd be home by.  Ultimately, I had plans not to go anywhere tomorrow, and if that's the case, it's best to just do both things today so I can ... do nothing (even though I should clean my bedroom) tomorrow.  Just don't tell my uncle and my prom date that when I spoke to them, I was going commando.

Women Relying On Me

So Mother prolonged this stupid entanglement with the credit card company and this company that didn't send her this thing she wanted for three months.  She kept badgering me and badgering me to do something about this, so I eventually just sent a complaint letter to the credit card company asking them to credit the price of the purchase.  Well, My Fucking Mother yesterday was able to cajole my sister into talking with the company to just give the item, which Mother just received, for half off.  So now I have to talk to the credit card company telling them, "Hey, that letter I sent certified mail?  Never mind!"  But I'll wait to do that until this company actually credits My Mother back the money they promised my sister they would.

Mother has been a pain in the ass lately.  She's been aggravating me on a bunch of things, but in this instance, where I do something for her, only for me to need to unwind that because she bothered someone else to help her with her complaint, is another level of annoyance that I would rather not spend brainpower or time on.

Speaking of my sister ... she hepped me up to a paper she's writing, and she wants my help in editing it.  She sent it last night.  It's 23 pages long (well, 21 without footnotes), and it's on her level of expertise, which makes any suggestions I would have when it comes to sentence structure and wordiness very difficult to convey.  I am reduced to spelling and grammar checks -- important stuff, but I think I could help her more with concepts of organization and word economy, and I don't think I can do that if I don't know the subject matter.

Actually, overall, even though I'm flattered she asked for my help, and will do my best to help her because that is what families are supposed to do, I'm scared that my edits will in fact get her paper a worse grade.  Instead of helping her, I am afraid I will in fact hurt her.  I'll pray that's not the case.  Actually, I'll pray that I can edit her paper in time.  Sis says the weekend is fine, but ideally she would like it back by Thursday.  That might be difficult, especially since this "college thing" has a meeting I think I should drop in on, if not fully participate in, this evening.

Oh, and ******a.  I like the boundaries that we have when it comes to sexual activity.  She allows none of it, but she is trying to hustle a business by giving massages, and she has given into my request to get massaged completely naked -- mostly because my left hip is killing me, and I think a knot is centered in my left ass.  ******a wants me to make massages with her a regular thing.  I'm OK with that, but we need to discuss frequency and price.

But beyond that, I have to say that she's a bit ... neurotic.  We were texting back-and-forth about setting up an arrangement last night.  ******a is very unique when it comes to texting -- namely, I don't know of anyone, stripper or non-stripper, who texts so much.  How can anyone's thumbs pound the surface of a phone that much I don't understand, and the strain in my eyes in trying to look at small, frequently misspelled text in a small screen dissuades me from texting so long.

Anyway, after we left the subject about me being a regular massage client, she told me that she just had to break into her house because she locked herself out.  And then she texted other stuff about going to the neighbor's and going to the cops and batteries and how she locked herself out ... she goes on and on about some things, and my eyes just glaze over.  She's nice, and she's hot, but I cannot engage with her on stuff like that, especially when she is in the middle of a stream-of-consciousness text, so I replied with, "Oh, OK.  Good night, and I'm glad you're safe!"  (She did end her text by saying goodnight.)

I don't think she needed anything from me.  I ... well, she's a weird bird, I guess I wanted to talk about.  Hot weird bird, but a weird bird nonetheless.

Maybe Not The Best Thing To Do Father's Day Eve

So My Fucking Mother spouted off again because of some e-mail she didn't understand.  Turns out the router my parents have in Las Vegas has a security hole and the e-mail contains a link to a patch for it.  That didn't end my conversation with her; she continued to ask my other questions, which got progressively more stupid and unanswerable -- no, Mother, I cannot do this for your router in Vegas because we are not in Vegas.  So she finally asks me to forward this e-mail to myself so that once they get to Vegas, whenever that is, she can reach out and bother the shit out of me from two time zones away in order to get their router fixed.

So, I'm not in a good mood.  And I'm tired, too.  And it's sunny out and I can't go anywhere.  Still, I wait around the living room to take the garbage out.  And as I'm waiting for My Fucking Father to clean up the rest of the kitchen, he asks me, "Do you go to work tomorrow?"  And I knew that motherfucker was trying to set me up, so I said, "Uh, maybe?"  Maybe that ain't a foolproof plan to prevent him from saying I should clean up my bedroom, because he replied, "When you have time, clean up your room, clean up the house."  And that set me off, not gonna lie.  Peace, motherfucker -- I'm gonna wash my hands; you take out the garbage, you yappy fuck.

Didn't dawn on me till later that tomorrow's Father's Day.  Is he pissed?  Who cares -- I'm pissed.

Tomorrow, I'll pointedly not clean my room and not clean up the house.  And then, at some point, I'll give him his $100 gift for Father's Day.  And he'll fucking take it.

Wait -- Mowing What Lawn Now???

Got home from work just now.  Earlier than usually because I was filling in for someone who comes in and leaves a half-hour earlier than I usually do.

Second thing I hear as I burst in the door (the first thing was Mother saying, "You're home early!") was Father saying, "Oh!  You don't have to mow the lawn in Minneapolis tomorrow.  You can mow it next week."

Last weekend Father asked me to mow the lawn this weekend.  That sounded weird to me, planning to mow the front and back yards a week ahead.  But I appreciate the advanced planning.  I was hoping I would be able to dodge the raindrops and do it tomorrow morning.  But ... now I don't?

I looked outside; sure, the grass in the front yard isn't tall, but it could use a cut.  Maybe I'll have time to just fuck around this weekend, one which, as I was working this week, I was looking forward to as much as I have looked forward to a weekend, for some reason, in a long, long time.

But that's not what Father was talking about.  He kept saying mowing "Minneapolis."  You mean, like, the entire city??  Finally I understood what the hell he was talking about: This weekend he wanted me to mow both our lawn and the lawn at one of their properties, the about which they were bitching to me about last night.

Yeah, I can do that.  And again, thanks for letting me plan ahead.  But there is no way My Father told me last weekend that he wanted me to mow that property's lawn.  He did not make it clear last weekend.  I don't think he even said anything about mowing somewhere else.  And yet he was acting as if he told me this specifically.  He is either delusional or he is having difficulty with English again.  And I shudder to think if he still wanted me to mow there when I had no clue what he was talking about.  It would have blindsided me so fucking hard.  Goddamn language barrier. ...

Oh, I'm Inheriting Your Properties? Bullshit!

So, My Fucking Mother just freaked out after dinner.  She wanted my help deciphering an e-mail she got from her property manager -- again.  (Sometimes she says her English is good, and sometimes not.  Whatever.)  This e-mail was just a reminder to send ... well, something to the now-former tenants of a property my folks own.  This e-mail was the latest in a chain of back-and-forths, the originating message of which came from the prop manager stating, among other things, that the owners of this property, aka my folks, need to cover their legal obligations by sending an itemized bill in the wake of cleaning up said property to the tenants.  It's important to note that they don't know where these tenants have moved to, but legally, all my parents have to do is send this bill to these people's last known address.  The reminder reminds my parents to do it soon.

And My Fucking Mother basically went, "WHA-WHA-WHA-WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!  I didn't know this!!!"  Even though I told her two weeks ago about this ... when she showed me that e-mail, the beginning of this thread, because she didn't fucking understand that e-mail either.  This should not comes as a surprise to her, but it did because she refused to pay attention.  So she told me to e-mail her saying, basically, that ain't my fuckin' problem, I pay you to do this shit.

But My Fucking Mother wasn't letting this shit go.  I was sticking around the living room so My Fucking Father could hand me that day's garbage that I would take out to the trash can.  It was (and is) thundering, but I was thinking I could get that garbage out there before the rain came.  I never got that garbage.  Instead, Mother started asking me again about that fucking e-mail.  I tried to explain to her that not only was her (as the "owner") supposed to send this mail, according to the e-mail the property manager sent to her, but that I told her this two weeks ago.

And then she started jibber-jabbering.  "I'm educating you!" she said.  Educating me?  You're the one asking me what you need to do!  And then she really laid the guilt trip on me.  "What happens if we die?  What are you going to do then?"  Anything that's better than the "advice" you're giving me, Mother.  Finally, after more bullshit came spewing out of her mouth, she tells me, in less-than-uncertain (?) terms, that all these properties are going to be mine some day, and I'd better get serious about running these properties.  This was a revelation timed for maximum psychic damage (and one I had already figured out, even though I put it out of my mind a lot), even though I have rarely seen any of these properties, even though these interests were and are my parents' and my parents' alone, even though the only exposure I usually have to these come in the form of problem e-mails my parents toss onto my lap because they play the victim because they say they can't understand any fucking English.  I'm not going to fucking care about this just because you tell me to fucking care.  And really, if they die and I inherit running these properties, goddammit, I'm selling them the first goddamn chance I get.

I had to retreat into my shell, again, just to shut both of them up.  (Oh, My Fucking Father got in on the yelling, too.)  All I could do was go back to the e-mail; they are going to follow up by dropping by the property manager's office tomorrow and tell them that, for all they know, they as owners just pay them to do everything, including mail these bills to cover their asses.  Seeing that nothing else can be done for the issue at hand until tomorrow, they quieted down.  And I find safety in my bed, and in this blog, and put out of my mind that, once again, I will need to clean up a mess I had no hand in making -- in the short-term and the long-term.

So yesterday, after dinner, my parents were going to go out for a walk.  But it started raining, and so they decided not to walk.  Mother bursts through the door and shouts -- to me, since I was the only one in the house -- that they were coming back.  I didn't answer because she was just shouting into the ether, and besides, what does it matter, they're back.

And so Mother says, "Hello-hello-hello?!?!" so apparently she does want an answer, and since she's all hyped about it, I get off of my bed and open my door: "Yeah-yeah-yeah, what's the matter?" very gently, to which she replied, very rudely: "I just wanted to say that we aren't walking because it started raining.  It's no big deal! (emphasis mine)"

OK -- you scream that I don't hear you, and when I say that I do hear you, you scream at me for talking.  Do you know how you psycho you sound?  And you do it every single fucking time!!!

And what's worse is that I can't articulate my feelings to her, partly because I'm bad at finding the right words, partly because it might get lost in translation, and partly because I don't think it's any use.

THIS IS WHY I GO TO THERAPY!!!  YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND HOW YOU MAKE ME FEEL WHEN YOU DO THIS, AND I DON'T KNOW HOW TO GODDAMN TELL YOU!!!

---

Going to the Fair now.  Fuck this noise.

My Fucking Mother Wounds Me

So after dinner last night My Fucking Mother was carving up watermelon.  I wanted only a small piece.  Then she said something about making sure you take that piece before other people, yadda-yadda-yadda.  I didn't think anything of it as she put the plate of watermelon on the dining room table in front of me, my aunt and our guest, my cousin once removed.

My aunt takes a piece.  To me, they all looked the same, but to My Fucking Mother, my aunt to the small piece.  And she cried out: "My God!  I told you not to let her take the small piece!  You're so stupid!"

Stop calling me stupid, you fucking cunt.

For fuck's sake, the slices of watermelon looked the same to me.  The one I took was a bit smaller, in fact.  Why the fuck did she call me stupid?  You know what?  I'm not so much as angry as I am ... hurt.  That really hurts me, it really does.  Maybe this shows the limits of her understanding of English, or maybe she was just paling around and thought calling me stupid is a way to tease me.  But it hurts.  She didn't need to say that.  And I'm not fucking being oversensitive.

So now I have to decide how am I going to play it.  Do I give her the silent treatment and passive-aggressively let her know I'm not happy with her, possibly pissing her off over something she may have genuinely been just giving me shit over?  Or do I play along and act as if this was water off a duck's back, possibly giving her the green light to say even more mean things to me?  Man, I don't know.  But why in the fuck did she call me stupid?  I fucking hate her for that.