Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Fear and Loathing in the Mind of Zelda

Gwennie has been having crying spells where she tells me she is afraid of getting old and dying. I'm not quite sure how to manage that one being plagued with fear on that score myself. Then in the middle of Easter Sunday Mass, she looked at me skeptically and said, "But yeah. Who made God?"

Damned if I know, kid. And that just may be the truth.

While I appreciate and even delight in intricate theological questions, I am not thrilled with being thrown into existential crisis at unsuspecting moments. Being a nervous sort, I don't handle it very well.

Now if I may shift gears, what is it with crazy white people? I swear, every time they discover I am married to a Vietnamese gentleman, they insist on sharing with me every aspect of Asian culture they've ever been accidentally exposed to from bedroom slippers to a salad at Jack-in-the-Box.

We have a crazy real estate agent working for us now (a blog post in her own right) and she drives me insane. She never shuts up, and she does everything wrong from filing to writing contracts.

So after having driven away her clients with her endless, banal chatter, she called me while I was at lunch and kept me on the phone for 20 minutes telling me about some Asian salad at Crap-in-the-Box. "You would like it," she says. "It's ASIAN."

Go Away, Crazy Lady. I'm dealing with my own insanity. Must you heap yours upon my already overflowing platter? Truly my cup runneth over.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Zelda: Get a new real estate lady. They can't all be that bad.

Can they?

Zelda said...

Yes, they can. The horror.

Zelda said...

Oh, but I see what you're saying now. She isn't selling our house. I work in a real estate office and she is a co-worker.

Zelda said...

If she's this upset now, just think how 30 will hit her!
angi | Homepage | 04.19.06 - 10:32 am | #

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Tell me about it. I am turning 30 next month.
Zelda | Homepage | 04.19.06 - 11:08 am | #

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And there was this one time, at band camp, an ASIAN played the flute.........
Kristin | 04.19.06 - 1:38 pm | #

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I am sure the whole death and dying thing is due to her visit with Jethro's dying grandma. It is hard on kids, they don't understand all of it. Hell, it's hard on adults.
Jen | Homepage | 04.19.06 - 4:08 pm | #

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That reminds me: Randall's has these new Indian sauces that you mix with yogurt and chicken and it turns into a pretty close replica of what you get in an Indian restaurant. It's good but I'm getting kind of Sikh of it. You Indians would like it.

Our kids are 10 and 8 and we've never had a problem explaining death. They lost my wife's father and my mother by the time the oldest was 7. We are a family with religious beliefs but we don't go to church. We do pray before dinner, etc, etc. Things like death are a lot easier to children when you can just say 'God needed grandma to come live with him'. We started practicing our religion again when they were born - mainly to ground them in life and to give them a sense of 'this isn't all there is.'

I've also told my kids that as long as I can live long enough to see them grow up and start their own families, I'm not afraid to die. They now look at death as just another place we go when we leave here.
slug | 04.19.06 - 6:46 pm | #

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Dumbledore said: "To a well organized mind, death is the next great adventure."

As for Asian, I had Chinese today, and talked about clay pots with my co-worker. I also missed an opportunity to have Vietnamese over the weekend because peeps in Columbus can't give directions. They suck, and I have no clay pot fish.
Inanna | Homepage | 04.19.06 - 8:11 pm | #

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Kristin - And this other time at band camp, I stuck an Asian in my ...

Jen - I'm not really sure what brought it on. It could be grandma, but she isn't with Jethro's parent's anymore.

Slug - I think she is just a little high-strung and nervous. We've taken a fairly similar approach and she does have religion classes, but she has a very overdeveloped imagination.

Nanner - Dumbledore is right - seems to be the British perspective on the subject as I recall Peter Pan said something similar.

Now you've gone and made me crave clay pot fish. If you come we will get some. (That sounded backwards somehow).
Zelda | Homepage | 04.19.06 - 8:30 pm | #

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I met an Asian guy at a strip club in Dallas a while back.
You'd really like him.
dick | Homepage | 04.20.06 - 2:40 pm | #

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I ate sushi once...
kidding.
I hate raw anything.
Gwennie is an old soul : )
Brighton | Homepage | 04.20.06 - 5:34 pm | #

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Being from the South, I should be the last to stereotype, but I do it anyway! Evertime you mention Jethro, the Beverly Hillbilly character pops into my mind, overalls and all. How did a Vietnamese guy get a name like that??

Does he play a banjo?

LOL, take comments above with a smile, I mean no insult, and can't for the life of me figure out why I think the way we do from time to time!
Tater | 04.21.06 - 4:36 pm | #

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Tater - No, Jethro doesn't play banjo. He aquired that moniker for 2 simple reasons. 1) I happened to be listening to Aqualung when I started my blog. 2) It goes against stereotype. That's my neat trick. I play against stereotype.
Zelda | Homepage | 04.24.06 - 4:16 pm | #

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