Gifted

My grandmother decided last Christmas that she would buy me underwear. My aunt promptly talked her out of it. I'm glad. To this day, I honestly don't know what I would have gotten had Paula not intervened. Something tells me that I wouldn't really want to know anyway.

As a child growing up I became all too used to getting clothes on special occasions that were either small enough for dolls or were so hideous or bizarre that I wouldn't even dream about wearing them. Last year she went to the trouble of getting my mother a birthday present a couple months late. It was a lovely little cd filled with cheezy sound effects and midi files entitled "The Sound of October". Please note that my mother's birthday is in May.

Last Christmas we moved from a house into a basement suite, where we had no room whatsoever for anything and were constantly butting heads about where to put stuff, what to throw away and the fact that none of us had any personal space. It was not a nice way to spend Christmas. Enter my grandmother, who thought she'd help out by giving us more tacky useless things that we didn't need and didn't have room for, this time a plastic singing reindeer choir.

Evidently buying gifts is not her forte.

I was informed yesterday that she had bought me a birthday present and that I was to drop by and pick it up. Naturally I was not quite sure what to expect, especially since my birthday is in August, not October. As you can imagine, I was extremely surprised to find that it was a porcelain music box. A tad bit on the corny and oversentimental for my liking, but a very nice gesture regardless.

I spent the next two hours demoing everything my computer can do, because she has never seen one before. "How the hell are you going to get a man with that little thing?" she asked, "It's too small. You can't ask a man to carry that for you."

She wanted to hear me play some music, and naturally, not being able to find anything in my mp3s that she would like, I eventually settled upon something that she would neither like nor understand: Kaizers Orchestra. "It sounds like a fucking construction site!" she said, "and you don't know what they're saying." I explained to her that all you had to do was ask a Norwegian to explain the lyrics to you and then I had to explain how that was possible through the internet. I don't think she understood.

Then she wanted me to explain to her if the computer could tell her if certain people were idiots or not. I told her that it really depended on who the person was in question.

Apparently Auntie Sharon has a computer that she wants to sell and Grandma wants me to get it for her. I don't think that will happen. Auntie Sharon has been spending the past 20 years pretending that I don't exist, and from a practical perspective, the computer is a 6 year old dinosaur and not a laptop, which would definitely not work because Grandma lives in a hospital bed. I've tried to explain this to her before.

She just doesn't understand. She never does.

Reccommended reading:
Daniel Regelbrugge on Matt Good's blog