Re: [Or] [ZuNo] An Experiment in Reality Pt. 2 (The Start of a New Year)
January 1, 2008
12:00 A.M
No lights, no music, no special way to ring in the New Year.
Me, lying on an area rug, watching the Simpsons movie. I’ve already seen it, but I guess it’s worth watching again. I hardly notice the time change, until my mother notifies me.
Happy New Year… I guess…
I shambled into my room, no longer interested in the movie. I went on the interblag, put on some music and chatted with some friends for a while. That didn’t entertain me for long, so I went to sleep.
* * *
I woke up to my mom shouting at me to get out of bed. I was woken up early because we were traveling to my great-grandparents for my grandad’s birthday. Yay me.
I got in the shower, but I didn’t really enjoy it. I was busy wrapped up in my malaise. Something about not having anyone to be with, unfinished homework, and being on break for way too long, seems to just get me down. As soon as I got out of the shower, I went back to bed, considering there wasn’t much else to do.
I once again woke up to my mother yelling at me. This time I was in a mildly better mood. We were piling into the car, so I grabbed my iPods, a pillow, and my copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I was less than halfway through it. It needed to be finished by the next day. So much for completing assignments on time.
We pulled up to my great-uncles house to pick him up. He and his family used to travel by separate car, but that was a long time ago, when things that I don’t know about transpired and caused some sort of schism between my great-uncle’s family and my great-grandparents. Not that I really care about it anymore.
The trip up to Ellensburg was uneventful. I listened to my iPods (one likes to spontaneously turn off, the other’s a shuffle) and tried to read The Grapes of wrath. It’s not a bad read, it just (for reasons I don’t understand) takes a long time to read. I mean, I can finish the last Harry Potter book in one sitting, yet this book seems to defeat me.
My reading was interrupted by our arrival. We got out of the car and entered my great-grandparents (hitherto referred to as the prunes) assisted living home. It’s kind of cool. They live in a place that’s like a weird combination of a dorm room and a Boy Scout camp, and everyone has been aged by 60 or 70 years. They even get a 50’s style ice cream parlor.
We spent a good few hours sitting in their “dorm.” I didn’t participate in the discussion much, considering I don’t talk to old people that well. Even with my parents involved, the topics seemed to cover things I didn’t know about or didn’t want to know about. So I sat in a chair and read, whilst still listening to music. Eventually it was time for lunch.
Lunch at the Prunes’ wasn’t as great as it used to be. Before assisted living, I’d get delicious cake and homemade chicken pot pies at my great-grandparents house. What’d I get this time? Bland pasta, and really weird pork. At least, I think it was pork. On the upside, there were staff who practically waited on us, and the company was pretty cool. Along with the usual cast of misfits (e.g. my family) the Prunes invited two other people. Contestant #1 Mary, was an eccentric forgetful woman who had grown up with a Croatian background, providing an interesting way of speech and accent. Contestant #2 was Jim, an interesting man who had succumbed to a stroke sometime in the past 3 years. He was pretty normal, he just didn’t talk in long sentences and behaved erratically. Other than some speech and social skill deterioration, he was still mentally sharp. We managed to have some interesting conversation. Mary told us about the sadness of Communism in conjunction to her visit to Croatia. Jim told us about managing a KFC franchise for 20 years of his life (via having my father ask him the right yes or no/short answer questions).
After lunch is when things started getting… uncomfortable. My father decided that we should have a prayer-group-like-thing. This side of my family is notorious for these kinds of things. Obviously, I do not enjoy them. It’s not that I have religion issues; currently I am becoming a Catholic, after having been a Protestant for my entire life. I just don’t like these prayer things the Prunes/my dad do. They make me feel like I need to lie or try to one-up everyone or something. I managed to position myself last, thankfully. So we went around, and everyone talked about what they were thankful about during the last year, and what they were looking forward to this year (all with an implied religious connotation, of course.) Everyone said things that were pretty general or satisfactory, but once it came to my great-uncle, I heard something that disturbed me. I’ve always known my uncle to be an extremist, not the kind that blows up abortion mills, but the kind that is ignorant and ends up saying something offensive. Apparently, he had come to believe that the music his daughter was listening to was being “hexed” by “witches.” Um, wow. I became a little concerned, wondering if my parents were sharing any sentiment with him, and were therefore planning on emptying out my music library. I didn’t have a chance to ask because it came to be my turn.
Not wanting to lie about what I was going to say, I came up with something that, while satisfying the requirement, didn’t satisfy it in the way they wanted it to. I revealed to the family that I was grateful for all the adversity God had thrown my way, and was looking forward to all the adversity He had planned. I personally think that no matter what happens in your life, God is working. All the bad and all the good are according to His plan. It’s a kind of uplifting positive cynicism I’ve come to enjoy.
After that event was finished, I managed to talk to both of my parents (quietly and separately) about their opinions on what my great-uncle thought. Thankfully neither of them agreed with him.
Alas, my time with the Prunes was over, and all that followed was an uneventful car ride home.
Upon entering my house, I did what any good boy does, get on the internet. I was only on for a little while, I still had homework to finish. Sadly, there was a lot of it, and it took me till the end of the night to get it finished.
10:30 P.M
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