am i crazy, or is everybody else?

[cimorene]

the sad thing is that in our house, they're probably equally likely.  my parents both think i have been in the habit of "saying mean things" about one of daddy's attendants, which i have never consciously done. 

daddy: has anyone seen my attendant?
me: i ate her.

(this is my response whenever anybody asks where something is, regardless of what it is.)

mom: (in hissing whisper) this is why she's so depressed, because she knows you say these things about her.

i said 'what?  what are you talking about?' for ten seconds or so without getting any response.  mom left the room, i started to go back to eating, and then dad whispered 'she knows you say mean things about her.'

'but i don't,' i said.

'you just DID as soon as she left the room,' he said. 

not only do i not say mean things about her, i don't say any things about her.  i have not made a single comment about her to my recollection.  daddy's the one who impunes his attendants' intelligence, but that's a story for another day.  and i kinda thought she was reticent because of a rough divorce combined with the flu.  but what do i know?

i feel like i've jumped into the twilight zone.  do i have an alternate personality who's been saying mean or ambiguously interpretable things about daddy's attendants?  could this explain my complete inability to remember a single speech of mine that could fit this scenario? 

more likely, everyone else is crazy.  but i suppose the world may never know.

Comments

[ajodasso.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I think the majority of our parents' generation is determined to interpret our generation's sense of humor as malicious or suspect, since most of the time they can't comprehend it. It's so irritating.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i suppose that's one possibility. probably the most likely. i can't even remember another joke that could possibly have been thought to be aimed at her. oh well.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

They're nuts - don't stress about it. I think irisbleu is right about the "sense of humor" generation gap thing - and if your dad's attendants are really as smart as HE thinks they are, then they also might interpret sarcasm as being mean. (Also, my mom once completely flipped out because I said something sucked. Apparently I'm not supposed to say things that used to be offensive back in 1965.)

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

I am reminded of a line from Scrubs: "I don't hate you - I NOTHING you."

[hollsh.livejournal.com]

I remember my mom saying once how she hated when I would say things 'sucked' as it was vulgar, yet I was allowed to swear. Go figure, "She's a fucking cunt*." is less vulgar than "That show sucks."

* sorry if youre one of the women that hate the C word, its one of my favourites.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i agree. cunt is fun, although i totally understand some people's finding it offensive.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

I'd never even *heard* the word cunt until I watched "Silence of the Lambs" in like 9th grade. It's just not something people I know say a lot, not because it's offenseive but because it isn't in their insult-slang vocabularies. Now "douchebag", that I hear a LOT. Weird, huh?

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i think isadora bullock read some edgy, modern novel with smut in out loud to me and adrian hageman when i was twelve, at her thirteenth birthday party. i grasped the meaning at once though, so perhaps i had heard it before--though obviously not in casual conversation! it's a bit harsher than you hear out and about in the south; belongs to an extra crude class of words, and NOT to the Gangsta Rap family of crudities.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

ps: i must yousendit you "silence of the lambs: the musical."

my and wax's favorite lyrics:

this cop is already dead, you see
i'm wearing his face on my head, it's ME!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

there was this big discussion at the tuscaloosa science fiction society meeting last week and i was the ONLY ONE at the table except lillian and her friend who didn't think 'suck' was a terrible, really offensive word. mom said that her class sucked once and they gasped, so she took that as evidence that they thought it was a really bad word. i was like, mom, of course they gasped, you USED A CUSSWORD, insulted them and proved you know what 'suck' means all in one blow! she doesn't believe me.

most of the people there incidentally thought you shouldn't swear AT ALL, that those 'emphatic' words need to be used rarely, and of course language should have them, but only FOR EMERGENCIES.

whatEVAH.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

fuck that!

[cimness.livejournal.com]

astonishingly well-put. a shitload of well-put lies in that succinct opinion.