Being in my Parents' House

i'm already bored out of my skull from being in my parents' house. its the kind of bored thats so deep that i cant even do any of the things that i know would make me less bored. fortunately, when my sister is in a good mood she is Mrs Funnygiggle weirdo who is just like me. last night we took pictures of each other's feet in different ballet positions and then went back through the pictures trying to figure out whose feet they were. then we looked through pictures of hot people from her boarding school, and we called them at 3am to tell them they were hot. then we went and told jokes to mom while she was asleep, and then we had competing night clubs, which meant that we each faced each other while dancing to our own separate music in the doorway of our bedrooms 1.9 feet away from each other. then we put on Bill Pine's clothes and turned on a black light in her room and listened to rave music. right now she is disco-ing next to me and speaking fake words. in addition to these things, i have been writing long emails that go into excessive detail to pass the time. and making shit up. most of this paragraph was made up.

today i put on real pants! my dad and my sister and i went out to get pho for lunch and then did the requisite tour of all the used bookstores in the area, something i do with my dad every time i come home, especially when it's raining. we do it neighborhood by neighborhood. the neighborhood we picked today was Goldlane Square on Shady Grove Road, right next to Wintergreen Plaza and Rockville Shopping Center and Shady Grove Shopping Center. That's right next to Home Depot and Best Buy, which is right next to Red Lobster and Outback Steakhouse, and Chicken Out and Nordstrom Rack. That's right next to 7-11, which is right next to a place that's just like 7-11 but it's called 6-12. it's actually called that. they sell hot dogs.

i've read barely half of the books that i've gotten on these tours of used bookstores. my dad is very frugal, and will dispute over quarters in a parking meter, but will unleash vaults of gold at used bookstores. we went to this one today called the Book Alcove that was like a hobbit's labyrinth. short ceilinged, endless twisting narrow aisles, piles of things unsorted and unalphabetized, a wet pile of raincoats and umbrellas dripping in one corner. i was looking for this one steinbeck book, and when i asked for help the lady seemed annoyed that i hadn't thought of it myself to consult the tertiary shelf of paperback fiction in the secret room past the room of chocolate sculptures and guarded by the Trolls of Toenail Canyon. then when we got there, she couldn't find it herself. then she asked me why a nice young man like myself would want such an obscure book. i told her it was because im not a nice young man, im a pretentious and snobbish young man with obscure tastes.

luckily my father is very persuasive and has a vendetta against people who are bad at looking for things, and he's an assiduous fellow, and so he aided me in my quest for the obscure steinbeck. he befriended the guardian trolls by showing him that his fingertips are the color of old book pages, and then they talked about what it's like to have rhinoceros skin on the backs of their ankles. and my dad loves to find new and interesting people to talk to, and especially since he had never met any trolls before, he was thrilled to be able to tell them about his work on the Veterans' Rules and Regulations Re-Write project that he works on in the Office of the Secretary of Veterans' Affairs. and by that point i knew this would take fucking forever, i should have known that it wouldn't be fast, and so i hadnt bothered introducing myself to them because i thought that it would be really quick and we would just get the book and leave, so then i was just standing there awkwardly smiling and trying to appear friendly in that silent and inactive way when it's too late to enter a conversation for the first time.

eventually the trolls had had enough of the Veterans' Rules and Regulations Re-Write project, and one of them went to get the book while the other one stood there smiling and nodding vacantly, and then they politely cut off my dad by uttering the necessary incantations over the book so that they could hand it over. but my dad was really jazzed at that point and wanted to keep talking to these guys and so he was like "wow, where were you hiding the book?" and so they somewhat begrudingly offered to show him how they massaged the rusty jaws of The Ancient Vault of Literature of the Working Class, and it was pretty cool, and i paid them great thanks by offering my small vial of toenails that i swiped from the bathroom of Giraffe House when I left Oberlin. it's been only two weeks and i have already begun to collect returns on my investment in Oberlin. unfortunately, we were unable to find The Vault of Fiction Writers Who Are Not White Men, which perhaps was more diligently hidden. Perhaps it was near the Tombs of Suburban Ennui.

these last things are also made up. i did not get the steinbeck book at all, although my father's fingertips truly are made of old book pages. also, oberlin hasn't done much for me yet except given me a penchant for obscure literature.