![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 18th, 2004 12:20 amI can't believe it's been eight days and I haven't tortured you all with tales from my father's Mensa Art Show. To put it simply: It was an experience. I spent an hour and forty-five minutes of my life I'll never get back sitting with an old man who told me we were like the Russian Empire, being brought down by wine, women, and song. Then he told me about how terrible lawyers are, and how you can get sued for a hangnail. He caught himself a second later and said, "Not your father, of course. Or your grandfather."
"Right," I said, and then my Hardass Tough Girl melted away in the face of feeling like I was being rude to an old man. "But some of the commercials for lawyers are terrible."
"Awful!" he said, and then went on about a bunch of other things I can't really remember because I spent the whole time thinking about how much my father owed me, and that this would most definitely cancel out any guilt I feel over moving home and living with them rent-free the last couple of years.
During the art show I wandered around eating lots of cheese and crackers and having awkward, occasionally overly-personal conversations with people I'd just met. One woman soothed me into a false sense of security by starting a typical conversation about our shared alma mater, and then somehow segued into stories about her childhood in a Catholic orphanage and how her father tried to kill her mother three times but it wasn't really his fault.
"He was insane," she said. "There was something wrong with his brain. He couldn't help it."
I probably said something in response but I can't think of it now, because it just doesn't seem like there's anything a person could say to that. But I must have said something, because I wouldn't have been so rude to just run back into the kitchen for more Werther's Originals without saying anything. Though maybe I did just that.
Most of the other people were charmingly eccentric, a bit like my father. He was in his element. I felt weird because people kept asking me which artwork was mine and all I could do was point at my father's family portrait of me, my brother, and my mother at dinner and say, "That's me on the right. It's my father's painting, I'm just here for moral support."
The most important thing I learned was never to choose shoes for a six-hour outing based on the idea that you'll "probably" get to sit down a lot. I got compliments on my new black heels, but my feet were killing me by the end.
That was the Saturday of last weekend. The Saturday of this weekend was spent baby-sitting Emma, who is now seven years old, which just does not seem possible. She's still high-energy and precocious, but it looks better on a seven-year-old than it did on a three-year-old, probably because I can better communicate my empty threats to her.
"Well, if you're going to do throw ice at the dog, then I guess we're just going to have to eat at the kitchen table!" What a threat. I let her eat in the living room when I babysit because I'm Just That Strict. She threw ice at the dog a couple times more and we still ended up sitting at the coffee table in the living room, eating chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, watching a Scooby Doo episode with a vampire.
At one point I kind of jumped at something that happened on screen (this is why I can't go to horror movies; Scooby Doo episodes startle me), and Emma looked at me across the table very seriously and said, "It's okay, it's not a *real* vampire."
"Like you?" I asked. She had tried on her Halloween costume while I was boiling the water for the macaroni, and emerged from the bathroom in a black cape and plastic fangs. She had warned me from the bathroom a few times that it was going to be a little scary, but that it would be okay. I yelped and clutched the wooden spoon I was using for the macaroni to my chest, and she took the teeth out of her mouth and had me pick her up so that I could see it was just Emma.
"Like me," she said.
I gave her a bath and brushed her hair while she read from a book to me, and then we did math flashcards before I put her to bed. She still asked me to lie down next to her and sing Old MacDonald. Every time I go there I think she won't ask, but every time she still does. I'll probably cry the first time she doesn't.
She's a sweet kid. When I got to her house, she was playing out back with Andrew, the boy next door who my aunt doesn't really like. She thinks he's mean. They were pulling an oversized wagon full of toys around the yard and after I said I was going to go inside to see her mother, Emma pulled out this plastic laptop toy and said she was going to type my name to see what it means.
I was halfway across the lawn when I heard Andrew say, "Her name means fat and ugly!"
I kept walking like I hadn't heard, and then just as I was going to go into the house, I heard Emma yell, "Jessie, your name means beautiful!"
"Thanks, Em!" I yelled back, and then I went inside.
"Right," I said, and then my Hardass Tough Girl melted away in the face of feeling like I was being rude to an old man. "But some of the commercials for lawyers are terrible."
"Awful!" he said, and then went on about a bunch of other things I can't really remember because I spent the whole time thinking about how much my father owed me, and that this would most definitely cancel out any guilt I feel over moving home and living with them rent-free the last couple of years.
During the art show I wandered around eating lots of cheese and crackers and having awkward, occasionally overly-personal conversations with people I'd just met. One woman soothed me into a false sense of security by starting a typical conversation about our shared alma mater, and then somehow segued into stories about her childhood in a Catholic orphanage and how her father tried to kill her mother three times but it wasn't really his fault.
"He was insane," she said. "There was something wrong with his brain. He couldn't help it."
I probably said something in response but I can't think of it now, because it just doesn't seem like there's anything a person could say to that. But I must have said something, because I wouldn't have been so rude to just run back into the kitchen for more Werther's Originals without saying anything. Though maybe I did just that.
Most of the other people were charmingly eccentric, a bit like my father. He was in his element. I felt weird because people kept asking me which artwork was mine and all I could do was point at my father's family portrait of me, my brother, and my mother at dinner and say, "That's me on the right. It's my father's painting, I'm just here for moral support."
The most important thing I learned was never to choose shoes for a six-hour outing based on the idea that you'll "probably" get to sit down a lot. I got compliments on my new black heels, but my feet were killing me by the end.
That was the Saturday of last weekend. The Saturday of this weekend was spent baby-sitting Emma, who is now seven years old, which just does not seem possible. She's still high-energy and precocious, but it looks better on a seven-year-old than it did on a three-year-old, probably because I can better communicate my empty threats to her.
"Well, if you're going to do throw ice at the dog, then I guess we're just going to have to eat at the kitchen table!" What a threat. I let her eat in the living room when I babysit because I'm Just That Strict. She threw ice at the dog a couple times more and we still ended up sitting at the coffee table in the living room, eating chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese, watching a Scooby Doo episode with a vampire.
At one point I kind of jumped at something that happened on screen (this is why I can't go to horror movies; Scooby Doo episodes startle me), and Emma looked at me across the table very seriously and said, "It's okay, it's not a *real* vampire."
"Like you?" I asked. She had tried on her Halloween costume while I was boiling the water for the macaroni, and emerged from the bathroom in a black cape and plastic fangs. She had warned me from the bathroom a few times that it was going to be a little scary, but that it would be okay. I yelped and clutched the wooden spoon I was using for the macaroni to my chest, and she took the teeth out of her mouth and had me pick her up so that I could see it was just Emma.
"Like me," she said.
I gave her a bath and brushed her hair while she read from a book to me, and then we did math flashcards before I put her to bed. She still asked me to lie down next to her and sing Old MacDonald. Every time I go there I think she won't ask, but every time she still does. I'll probably cry the first time she doesn't.
She's a sweet kid. When I got to her house, she was playing out back with Andrew, the boy next door who my aunt doesn't really like. She thinks he's mean. They were pulling an oversized wagon full of toys around the yard and after I said I was going to go inside to see her mother, Emma pulled out this plastic laptop toy and said she was going to type my name to see what it means.
I was halfway across the lawn when I heard Andrew say, "Her name means fat and ugly!"
I kept walking like I hadn't heard, and then just as I was going to go into the house, I heard Emma yell, "Jessie, your name means beautiful!"
"Thanks, Em!" I yelled back, and then I went inside.
