I had a very messy evening last nite.

I took off my makeup and got changed for jujitsu early, had dinner early, and burned my tongue on chicken noodle soup. Then I noticed that some body parts that are required for jujitsu are in horrible condition, in pain and oozing blood and whatnot. So I decide to forego jujitsu to give them a couple of days to heal before causing more damage. Feeling bad for wasting an evening, I decided to visit my parents, whom I had not seen since their return from China this past weekend. I changed into comfy clothes, and immediately fell asleep on the couch. I woke up at 8p and debated whether I still wanted to head over to my parents’. What if they’re already asleep from the jet lag? I went anyway, realizing I wouldn’t be seeing them this weekend because Mr. W and I are gonna be in San Francisco, and I still needed a good way to break that to them.

The first thing my parents, who were seated in the family room having dinner and watching TV, said upon seeing me walk in was, “WHAT are you WEARING?! Did you DRIVE here in that?!” I went into the bathroom I was next to and looked at myself in the mirror. Oversized gray Esprit sweatshirt that went down nearly to my knees (remnant of the early 1990s, B.U.M. Equipment flava’), baggy black sweatpants with a white Dodo hair here and there, big plush green houseslippers designed to look like huge tennis shoes, complete with green shoelaces. My hair was matted on one side from when I leaned against the back of the couch and fell asleep, such that my head then slid down, and I’d scrape my head along the couch back up, and it’d fall down, I’d push myself back up, etc.. Yup, I looked like a crazy homeless woman. But I was comfortable, damn it.

I picked up a pair of chopsticks and jumped in on the homemade Chinese dinner. I’ve missed my mom’s cooking. Mom showed me digital photos of their trip with a feed into their big screen TV. The photos were projected so large that on one, they suddenly realized there was a fly that landed on the side of my dad’s forehead to get in on the shot. Then I was shown the printed out photos their friend took, and then my dad showed off the rocks he bought. Well, these weren’t so much rocks as much as stones that some famous artist carved into overpriced ink-grinding platforms that ancient Chinese used to do their brush-writing. I shouldn’t say ancient Chinese, it’s still practiced today. My parents had visited an ink factory and I finally found out how solid blocks of ink are made. The transformation from pine to ink blocks is fascinating. And then my mom popped in a DVD they’d bought which introduces “the mysterious Huangshan” (Yellow Mountain) to “foreigners” so that I can enjoy vicariously what they saw in person. “We tried to watch this twice already, but we fell asleep both times,” my mom announced, causing me to quake excitedly with eager anticipation.

Somehow I fell asleep, too. I woke up at 4am sprawled out on the 3-sectional couch and looked around groggily at my mom, asleep on the recliner, and my dad, asleep on the 2-sectional couch. I got up, went to the bathroom and contemplated going home, but somehow ended up back on the couch and asleep until my mom kicked me out at 6:20 a.m. and I fought traffic all the way back to my house, showered, fell asleep again in my own bed for half an hour (which was longer than I’d spent in my bed for days, as I spend a lot of nights on the downstairs couch so that I could hang out with die kleine Katze).

And after all that, I realized at work earlier that I still forgot to tell my parents I’m not gonna be around this weekend.