So a couple weeks ago my parents went to Vegas to visit my aunt and uncle and attend some intense, boot camp-style gun training seminar. The fact that they were in Vegas for nearly a week and NEVER EVEN SET FOOT in a casino just goes to show how far the apple falls from the tree sometimes (especially when the tree finds out about the apple's online gambling account and disgustedly kicks the apple a couple of times, and even tries to claim that it's not even their apple, it belongs to the tree next to it.) I mean, not even one little shoe of blackjack? Not even one roll of the dice at the craps table? Not even 20 minutes in the VIP room with Cinnamon from the Olympic Gardens? That's just crazy to me. But I digress.
The point is that my mom is now proficient with an array of handguns. Like, really proficient. To hear my dad tell the story (which he was WAY too excited to tell, now I know how Alex feels when I ramble on for 20 minutes about how amazing it was that KU made the championshihp game in 2003 with only a 6-man rotation) she is a regular G.I. Jane now, rolling through the obstacle courses, blasting the bad guys and flawlessly saving the elderly ladies and children.
And I gotta tell you, it's incredibly emasculating. Although it's not completely new to me- I've been fairly sure that my mom could kick my ass for a few years now, ever since she started regularly working out....especially considering that the last time I was in a weight room, you couldn't download Britney Spears and Mandy Moore songs because Napster hadn't even been invented yet. (Side note: this was confirmed last year when I was home for a visit. Long story short, I wanted my steak medium rare, she cooked it medium well, I voiced my displeasure, a fistfight broke out, and I ended up in tears, with nothing but a black eye, fat lip, and slightly overcooked steak to show for it.) Now she's going to the gun range and applying for a concealed weapon permit? What the HELL is going on? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!
I'm sure the next step will be my mom going with on family hunting trips now, toting her own shotgun and bringing down twenty-point bucks (I'm not positive what 'twenty-point' means, but I've heard my friends talk about it a bunch of times. I think it must signify how many stripes the deer has on its stomach. Deer have stripes, right?) So my mom will be out big-game hunting; meanwhile, I haven't slept well in a month, ever since the day I accidentally ran over and killed a squirrel in my golf cart, and the nightmares began. Poor little guy came out of nowhere!
At night the whole family will sit by the campfire, trading hunting stories and laughing...then someone will mention my name, and they'll grow quiet and my dad will spit a big wad of tobacco and say something like "Yeah, it's too bad he couldn't make the trip, I guess he's got his own hobbies....what the fuck is a blog anyway?" And then they'll all have a big laugh and go back to cleaning their guns.
It's official: my dad's eldest son has disappointed him so badly that he's converting his wife into a new one.
