The other day a someone asked me over the phone what I'm planting this year. Flowering shrubs, I told her, and she repeated that to someone in the room with her. "Oh, rhododendrons?" he asked and she relayed. "No," I replied, "rhododendra don't do well in Denver." He began to offer suggestions.
First of all, I hate two-way phone conversations. I won't be the mediator between whoever's on the phone and whoever's standing next to me. I hand the phone off for almost anything more than "RDC says hi." Second, the plural is rhododendra. Third, "oh, rhododendrons?" because that's the only flowering shrub in the world?
I restrained my response, not to make the friend the mediator and because I had no idea how politely to say that in addition to amending the soil as he recommended, I would also have to alter the climate, making it more humid, and lower the altitude, making the sun less harsh, or at the very least suddenly have a 30-year-old shade tree. I guess I could have just stated these facts, but stating them without sarcasm, or evenly without sounding antagonistic, was beyond me.
I maybe should work on being able to confront people, to address them. Mostly I favor a pointed silence.
I don't recall my mother's being as rude on the phone as she is now before her second husband. I have attempted to view this sympathetically (she wants people to know, and to reaffirm their knowledge, that she and BDL are so very involved with each other at every moment) but, unsurprisingly, failed. Often she'll initiate a call to me but be talking to BDL when I answer and greet her. I've asked her why she calls me despite having more pressing need of conversation with BDL. And she'll always explain why, just this once, she needed to talk to him right then--despite having dialed me half a minute before. I don't mean that we're on the phone and BDL calls "I'm going to the store, do you need anything?" and my mother says "Oh yes, could you get a jug of milk and I think we're out of sugar." I mean we're on the phone and she might interrupt even her own sentence to me (my own to her are always fair game) to tell him what we're talking about. Can't this wait? If he hears juicy gossip or a compelling debate, can he not wait until after the call to be filled in?
When I'm on the phone with someone and RDC needs to tell me something Right Then, I'll generally excuse myself for a moment, listen to him telling me briefly that the house is on fire, and return to my call. The problem is that my mother is so damn deaf or inattentive that when I excuse myself she doesn't hear. My parents both are fond of calling me before work "because I know you're home," despite being repeatedly informed that RDC sleeps later than I do. (This makes him a slackabed, not differently-houred.) If I need to get some clothes, I'll tell her that she should keep talking but I won't respond for a moment while I'm in the bedroom with a still-slumbering RDC. Invariably she needs this repeated, by which time I'm in the bedroom and not talking but grabbing (not deciding among) garments.
Would this bother me as much if it weren't she committing the offense? I don't know. Sometimes when I'm on the phone with a friend, a housemate, human or animal, adult or child, might interrupt her. When it's a kid or a pet, I want to know what my niece or nephew is doing to cause the quickly quieted ruckus. It's part of the story. When it's an adult, I honestly can't recollect that anyone else I know will allow, let alone initiate, an interjection that disrupts our conversation.
BDL is extremely immature, it's true. He thinks nothing of interrupting an in-person conversation--a sentence, not a pause--to show you his orange-peel dentures. So maybe I should make child-allowances for him. Nah. My sister doesn't: if she and my mother are talking in person and BDL interrupts my mother's very sentence, she will shut up immediately because he is The Man. My sister will ask her, "Oh, were you done? I thought you were still talking," and at least my mother seems to accept this correction of her doormattitude. If he interrupts my sister, she doesn't shut up until she's finished her thought. (My sister's sensitive to interruption for this very reason--maybe too sensitive to it in animated conversation.)
Ursual LeGuin wrote something in The Eye of the Heron that I really like and try to live by. It could be just so I can feel virtuous and martyred (just like my mother), which scares me. It was something about having enough self-esteem that others' insults or demands matter less. I should add that passage to my Explanations page. A pointed silence with eyebrows raised disdainfully into my hairline is not what Ursula LeGuin meant, though, I'm pretty sure.
Oh.
Oh my.
Oh my goodness.
Apple's new music store, OMFB, is what I've been waiting for. It still has gaping holes, mind you: it has some Corey Hart but not "Sunglasses at Night," some Til Tuesday but not "Voices Carry": not the one-hit wonders. Lots of the songs I'm looking for I haven't had since I arrived at college and starting taping people's vinyl over the compilations I built off the radio, full of the hiss of low recording quality, FM background noise, and my dog suddenly scratching herself or my mother calling for me.
I paused for a long time at Journey. Journey was a guilty pleasure of mine in high school, it being heavy metal and not something that I, as a wannabe prep, could admit to. Later I learned from a real high school metalhead (the one I married) that no boy ever liked Journey but pretended to because that was a chick band. Oh. I forewent Journey for now. I set myself a ten-dollar limit to indulge my nostalgia this evening.
It didn't have that song by the Call, I think, that's in "The Lost Boys." Nor the Cult song I wanted. I didn't get Echo and the Bunnymen, because I want all the Songs to Learn and Sing and the Music Store doesn't yet have it complete. No "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David and David. No Flock of Seagulls. I didn't get Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" because I couldn't decide among the several remixes and clearly the original 2:51 is not long enough.
The take: Animotion, Obsession; A-HA, Take On Me; Big Country, Where the Rose Is Sown and In a Big Country; Dennis DeYoung, Desert Moon; Dexy's Midnight Runners, Come on Eileen; John Waite, Missing You; Madness, Our House; Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, If You Leave; Smithereens, Blood and Roses; Modern English, I Melt with You; Violent Femmes, Blister in the Sun; and Weather Girls, It's Raining Men.
That was just too easy.