Oh, mom ...

There will be plenty of future occasions for research-related blog entries, but it’s time for a life-related entry.  The question I get most often from friends who are familiar with my current situation: “does it suck living at home?”

Answer: no, it definitely does NOT suck living at home.

Sometimes it’s a little weird or crazy-nostalgic, and it can feel like some places have changed a lot while others are all-too-familiar.  Working at my high school has something to do with this.  My mom has a lot to do with this.

How can I describe my mom for those not familiar?  There’s no single character in the history of fiction that aptly describes her.  Every recombination of TV or literary archetypes sounds like a cartoon.  She resides on the border between California and Oklahoma, with tremendous naïveté, innocence, sincerity, and humor.  It can be 105 degrees and she’ll still be cold, and she will still eat frozen yogurt 18 times per week.  She has a doctorate from Stanford in computer science and works at NASA but somehow has the computer fluency of a Kalahari bushman.

Maybe I should just go to the stories:

-     When I went to college, she confiscated a device in my closet that she dubbed “the marijuana machine.”  (It was a bong).

-     After the advent of DVD technology, she asked me how to rewind it so she could return it to Blockbuster.

-     Our unofficial high school senior class t-shrits adorned the slogan “Bud, Bitches, and Brew” featuring a well-endowed siren sitting on a keg with a blunt (yes, it was crass, but subversion was the point back then).  To which she asked “Ross, I don’t get it, Bud is a kind of brew. It doesn’t make sense.”

-     I want to say it was 2005-ish: “Ross, do we have any USB? Everybody at work is talking about USB. I need to get some USB, do we have that?” [My head falls into my hands as I worry about our national space program] “It’s for the computer.”  I know mom.

Those are some of the better.  Both her and my step-dad Roger are fully settled creatures of habit on the brink of retirement.  So I give them immense credit for putting up with me moving back for a year as I’m on the brink of 30.  Sure, there are social … disadvantages, but back to the question of it sucking?

Again no, it absolutely does not suck.  In fact, it’s awesome.  I submit:

-     I’ve attended a half-dozen Giants games, and I can watch the rest anywhere (and not JUST when they’re playing the Dodgers).  In Santa Monica’s S.F. Saloon, they don’t even get all the Giants games.

-     Do you know how much time you waste cooking and doing laundry for yourself?  My math may be wrong, but I’m going to say hundreds of hours per week.  Oh, is that mean letting my mom do laundry?  No, and probably, respectively.  I think she likes doing mom-stuff again after an 8-year hiatus and I’ll be honest, I don’t think she does much at her job—may as well keep her occupied with something she’s good at.  Am I lazy?  Well, right now they’re gone RV’ing Yellowstone for 2 weeks and my laundry situation is getting desperate—I’m on reserve socks and underwear.  Maybe the cat knows her secrets.

-     I’ve taken Palo Alto for granted for too long.  It’s really not a bad place to land.

I’ll write soon about becoming a substitute teacher at Palo Alto High School, boy is that a big dose of weird and a small dose of paycheck.  But for now, after many requests, my mom’s greatest hits, 2010 edition:

-     Here’s an example of 1000% weirdness.  Right of the bat, maybe day 3 of being back, we’re cruising on El Camino and I’m commenting on new housing construction on the Stanford campus.  She says in complete sweet earnestness “that’s where you were conceived, my dear.”  Ugh.  If I was behind the wheel, I might have had to swerve into a dumpster just to give my brain something else to process.

-     Until 2 weeks ago, I had never seen “Risky Business” (as in, the Tom Cruise movie).  I always assumed it was about dancing around in skivvies, not running a brothel while your parents are gone.  I retroactively retract every time I said I’m going “risky business style” when my roommates went out of town.  I didn’t mean that.  Except the once (sorry Conrad).  Anyway, I’m sharing a Netflix queue with my mom, she sees I’m halfway through the movie and gets excited. “Oh have you seen the subway scene yet?  That’s a classic scene.  You’ll like that.  What a great movie.”  I hadn’t.  I finally get there and I find out that it’s the dirtiest scene in the whole movie, where Tom Cruise is totally getting it on with Rebecca de Mornay in a Chicago subway while a hobo watches.  Nasty!  … I’m disturbed, not by the scene so much, but by the recommendation.  I confront my mom about this: “oh, but the cuts to the homeless man were so funny.”   Sure mom.  Sure.

-     Sorry, I’m still vomiting a little bit over #1.

-     She doesn’t know who Glenn Beck is.  I discovered this while watching The Daily Show with her.  Actually, I’m not ashamed of this one, I’m kind of impressed.  Like when Baxter ate the whole wheel of cheese.

-     My computer has no space, I need a new one.  In the meanwhile, I can’t play Starcraft 2 at all (maybe a good thing).  But she offered her NASA computer for me to install and play it when she isn’t using it.  Let me explain the NASA computer: everything on her screen goes through NASA for security.  I don’t know if there’s some dude sitting in a big room of screens like in the Matrix, but I’ll pretend that’s exactly what happens.  I like to think there are one of two things that said government employee is thinking while I rock through Starcraft 2:

1.   “That’s odd.  Let’s see … [checking security clearance] … ah, I can see that Jan Aikins has two sons and a stepson, 25, 27, and 29, one of them probably installed Starcraft. … or …

2.   … Jan Aikins is fucking awesome at Starcraft.

-     Her grandmaternal clock goes off weekly.  Some indirect quip about how fun it would be to have granddaughters.  Actually, she’s quite direct.  I’ve learned how to hit the snooze button on this alarm, but I’ve so far failed to unplug it.  I can only make so many sarcastic remarks about my all-male litter of illegitimate bastard children before cutting humor turns to misplaced optimism.

All in all though, things are good.  I'm enjoying it here a lot more than I thought.  A surprising amount of friends are around or have materialized through Facebook, etc.  I also have a dad running around somewhere being wily and irascible.  More highlights to come.

Working on: A presentation at UCLA Ashe center at the end of the month, a presentation in D.C. in October.  Data checking, coding.  I’m thinking about getting a new computer that can run Atlas TI qualitative data management software.  Does anybody know anything about this?