My mom is crazy

She just thinks so differently from me. As soon as she learned I could come home for a few days, she started talking about all the exciting things I could look through and see if I want to take them to the on-campus apartment I'll be moving into a week from tomorrow. I find this terribly uninteresting, as is evidenced by the fact that when she was going through my closet saying, "Do you want that? And what about this?" I was watching "The West Wing" (they started showing it on Bravo; now I wish I had more than basic cable). Things in boxes are not nearly as interesting as Martin Sheen threatening to blow up Syria. But I can't expect my mom to know that.

Sometimes I fear that my complaints about my family--"my mom's neurotic," "my brother's stupid," etc.--will be taken with too many grains of salt. Everybody thinks their own family is the worst, right? But then, I can usually come up with proof. (Example: "My brother is stupid." At breakfast on Sunday, I'm pretty sure I taught him something about LInux: it's free. This should be more than obvious to people who claim to know as much about computers as he does. He's the one majoring in some kind of networking thingy--I never know for sure because I only hear about it from my parents and they don't know for sure--whereas I am a mere English major.)

So I mean what I say. Here's my new best example of my mom's craziness: I had the presence of mind to bring home the loofah-thing I like to use in the shower instead of a washcloth. Being home for several days, I just left it in the shower there. I do this all the time, and haven't even forgotten to bring the thing back. Wednesday night (when Mom is washing the clothes I wore that day even though she'd just done laundry Tuesday, because she cannot send me back with anything dirty, ever) she finished her shower and walked into my room to tell me she'd taken my green-and-purple thing out of the shower. This alone was enough to annoy me--I wouldn't get to use it the next day! That ended up being a moot point, but it really just displayed my mom's inability to conceive of anyone wanting to shower in the morning, because she doesn't. But that wasn't the worst part; she wasn't done yet. She then told me she put it in the dryer.

"The dryer! What?"

"Well, it was wet," she said.

"It shouldn't have been; I left it out of the path of the water. Besides, can't you just ... let it dry on its own?" I had visions of whatever its netting was made of melting in the dryer's heat, fusing to my clothes or the dryer or at the very least wrecking my foofy thing.

I found it with all my other clean clothes when I got back here. It's okay, and not fused together ... but just touching it I can tell it's all scratchy now and probably not something I want to rub all over my body. Time for a new foofy, I guess. But I like this one! It's purple and green and didn't cost anything.

And it's definitely dry.

Have it your way

We went to Burger King--Katie and I ordered the chicken Caesar sandwich we've been seeing on TV, and Josh got something similar--for dinner last night, and walked to Dairy Queen where those two bought shakes for dessert. Katie and I sat at a picnic table outside the walk-up DQ as Josh waited for his shake, and Katie said, "It was worth the drive."

A bit earlier, she'd said, "This is good; I'm glad we came. Though I'm not used to driving somewhere to get fast food."

A fair enough pont. We had to drive 25 miles to do this, and we'd done it with the sole purpose of going to Burger King.

Morris used to have a Burger King, but it mysteriously disappeared this spring. People showed up for work one afternoon to discover that it was closed. Forever.

The round Burger King part of the sign was taken away (actually, all the things that said Burger King--inside the building, on the windows or doors--were removed) and beneath it the letters that used to spell WHOPPERS ON SALE WOOHOO!, or whatever they said, now told bewildered citizens of Morris SORRY WE'RE CLOSED.

Rumors flew about the evil takeover by cross-town rival McDonald's, who'd bought the Burger King to close it and reduce their competition. I know one or two people who refuse to go to McDonald's now because of this. Soon SORRY WE'RE CLOSED was replaced with WE LOVE TO SEE YOU SMILE AT MCDONALDS 12 BLOCKS AHEAD, which seemed only to confirm McDonald's evility. Even if they hadn't killed the Burger King, they were trying to profit from its death.

Soon the building was reduced to rubble, and now a bank or something is being built there. And I miss Burger King. It's one of those things you don't notice until it's gone, and while it's not the greatest food I've ever had, it's a lot better than McDonald's. Even Subway and pizza, the tolerable food that can be gotten here, gets old quickly. And Burger King lets me have onion rings instead of french fries!

Yesterday was probably the first time I'd been to a Burger King since the last time I was at what is now the future home of some bank. It occurred to me that it's ridiculous for us to drive to other towns just as small as Morris (if not smaller) just to visit a generic fast-food chain.

Or is it just ridiculous that we were excited before it, and happy afterwards?