my parents, chinese hats, and weather that was bad when it should have been good thereby turning our pool vacation into a rain vacation and making me wildly unhappy but maybe less likely to get skin cancer. also, tattoos.

A few months ago, my mother called to tell me that she had gotten a ticket for running a red light. “They caught me!” she screamed into the phone.

“Well,” I told her, “maybe you shouldn’t drive like an asshole.”

“It doesn’t matter because they caught me on that camera thing with the radar and they know it’s me and I got a ticket and it’s expensive and I can’t get out of it because they have my picture!” And then she showed me the picture and oh my god please listen to me when I tell you that anytime I’m in a bad mood about anything ever I pull out this picture and stare at her guilty guilty face and laugh until I’m convulsing on the floor with my legs squeezed together totally positive I’m going to wet myself because it’s the actual best picture and just look at her face, her face.

So I told Jamie this story last week, in preparation for our trip to Arizona that started out as a “let’s lay by the pool in 80+ degree weather” mini-vacation but became more of an “it’s about time my parents met my best friend/roommate/business partner/soul mate” trip because apparently we visited during what turned out to be the only cold and rainy days of the entire Arizona biosphere.

But, before the trip I told Jamie the red light story. And also the story about that time my mother tried to make loose leaf tea while drunk and naked in the kitchen. And also the story about that time she wanted to join a monastery. And also other stories. Just, you know, to prepare her. And then we landed in Arizona and headed right to my parents’ house for dinner and there was lots of wine because if there’s one thing my parents and I do well, it’s drink wine and so we drank a lot of it and my mother announced that she had recently purchased some new hats which she knows I dislike because while my mother is very pretty, she looks RIDICULOUS in hats because not everyone has a head shape that works well with hats and she definitely doesn’t and I tell her this because I’M A GOOD AND SUPPORTIVE DAUGHTER and yet she continues to wear them and each one is more absurd than the one before it and she got drunk at dinner and ran to her room to begin performing a hat fashion show in which she strutted down the hallway and posed dramatically with each one and the first hat was some sort of bonnet and the second one was a white top hat with flowers on the front and the next one was one of those big hats with the chin straps and she had the strap tightened all the way up against her throat and she posed and yelled, “THIS ONE IS TO WEAR WITH MY CHINESE OUTFIT” which is when we went from trying not to be impolite to trying not to puke from laughing so hard to trying to ask for clarification about what the fuck her Chinese outfit looks like.

Also during this dinner my 73 year old father announced that he has “quite a lot of friends on The Facebook” and I was like, “Please kill me” and he was all, “I get between 1 and 3 friend requests per day and sometimes I get requests from people I thought were dead but they’re not dead because they want to be my friend on The Facebook!” and then I showed him how to upload a photo so that he was no longer a creepy grey and white face and he got so excited and declared it “a momentous day” and said that next, he’d like me to set up a blog for him.

A BLOG. FOR MY 73 YEAR OLD FATHER.

And then I found out that my mother wants to shave her head and that she recently tried to get her hair stylist to do it for her but that the stylist wouldn’t do it unless my mom could come back the following week with another person who was sane and not from Craigslist and could somehow convince her that it was a good idea but my mother couldn’t find a single person to do that, which makes me want to open mouth kiss Stacey the Arizona hair stylist because I know my mother and I know that the second she realized that she was bald and that maybe being bald isn’t the best look for her, she’d resort to wearing hats all the fucking time and I’d explode.

Also, Jamie and I got matching quotation mark tattoos on Saturday.

Also, I think this is a good time to remind everyone that I really do still like cock, despite all the evidence to the Nicole & Jamie lesbian contrary, including the fact that my mother now seriously refers to herself as Jamie’s mother-in-law as if it’s the most normal and appropriate shit in the world.

Posted in: big giant life list, day to day shenanigans, i heart my crazy mother, the nicole & jamie show