Her: Where are Alice and Bob going on their honeymoon?
Me: A cruise, I think.
Her: How long will they be gone?
Me: I don’t know.
Her: A week?
Me: I don’t know.
Her: Two weeks?
Me: I don’t know.
Her: Longer?
Me: (in my mind) DID I SAY “GUESS?” No. I SAID “I DON’T KNOW” BECAUSE I DON’T FRIGGIN KNOW. I DIDN’T QUIZ THEM. WE’RE NOT PLAYING “AM I GETTING WARM?” BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW. WHY ARE YOU STILL ASKING THIS QUESTION?
Me: (in reality) I don’t know. You now know as much as I do on the topic.
Lego, I sympathize with you, as one also lacking in interrogation skills, but it’s really important to know how long Bob and Alice will be away because- um. Yes.
Things okay, job’s interesting, going out of town soon, fishing, golf, the rusted floorboard on the Ranchero, pear trees and late springs, thornless raspberry bushes, Kuiper Belt objects, gravity slingshots, cousin’s in jail again, cannibalism, Senna vs. Fangio vs. Earnhardt, cF and lateral acceleration, forged or cast?, that damned dog, that good dog, .303s and hunting, holidays.
Dad: Okay, I need to turn you over to your stepmother, now. I didn’t ask the right questions.
Well, WHY NOT? Didn’t you ask? Don’t you care about Alice and Bob? You know, if you did care, you would have asked! Don’t you like my friends? They annoy you, don’t they? Why didn’t you say something before? Did you think I’d get mad? You thought I would get mad, didn’t you? So you’re afraid to talk to me now, is that it? What kind of a man are you, anyway, that you can’t even talk to your own wife?? You make me sick. ahem
Sorry.
I used to have similar exchanges with my mother, except it was in the vein of I DON’T CARE.
Her: “Oh, you’re invited to Kirenza’s wedding! They want to know if you want the chicken or the vegetarian entree.”
Me: “Hey, good for her! I don’t really care which entree I have.”
Her: “Well, the vegetarian entree is a lasagna, and…”
Me: “I really don’t care; I’ll eat anything.”
Her: “So, do you want the vegetarian lasagna?”
Me: “I don’t care.”
This repeated for a while until I made an arbitrary decision to make her happy. Yes, I do realize (by now) that my attitude could have been taken as surly, lazy, slothful, deliberately provocative, et cetera, but c’mon! There are some times when I honestly DO NOT CARE no matter how many times you present the options to me!
I got to the point where I would get up and leave the room and do other things for awhile when my friends were over. Since I evidently did not ask the right questions, I let my mom do it for herself.
I have had many similar conversations with my family. In fact, this issue was the inspiration for a skit I wrote and performed in when I was in high school. It was about a girl who returned from the store to announce that she had found the shopkeeper lying dead with a piece of fruit in his hand. Her family grilled her incessantly about what kind of fruit it was, although the girl kept insisting that she hadn’t noticed.
Well, it doesn’t sound funny described like that, but it was. Really.