jay-z, the dishwasher, and oh my god my mother

“AM I THE ONLY PERSON IN THIS HOUSE WHO KNOWS THE RECIPE FOR ICE?!”

I look up. My mother is standing in the kitchen, waving empty ice trays above her head and growling about how my father and I don’t deserve cold drinks because we are “lazy and insensitive in regard to our ice usage.”

She stomps around a little more before filling up the ice trays herself. Then, she picks up a dirty plate, scrubs it in the sink, gets it completely clean, slowly starts to open the dishwasher door, peers in, opens it all the way up, puts the plate inside, slams it shut, and jumps backward.

“Um, what? You just put a completely clean plate into the dishwasher. And what’s with the peering and the slamming and the jumping around?”

“The critters!!” she yells. “Enormous black bugs! Fast ones! THE BIGGEST ONES YOU’VE EVER SEEN. Sometimes I find them in the dishwasher. Everything has to be spotless!”

She turns around and pours vinegar down the sink drain and quickly plugs it closed.

I stare at her.

“The critters come through the sink too!”

I keep staring. The entire house now smells like we’re dying Easter eggs.

“Come on,” she says, waving her hand toward the door, “we’re going to Barnes and Noble.”

I ask her if she’s going to put real pants on. She tells me sweatpants are real pants. I point out that the sweatpants she’s currently wearing are bright turquoise and that with the magenta sweatshirt she has on, it’s not necessarily the most flattering combination to wear out in public. She’s asks when I became such a snobby fashionista and then yells at me for letting my shoes touch the carpet while I’m putting them on by the door.

“Your shoes track in particles!”

I don’t even want to ask. I raise an eyebrow.

“Particles of things the critters eat! Now I’m going to have to vacuum that spot! Go wait for me in the car. You’re driving. I’ve had wine.”

“I’ve had wine too.”

“I’M THE MOTHER!”

I sigh, walk to the car, and wait. She climbs in. I ask her if she knows where we’re going. She rolls her eyes at me, potentially to indicate that, um, duh, she’s not a total idiot. I start driving.

After about 15 minutes, I get this feeling. You know what I’m talking about. When you can sense that you’re going in the wrong direction but you’re not the one who lives in this damn city so you don’t say anything and she just sits there, eyes darting about furiously, and then at the last second she’s screaming her face off about how you “HAVE TO BE IN THE RIGHT LANE,” except you’re all the way over in the left lane like she goddamn told you to be and now you’re making all kinds of illegal moves while she repeatedly slams her foot into the floor, pumping her imaginary break pedal and asking where the hell you got your license.

Eleventy thousand turns later, we’re headed in the correct direction. I turn my iPod on and it’s the new Jay-Z song, the one about New York that I’m irrationally obsessed with, and it takes my mother all of six seconds to start shrieking about how much she hates rap music and how I’m inconsiderate. I tell her to just listen to the lyrics because she’ll like them, being from NYC and all. She’s quiet for a minute and then asks who Jay-Z is. I try to think of an answer that will hold any relevance at all for her.

“He’s married to Beyonce?”

“Oh, yes,” she responds thoughtfully. “He’s no where near as yummy as that Diddy person.”

Posted in: day to day shenanigans, i heart my crazy mother