Fatale Abstraction

OK, a couple teeny complaints here.

I don't give a shit who you are. DO NOT invite me to your million dollar house and expect me to take off my expensive shoes and walk around on your filthy floors, THEN put my expensive shoes back on dirty feet. HELLO!??? They're intercoursing floors--not holy relics, baby! These floors were made for walking. At the in-laws' new home, I was expected to go to the master bath with everyone else and watch the darling baby niece (she is a cute girl) have her way with the big jacuzzi tub, when I was informed we are still removing our shoes to walk on the floor in this part of the house. I didn't say anything, but I stayed behind, happy not to be part of the expedition, 'cause I'm not taking off my fucking shoes, bitches!

OK, you knew this was coming. A month ago I bitched and moaned about the sister- and brother-in-law coming from San Francisco to visit. Apparently one of her pet peeves is that her profession has two spellings, and she rolls her eyes at the most common: dietician. Frankly, I've seen it spelled that way all my life, so I'm going to stick with familiar usage since it pisses her off so. Anyway, her sanctimonious, condescending bitch-assed-ho self proceeds to catalog for everyone what tremendously poor dietary choices her husband has made at every meal. Before dinner, MIL and SIL were orbiting each other in the kitchen while the men manned the grill outside, and I sat quietly at the table marveling at these two harpys getting on each other's tits, wishing I had a bowl of popcorn while watching the show. They are both neurotic control-freaks, so it was a golden moment of double-payback time. MIL won, by the way, since no one can out-freak her.

Exquisite steaks were grilled, but while the others of us feasted on gorgeous side dishes from Central Market, BIL had a spartan baked potato with his beef. She had a chicken breast from a deli with a potato. She offered him some of a mystery packet of stuff to garnish his potato with, and he said "no, it's my vacation, I'm going to have butter." At that point I was thinking "good for you, man! Slather the good shit on, put up your feet and relax." So what does he festoon his naked spud with? I can't believe it's not butter - a butter substitute! WTF??? This is a vacation? Shit. I guess he's lucky she let him have a steak. Gawd, and she's his second control freak wife. I guess growing up with a mother like that, he just wanted another woman he could go on auto-pilot with. Mission accomplished.

It's annoying as shit that this woman has the most underdeveloped sense of irony I've ever seen. Saturday I said something about a tv program, and she said imperiously "we have a child now, we don't have time for television." So imagine my amazement (not at all, actually) when last night she gasped and said "The Amazing Race is on!" and sparks flew off her feet as she hastened to the television to hook up to the borg. Apparently, she doesn't consider her addiction to that show and CSI to be television. Television is what crap people from Texas watch - people who eat real butter and misspell her vocation.

Props to husband to doing a bit of a tidy-up on the house, because BIL needed to come here and use our internet connection for some work stuff today, because dial-up wouldn't be good enough. Well, um, ok. Our house looks like someone picked it up and shook it - the dining table is covered in papers, and although I'm using my studio now, there is still jewelry-making stuff all over the coffee table. At least the plants look healthy.

So WHO came to my messy house today when I wasn't home? Only the whole damned family, and get this-- SIL proceeded to open every closed door "Oh, what's in here?, etc" Fucking GRRRRRRR!!! My hackles are officially up. Here's the funny way I found out about it, too. BIL and SIL were talking about how their 21 month old is a brilliant child and will probably be a veterinarian or a horticulturalist, because she loves flowers, and she must have stopped 4 or 5 times at my house to look at my flowers. This amazed me- because she was only 3 months old the last time I knew of her being at my house. I swallowed my bite of sweet potaters carefully as I pondered the fact that although I'm expected not to walk on their floors in shoes, the entire fucking clan makes free to invade my home and inspect rooms with closed doors when I am in no way prepared to receive them. Well, there you have it.

Saturday I explained to SIL how I spent a lot of time in Arizona last year visiting my dying grandmother. Last night, she brought up how we should have seen how beautiful the Arizona desert was then, everything blooming profusely because of heavy rains that winter. I brushed away a tinge of melancholy as I said "yes, it was extremely beautiful."

Then I'd had enough. I declared in my mind that the Sister in law show was officially over, so I bent the room to my will. She was talking about her tattoo ( a chain around one ankle--how radical!), MIL and FIL nearly pinching a loaf at the thought of tattooed DILs, and I said the endorphin thing was incredible. She said she didn't get the endorphin thing, in her usual trope of one-up-manship, so I embarked on a tale of a biker guy I used to work with who was trashed on booze and who-knew-what-else with a bunch of friends one night and they copied a Budweiser label onto his shoulder and went to the tattoo artist and insisted he tattoo the image exactly as they had rendered it. Sobered up a day or so later, they found they had done the budweiser thing in reverse image, so it looks right in the mirror, but nowhere else. He was a great guy, and fun to work with, though I never knew him very well. But this tale of truck with a rougher class of folk than our genteel family had the effect of horrifying the room.

Now, I'm the first to say I'm not very smart, because if I HAD been smart, I would have ended the story with "and THAT's the guy I got hepatitis C from! Isn't that funny?"