Day 10: Passive-aggressive decorating

May 17, 2008 at 5:33 PM
3 comments

Only one or two people that read this blog have ever gone into my parents' house in Ohio. If I ever return, I will get pictures to document this post. But for now you are going to have to take my word for it.

There are family pictures all over the place in that house. Everywhere we went we took copious pictures as is legally required for people of Asian descent. So walk around that house and look at all the pictures... and you will notice something.

Every picture is the same.

Well, the time and place changes, from 1980's Ohio, to a trip to Japan in 1992, etc.

But the composition is always the same.

My mother is all done up, smiling at the camera.

My father is never looking at the camera, or if he is he has a pissed off look.

I am usually looking at the camera, but looking unkempt or blinking or smiling strange.

This is true for every single picture on display in our house. At last count it was over 50.

Now, before you say that obviously my father never looked at the camera, or I always looked like a bum or don't know how to smile, it's not true. We have album after album of pictures where all three of us look great. She never EVER hangs those up though. Not one. In fact, unless there's a pic from the same event already hanging, you won't find any pictures where my mother is the only one smiling and me and dad are being tarded. Why? Because she's already taken them all and hung them up on the walls.

A few years ago I was talking to my mother on a night where she had imbibed enough Grand Marnier to be open. I asked her if this was on purpose (of course it is on purpose, I was more wanting to see if she would bother lying). My mother told me that she held this family together, and that on our trips and especially during picture time, she was the only one paying attention because my dad is aloof and I'm just a bad kid that doesn't know how to smile. So when she's hanging up pictures, she tries to get pictures that accurately portray what it was like being there.

So there you have it. My mother is some sort of oddball adherent to cinema verite.

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30 days of miserable childhood

Comments

[this is good]

Wowwww. This may be the strangest one yet. I really love it. There will be a movie, right? You're working on the screenplay? I caught some weird wacky stuff at an Asian film festival in Seattle once... your vignettes of your family would have fit right in.