Aside from the amount of times my parents don’t get a pop-culture reference, they’re pretty cool alright. I mean they consistently find the most inopportune time to interrupt a movie to ask annoying questions like: “What’s happening,” “What did she say,” “I’m tired. How much longer,” and “Didn’t he play the son of that woman in the movie with George Clooney?” But I love them regardless, and I will usually answer their questions with only a tinge of annoyance in my voice.
However, there are usually only two things that make me want to trade them in for different models:
When they repeatedly ask me the exact same questions about my career path…because answering just once isn’t painful enough.
And when I take them to new restaurants in hopes of getting them to try — with “try” being the operative word here — new foods. They tend to wrinkle their noses before the plate even touches the table. I promise them it will be good. I plead with them to a least give it a try. They sigh and warily say, "Okay." They move the food haphazardly around while eyeing it with distrust. I watch with hopeful eyes as forks travel to their mouths. Then, ending in an anti-climatic moment akin to Y2K, they stop mid-bite and put down their forks. "It's just too weird," they say. They then proceed to try to order sandwiches in a dim sum restaurant.
Parental Unit 2.0, where you at?