1:35 p.m. - 08.04.2003
When Good Intentions Go Bad.
My dad called me a week or two ago to say that he and his wife had some extra dishware and wondered if I could use it.
Straight off, the answer to that question is No. But I could tell that they wanted to contribute in some small way to my new life here in Seattle, so I accepted, thinking that a few extra plates would come in handy if I ever had a Greek dinner party.
One day the UPS man came with my new "dishes". It was a box roughly the size of my bedroom and I knew I had inherited some dishes, and maybe a small Albanian child.
I tore into the box to discover it filled to the brim with Styrofoam popcorn. After a few stressful minutes of digging, I went ahead and climbed into the box. Swimming around inside I discovered there was another box down in what I would later call the "deep end of the pool."
I waded this second box through the popcorn to the shallow end where my feet could touch and would be able to look through box #2 without treading.
Inside were a number of tightly packed bricks resembling a couple kilos of some exotic drug.
After fishing all the kilos of dishware out, I soon discovered that I'd been had.
Somewhere in south Georgia my dad and his wife are throwing their heads back in devilish cackle at their little ruse.
It's painfully apparent that they have in fact kept all the useful items (read: dishes, drinking glasses) to themselves, and sent me their unwanted castoffs.
I'm a single, unemployed, 28 year old man. Why on earth do I have need of a gravy boat? Or tea service for 25? Or a caddie and cover for my many sticks of margarine? What the f%$@?! This must be a cruel cruel joke.
Bananarama said it best. This my friends, is a cruel cruel summer.
Wanna know the clincher of this little joke (I point the finger at my dad's wife as mastermind) played on me? The pattern. Slowly, my dad's wife is trying to turn my hip little Nooklife into a country kitchen. And a horrible green country kitchen at that.
What were they thinking? Besides the gravy boat and tea service for 25, did they really think a pattern called Mr. Green Jeans' Country Kitchen would fit in with my existing pattern?
The Great Muppet Caper and Return of the Jedi glasses I have now kick royal ass and in no way want to associate on the shelf with suburbia.
Needless to say, you all know how this story ends. My dad will one day come visit me here. So the dishes will have to be here. There's no way around it. I'm stuck with them. They'll never leave me. My dad and his wife have given me the herpes of kitchenware.
Maybe, just maybe one day I'll get rid of them when I get hitched. My wife will get to throw them out, and I'll get to point an accusing and scornful finger in her direction whenever my dad is around, but secretly I'll praise her loving martyrdom in song and dance.
But if she has a problem with my Great Muppet Caper glasses � she�ll have to go.
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