Monday, May 02, 2005

I'm Going To Have To Spend The Whole Week With Her?

My sister and I are going back East for a week trip to do a little family history search (her passion, not mine) but I’m going along because… well, I’ve got nothing better to do. I could go to work, but really—I do that everyday and it’s not like it gets me laid or anything.

Actually, it did. But that’s another story for another time.

Anywho… my sister has not been on a vacation in forever. She used to travel a lot, but now only does the occasional day trip or weekend trip to The Crosby, Tahoe, LA, etc. This will be her first real vacation in a long time and she is very excited about it. Very excited.

So excited, in fact that she constantly talks about it. “Just think,” she said Saturday morning, “in a week, we’ll be flying…” In church on Sunday (yes, I go to church… yet another story…), she leaned over and said, “In a week we’ll be at mass at Victor’s church.”*

She’s even started packing! The dining room table is now covered with her underwear (she’s 45 guys, don’t get excited… it ain’t pretty) and toiletries. We leave on Saturday, so I’ll probably start packing on Friday night… or Saturday, if our plane leaves after noon. I’m not sure what time we leave… which leads me to my next ‘problem’:

She’s highly organized.

My sister keeps everything from the trip in a file—hotel reservations, flight information, car rental, maps, ideas, etc. It’s astounding. However, she thinks everyone does this. We received an invitation to go to a party and she looked at me and asked, “Do you want to put this in your file?”

“My file?” I asked.

“Yes, your file folder with all the trip details.”

“Uh… no. I’m good.”

“You have a file, don’t you?” She asked this in the same way my mother asks questions—pretty much giving you a direction in which she expects you to answer. (My mother often asks questions this way, as it saves a lot of time, because you don’t have to think, you just answer based on the cues in the question: “You’re not gay, are you?” [“not” + “gay” = answer: ‘no’] “You’re not a Democrat, are you?” [“not” + + Democrat” = answer: ‘of course not.’] My mother has since learned to live with disappointment—however, I will say she cried more when I told her I was a Democrat than when I told her I was gay… “You’re not going to vote Democrat, are you? [“not” + “vote Democrat” = my mother in tears).

Back to the conversation:

“No… I don’t have a file,” I confessed. For a moment, I thought she was going to cry. She stayed very quiet for a moment. “I just figured,” I said desperately pulling something—anything—out of my ass, “that you being so organized, it would just be duplication of work.” She smiled. I’m sure she knew I was full of it, but I was appealing to her sense of organization…

“Okay, I’ll put it in my file.” She started to walk away and I thought I was in the clear, until she turned back and said, “you really should have your own file, to keep all of the things you want to do organized.”

We’re going on this trip together—we are stuck together the whole time. The only time I have some time to myself is Monday night in Boston. I’m going to try to get into a Red Sox game (good luck), or I’m going to hang out in a gay bar.

Guess which way I’m leaning.

“Hey, Alix! In a week I might be sodomizing a Red Sox fan! Should I put a condom and lube in my file?”

It’s going to be an interesting week.



*Long-dead great uncle that was a Monk at Portsmith Priory.

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