Unsolicited Advice

Telephones are one of my least favorite things in the entire world. I have one, and I will happily text people until I wear my thumbprints off, but I basically don't answer any voice call that I'm not explicitly expecting. It drives people bats sometimes, but anyone in my personal life who really needs to get in touch with me knows how to do it without a phone anyway. If I have to use the phone for business, I just grit my teeth and deal. This is because I learned a long time ago that ringing phones never mean anything good. As batshit as my mother is, her mother was worse. Much worse. I watched her make my mother's life hell right up until the day she died -- which is a story itself -- and one of the ways she did it was via the telephone. How often do you call your children/parents? Every day? Every few days? Once a week? My grandmother phoned my mother constantly . When I say that, most people assume I mean "calls every day for no good reason, managing to interru...

It's very difficult sometimes to properly convey what my family is like to normal people. Fortunately, I have a convenient shortcut for nerds: My mother is Lwaxana Troi, only without the telepathic powers, and she's married to her Mr. Homm. She's very intelligent, independent, and has a total lack of shame that very occasionally comes in handy, such as when one has been kidnapped and stripped naked by a number of rogue Ferengi; but overall, her refusal to respect pretty much any social norm that strikes her as stupid, or capitulate gracefully to other peoples' requests, drives most everyone bats. A number of people have independently drawn this comparison over the years, one of them actually being my mother. She's thrilled. She has no idea why everyone on the Enterprise has sticks lodged up their unmentionables and thinks they should all just lighten up. She's also aware that I used to play a sort of gallows-humor game with my friends in high school that we ca...