Of Web Woes, Tortinas & The World Of Boys.

The last couple of days have been interesting in the way their tumultuous nature always led to some decent laughs, and not the bitter laughs where you try to save trees by not using up too many tissues for naught, no. The kind of laughs that come from you pegging life for what it is; nothing but an over-zealous excessively-propped farce that’s a couple of lines away from running up against Cats.

For instance, there’s how my mom has recently discovered the dark corridors of online realms, and came up to me a couple of days ago with the announcement that she’s meeting her first online friend for coffee. Needless to add, the newly acquired piece of information sent off a grenade in my ‘I really don’t want to die’ department, which respectively instigated the most elaborate imaginary plot of how they’d turn out to be an Egyptian pervert/serial killer and I started to seriously consider how I may never see my mom again in a couple of days until I’ve received a court-approved morgue summon to identify a body. Seeing as to how I couldn’t manage to successfully get it through my mom’s head that she’s not Meg Ryan and the stranger does not have a snowman’s chance in hell of being Tom Hanks, I took it into my own hands to go to the mattresses.

Now let me clarify that this was not the worst dilemma my culturally-confused mother has presented over the past years, so I’m well-trained in the art of swapping mentor roles to effectively deflect an incoming nuke.

Presently, I did my research – otherwise known to the cyber world by the term ‘stalking’ – and having eliminated homosexual no-lifer, the possibility of a sexual assault and, without fail, a potential con artist who lives in his mom’s basement and fishes out unsuspecting law-abiding citizens for evil ulterior motives, I jumped on the modern bandwagon, making sure that my mom doesn’t give out too much personal information. However, that couldn’t be helped since the object at question had successfully curated our phone number, district, and unfortunately, my name. My dad had long given up on the survival quest and had settled for watching us over his morning coffee and newspaper with an amused countenance that only comes with being a sport.

The long-awaited phone call was this morning, and we were all pleasantly surprised to find out that my mom has found her match, an equally confused citizen who’s gullible enough to rule out the possibility of how the person on the other side of the call is a psychopath and who’s, thankfully, rather pleasant. With mortal danger out of the way, I stepped out of my investigator shoes and joined my dad in being complacently amused with the turn of events, throwing off sarcastic repartees that neither the object at question or my mother seemed to quite register. What personally amuses me though, is that while my father and I were thinking what to do with the potential body bags, the fact that they could have both been dead right now flew right over their heads.

The list goes on to include my grandmother, who has been thinking about death a little too much and reached a twisted state of acceptance that gave her enough room to seriously consider leaving me her savings in the form of Loacker’s dark chocolate Tortinas, just because they happen to be my favorite. I made sure I controlled my facial expressions enough to moderate my reply into how I don’t mind the chocolate Tortinas even though I equally don’t mind not having them if that means she stops scaring the living shit out of me with the image of her in a coffin holding out a Tortina with sheer powers of Rigor Mortis.

Also, I’ve fulfilled my childhood dream of having a secret language that I use to communicate with my father, considering that most of our conversations are now limited to the pros and cons of automobiles. Being a girl in a sexist society, I can almost guarantee almost nobody gets what the hell we’re talking about most of the time, and I’ve admirably enriched my car-related vocabulary in the process. I gotta say this has been a breakthrough in terms of how I now get why dudes like cars, even though I hardly think it calls for a complimentary badge to mark the achievement unlocked. The irony lies in the fact that I’m yet to understand the feminine fix on the art of cooking. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a Snape away from being another potions class I skive off to start working on my more interesting ‘Werewolf Vs. Animagus’ report.

It’s quite an odd world we live in, and I don’t expect to get the hang of it any time soon. Till then, I'll settle for enjoying life’s ever-updated Merriam-Webster definition of the word Joke.