Before I go into a rant about my parents, I'm going to freely admit that I am not a good daughter. I do not show patience and kindness to my parents on a regular basis, it's all I can do to remember their birthdays and actually see them for a couple of hours any time I'm home. I answer their phone calls less frequently than I should. I realize that even though I've made good, I'm bad progeny.

With that out of the way, how can two people who spawned a being and supervised it for the ensuing 18 years have so little concept of who and what the product is? I think my parents gave up actually knowing me several years ago and have settled with a few cliched personality traits filled in with their own preferences and the person they think I was pre-puberty. The previous paragraph should illustrate that I don't necessarily give them the opportunity to get to know me better very often, but every time I see them or talk to them, we follow the same path of talking about the dog, them espousing beliefs as though I agree, having forgotten that I don't, and then a recital of their complete ignorance of my life, goals, likes, and dislikes related to things I have let them in on. If I can remember details about their dog and work they've done on the house, can they not stop asking me whether or not I've found any good leads at State? It's like reliving the same conversation every time I talk to them. I guess to a large extent that's just the result of my having moved away. I change my outlook and take new turns, but in their minds, I'm still the 17 year old moving off to Davis.

Tonight's highlight was my mother asking why I was moving into the city, not in the "what's your reasoning?" sense, but rather in the, "That's not something that would ever have occurred to me. Who did you offend to deserve that terrible plight?" sense. Yes mom, you're right. I moved far away from Orange County to seek out its east coast twin. Sounds like a solid plan to me.