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7.19.2009

I have a cold. My head is fuzz, my lungs are raging, my limbs are heavy, my mind is mud. I'm at work, not working, on a beautiful Sunday morning, sitting in the dark of my room drinking rooibos tea and listening to the sandstorm wind-roar of the air conditioning. Lull. Lulled to sleep. Almost. On the weekends I'm the only one in the department, the only one on my floor. And there are nine beds up here. SO SO hard to resist.

My parents arrived a week ago from Arizona and will be staying with me for a few months, into September or so. This is the second year of their summer-in-Cleveland thing. It's not bad. A bit of a mind fuck at times, but worth it in the grand scheme of things. The other night my dad reminded me to turn off all the lights and lock the doors before going to bed. Uh, yeah, thanks Dad. When they're staying with me it's like my house becomes theirs and I become a teenager again, existing within the confines of parental control. I've told them that they can do whatever they want with my house. Mom likes to rearrange and reorganize. Dad likes to clean and fix broken or less-than-satisfactorily-working things. Now the drinking glass cupboard has become the plates and dishes cupboard. The sharp knives drawer has become the measuring cups and spoons drawer. The cupboard door under the sink that opened with a clank/drop/whine now opens with a, well, opens normally. The guest bathroom toilet that once needed a jiggle of the handle to stop running, now stops running on its own. Good toilet! Smart toilet! I am stranger in my home. A stranger in a marvelously clean, well-functioning, well-organized efficient grown-up house.

But every plus has its minus. I felt about a hundred pounds fatter when my parents arrived. They're both stick thin, and shrinking, and equate thinness with goodness. We were immediately back to the comments about me ending up in a nursing home with congestive heart failure by the time I'm fifty. From my mom I get "Oh, you have such a pretty face, if only..." types of comments. The other day I had a breakfast of cheerios with blueberries, and a glass of orange juice. Mom walked by and said "I approve of that breakfast." Oh. Great. Glad to hear it. Dad complains that I smoke too much, and that I smoke too quickly. Too quickly??? "You inhale your cigarette like it's the last one on earth", he says. If I smoked my cigarette half-assedly he would probably complain that I was too wasteful.

So, typical family shit. Thankfully, this year I have refuge outside of my house. More on that later . . .

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