My mother ended up keeping Leta overnight on Friday so that Jon and I could celebrate his birthday to the fullest, if you know what I’m saying. Interestingly, I have received a dozen or so emails from male readers of this site that said something to the tune of yes, sex is good, but it doesn’t come close to the iPhone. And then the signature of the email would say SENT FROM MY IPHONE 3G. Ladies, I think I just stumbled across our salvation.
It’s like, sweetie, I know how much you’d love to stand here and twiddle my nipples all day, but I overheard someone talking about a new application for the iPhone, and if you don’t hurry you’re not going to have ANY IDEA what all those guys are Twittering about.
(I just read those first two paragraphs to Jon to see if he would be comfortable with me publishing those details, and he suggested that maybe it was time he Twittered my nipples. I’m taking that as a yes.)
After my mother dropped Leta off Saturday morning, we talked only for a few minutes before she had to head back out. This is the usual interaction we have with my mother, and rarely does she stay for more than five minutes in our living room. At first I thought it was because she has ADD. But then I realized it was because she was looking at those five minutes in my company as five minutes she could have been using to conquer the world. Selling more Avon than anyone else on earth is not enough. There must be other records out there that she could beat, other scores she could trample. And now that she’s retired I get the feeling that all the avid bingo players in the world SHOULD BE VERY AFRAID.
After we hugged goodbye she headed out to our driveway to climb into her van, and then thirty seconds later she poked her head back inside our door waving our morning paper in her right hand.
“Here’s your liberal propaganda!” she said as she tossed the paper on the floor of our entryway.
That liberal propaganda is The Salt Lake Tribune, the less conservative paper of the two that are circulated in Salt Lake City. Less conservative meaning that inside it you might find an op-ed from a scientist that talks about how we might want to think about conserving water. Because, oh, I don’t know, we live in UTAH. A semiarid region. WHERE WATER IS NOT ABUNDANT. And then the following week you’d see an op-ed in the other, more conservative paper going THOSE LIBERALS WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO HOSE OFF YOUR RIFLE IN YOUR OWN DRIVEWAY.
I wasn’t about to let her get away with that, so I ran outside, knocked on her window as she was about to back out of the driveway, and when she rolled it down I pointed out that this liberal newspaper? It endorsed George W. Bush for president. TWICE.
This is where I live. A place where George W. Bush is not conservative enough.
And that’s when she flipped me the bird. My mother, The Avon World Sales leader, waved her middle finger in my face. I sure hope she thought twice before she took the sacrament on Sunday.