two weeks in a nutshell
I’m watching Niles Crane and the lesbian chick from Sex of the City do a scene from Romeo and Juliet on HDTV PBS. I hate Shakespeare, and yet I would watch this over that god awful Frasier show any day.
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A week after I went to Vancouver, I went with my friend Royce to Portland, Oregon, with a stop in Scio, where his family lives. Never heard of Scio? Neither have I.
Ernie: [looks out the car window] I didn’t you can farm those animals.
Royce: [driving] What animals?
Ernie: Uhmm… those are… uhmm… fuck. I forget the name of those things. Gazelles?
Royce: (looks out the window) You mean, ANTELOPE?!
Ernie: Whatever.
Royce: Yeah, whatever, if we were on the FUCKING AFRICAN GRASSLANDS.
Ernie: [sigh]Ernie: [looks and sees llamas] WTF is a llama doing in oregon?
Royce: [rolls eyes] Uhm, no. You’re prouncing it wrong. You say it “YAMA” here.
Ernie: “Yama?”
Royce: “Yama.”
Ernie: Are you serious?
Royce: No.
Ernie: I hate you. -
A week after that, I went to visit my father in his new home for the first time after he separated from my mother about a month ago. He lives in one of those immigrant houses; owned by a Chinese homeowner, rented out to immigrants working in the Silicon Valley on H-1 Visas. None of the room tenants know each other though, so they mostly stay in their rooms, the glow of Chinese soap operas flickering under the door cracks.
For every 100 posts on this weblog where I’ve written about my mother, there are 1 or 2 posts about my father. There are a couple of reasons for this: he has a working knowledge of English and read the weblog frequently when he had a computer, but mostly because we’ve never seen eye to eye on anything. Comedy gold comes out when I talk with mom. I don’t have a conversation with dad so much as we accuse each other of our daily lives whenever we communicate by phone - “Where ARE you right now?” “I’m having DINNER right now, where SHOULD I be?” “Come over NOW, I want to have dinner with you.” “FINE!”
My dad complains to me while we go out for dinner. The house smells like fish because the other tenants don’t clean up after themselves. The other tenants, half his age, don’t respect him. After constant complaining, the homeowner let him move into the largest bedroom of the house, where at least he gets his own private bathroom, albeit for an extra two hundred dollars a month.
I start to feel bad for him, until I realize he would rather live like this than live under the same room as my mother and sister.
I pay for the restaurant bill.
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