Guess Who's Stuck At Dinner

I didn't bring a book. That's the biggest problem.

The first, of the very few rules I have for my life is: "Always bring a book." I usually do.

Tonight, I didn't.

But I didn't know.

I thought that we were just stopping by dropping off gifts. I thought that after the opening, we would be off for home. I didn't expect that we'd be here for dinner, and the cooking of dinner, and the preparation of dinner.

So, we've been here for over an hour now, my mom and me. I'm bored. I watched some TV with my cousins, but they kept flipping the channels in the middle of the show. I'm only a channel flipper during the commercials. It's like a race to see how many times I can get through all the channels before the show starts up again, but once the show starts, I watch. My cousins don't.

That's when I got up and spoke with Mom, quietly so my grandma couldn't hear us, to see if we were staying for dinner and found out I'm stuck.


Every day I've worked for the past two weeks, Mom has asked me to tell her one good thing about the day. Usually, I just tell her about the day and she points out something good, or better than expected.

Today, after asking her about dinner, she asked me. My answer was getting to leave. My grandma said, "Now, I don't believe that. You need to focus on the positive things that..." It was the beginning of a lecture that I don't want to hear, considering I heard more bad news at work. Fortunately, my mom interrupted her, distracting her with a question about dinner. Thank you, Mom.

I escaped the kitchen/dining room and perused the bookshelf. Not much that interests me there. How many volumes of Reader's Digest versions of books do you need? A 200 page version of War and Peace? That's nuts. So I headed to the computer to play solitaire.

Ten games later and I'm sitting at my grandma's computer, typing about how much I don't want to be here. I can hear my mom, my grandma, and my uncle talk about things. The topics may be different, but it always ends with Grandma lecturing. She doesn't know how to have an active conversation. She constantly interrupts the person speaking, often saying something similar to what the original speaker was going to say.

Once, my grandparents paid me to come down and help with cleaning the yard and one day was spent pulling nails from the wood that was once a roof. Grandma joined me. And she spoke at me. Topics ranged from the president (Clinton at the time) to single mothers to the greatness of Rush Limbah (or however you spell that blow-hard's name) to people needing religion to save society and on and on. I don't think I said more than twenty words to her in five hours of nail pulling. When I got home, my mom had already spoken with my grandma who said, "I just love speaking with him." I figure the only reason is because I didn't say much and that made her thing that I agreed with her, which I didn't.

Tomorrow, she'll probably read this and have some choice words for my mother about people being polite and things that should be said in private and how not to say anything if you have nothing to say.

To that I say, I don't need a lecture. Get over yourself. You don't have to read this page if you don't want to.

Soon it will be time for dinner. Wish me luck.