Que Sera Sera

Broin' Down

My brother came to visit last week. Within minutes of his arrival, we were talking in Oklahoma voices, a constant source of amusement to us. This is a strange phenomenon, since no one in our immediate family talks in these voices. Sort of like how I always make my mother’s voice sound like a nagging Jewish lady, at least until I said that to my friend Josh Newman and he said, “Wait, is that what you’re doing there? That’s supposed to be a Jewish lady voice?”

Anyway, we do not have Oklahoma accents. Our father is from Alameda, California, and our mother was born in Dallas, Texas, and raised primarily in Canada. Oklahoma accents are awful things, devoid of any of the charm of the Southern or even Texas accent. To speak in an Oklahoma accent, just try to sound uneducated and prickly. You never SIT on the porch, you SET on it, and you never quite get around to SETTIN’ on it because you are forever FIXIN’ to do so.

As you can imagine, this is a really fun way to talk, and it makes my brother’s stories about the barbecue restaurant where he works that much funnier. His barbecue restaurant offers an All You Can Eat Ribs Night on Tuesdays, (pronounced “Tues-dee”), and they often run out of ribs around 8 o’clock. Run out of ribs. On All You Can Eat Ribs Night. The humanity.

When we are not talking like Cletus, we usually end up touching on one of the following conversation topics:

Inevitably, all of those topics disintegrate into us quoting funny movies back and forth to each other. Some people communicate via words and expressed emotions and ideas, but my brother and I are okay just letting Dr. Peter Venkman or Tom Servo do the heavy lifting for us.

Speaking of being lazy, last night during dinner I got some Caesar salad dressing on my glasses. (I also got some in my hair, but that’s not the point right now.) I dealt with this by sliding them a little further down my nose and holding my head at a precise angle so that I could watch Law & Order: CI without having to get up and actually clean my glasses. Then, after Law & Order, I changed the water in my fish’s bowl, spending a good fifteen minutes AT THE KITCHEN SINK with the WATER RUNNING, and still didn’t clean them because that would have meant TAKING THEM OFF OF MY HEAD and I was tired. So I woke up today and spent at least ten minutes writing this post, my chair scooted up close to the screen and squinting, before I was like, OKAY, FINE, I WILL CLEAN MY GLASSES, GOD! It took all of one minute.

What is wrong with me? God forbid I have to MOVE EXTRA MUSCLES in order to MAKE MYSELF COMFORTABLE. I should totally have children someday. They will go to school coated in maple syrup and not wearing shoes, not because I am too lazy to tie them, but because I am too lazy to buy them any. Jesus Brielle, you want to leave the house AGAIN this week? Mommy is busy settin' here right now. Why don’t you go play with Mrs. Butterworth and ask her if she wouldn’t mind making you dinner.

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