the comedy post-script to the saga of vacation disaster

[cimorene]

you can think of this as epistolary fiction, except that it is the utter and unvarnished truth. 

it all started the day my family arrived home from vacation when i emailed my mom, my dad, and my sister simultaneously.

princess cimorene to cuddlepint, daddy, mommy          Jun 30 (2 days ago)
i'd love to hear about what happened to you on vacation.

innocuous, right? wrong. i got the first response almost immediately.

cuddlepint to me           Jun 30 (2 days ago)
nothing much...

like, what, are you kidding?

princess cimorene         to cuddlepint                  Jun 30 (2 days ago)
well, there were a few days in there that i don't know anything about... .

cuddlepint to me                  Jun 30 (2 days ago)
right, well... we didnt do anything.

princess cimorene         to cuddlepint                  Jun 30 (2 days ago)
i didn't think you had taken in a lot of tourist sights, obviously, but i know that things happened, because mom eventually talked to me on a phone and daddy's not still in the hospital, and all of you are no longer in france.

the next response i got was an entire page from my mom, which i won't reproduce here, but it conveys some information, like the fact that they were held up for hours in airport lines by employees who didn't know what to do with power wheelchairs and also that they missed a flight in there. meanwhile...

cuddlepint to me                  Jul 1 (1 day ago)
we hung out in the hospital. daddy got released. we flew home. that's about it. pretty boring... ♥

okay, well, at least at this point i was no longer desperate for details. then i got an email which i at first took for abstract poetry from my dad - he sends me abstract poetry fairly frequently, so that wouldn't have been that strange. it took me a bit to realise it was a letter from mom.

my parents' joint e-mail address to me
It is possible more things could have gone wrong.
i remembered I had brought a sausage, so they tookl it form me at customns
to incinerate ity, but bnI forgot the pate do canard gras, which  would
have been a 50 THOUSAND DOLLAR fine if they had discovered it. Dad
could have been ill again.  Etc.

formatting preserved, there. after a bit of "what does that even mean?" and appreciation - i still think it could make a good poem - i got an email on the same subject from dad.

dad's personal e-mail to me            Jul 1 (22 hours ago)
... then, Mom forgot that she had bought sausages at the Monoprix to take back.  This is the kind of dried sausage that doesn't even need to be refrigerated.  Sort of the French version of the Mexican version of a Slim Jim.  So she didn't put it on the declaration but then she remembered and told the customs person that so they had to pull our luggage out of line is go through it. they only went through her suitcase. Then they had to take the sausage and burn it.  nice to know that we're safe from prepackaged French food.  That made us miss our flight in Atlanta because they had already used up the entire available time on other typical bureaucratic crap. ...

i wrote dad back that it was fortunate the pate had survived and nice to hear his detailed account of the same events mom mentioned. 

princess cimorene to dad's personal e-mail            Jul 1 (17 hours ago)
...perhaps even more amusing than all this is that cuddlepint also answered my email, but she just told me that nothing happened. ...so on the one hand, we have cuddlepint thinking flying home was pretty boring and not even remembering that you missed one of your flights or that mom's luggage was rifled and part of it INCINERATED. on the other, you have mom's, well, abstract poetry. ...

this morning afternoon i woke up to this in my inbox - from dad's personal email address.

dad's personal e-mail to me        Jul 1 (14 hours ago)
i dont want to kmnow what mean things you say about me and mommy. i was tired.
dont email me again until you can be nice.

o_O daddy, how your email habits have changed! evidently, cuddlepint hasn't even noticed that she's answering someone else's personal email. i can't decide if this is more amusing or alarming. it's definitely more amusing that she's apparently in training to be tezuka -  she thinks mom's page-long saga of mishaps amounts to "we flew home. that's about it"... and doesn't see the slightest humour in that.

oh, family. ^__^ wouldn't it be hilarious if my sister actually did turn out like tezuka?

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

I am literally laughing out loud at this.

[guinevere33.livejournal.com]

Wow. I knew that even when there's been a bomb threat, most teenagers respond to "What happened at school today?" with "Nothin' much", but cuddlepint takes the cake for nonchalant teenage ennui.

Also, I am beginning to think your mom only remembers events in single nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which she regurgitates at semi-random when asked to tell a story. "Well, there was sausage. And a fire! And some customs agents. I think they were angry..." I love your mom :)

Oh, and do, please, yell at your sister for reading your dad's email. Uncool.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

it's nice that the surrealism is appreciable by other people and not just, you know, my brain melting after extended contact with them... :)

[cimness.livejournal.com]

wax_jism has advanced the theory that in her world, not much of import did happen, since it wasn't actually happening personally to her. it's hard to imagine how you could fail to notice the luggage being searched, the hours of standing in line and the delayed flight, but i guess if you're just waiting impatiently for fast food and have your headphones on the whole time...

the truth is at first i thought she had simply answered an email sent to my parents' joint account which wouldn't be that weird, and it's conceivable that i could have accidentally mailed that one because the display name is dad's for them both. however, no, she was in dad's gmail account that he mainly uses for work and poetry correspondence. that is really unacceptable - although since she didn't seem to notice she'd done it, i guess he was probably already logged in and she opened the mail thinking it was her gmail account. of course, the 'dear daddy' might have clued her in to look at whose account it was, but evidently it didn't.

[wild-boys.livejournal.com]

Ahahahahahahahaha wonderful. Wonderful. i dont want to kmnow what mean things you say about me and mommy. Oh, family!

Also your dad is hilarious on the subject of US customs.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

indeed! he also opined that the airline employees' several-hours-long search for a screwdriver with which to disassemble his chair (fairly unnecessary, since it didn't need to be disassembled, AND they refused to take him out of it till they were done) demonstrates the reason for the fall of the french empire. okay, it was funnier when he said it.

the 'mean things' is very typical - she grasps that i'm amused but not why, so she labels it 'mean things'.

[hollsh.livejournal.com]

...oh dear god...

Your father's email habits have certainly taken a turn for the worse.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

XD yes. i realised i just replied to him, so he will get the reply, not her... hopefully it won't be too confusing!