My parents don't understand me and for that I feel bad for them. They shake their fists and stomp their feet, yelling up the stairs, like little unattractive gremlins, "Kevin, wake up!" I can't help it if I sleep a little longer than most people: I need my strength, Mom, because some of us actually have jobs.
My mother is unsupportive: she thinks that selling encyclopedias isn't a career but it's just something to pay the bills until I can get out of this Podunk town and make a name for myself. I have big dreams and they will not be held down by things like taxes or laws or oppressive, Nazi parents.
As for my father, he's worse; he comes home every day, storming up the stairs and kicking open my door, sending my People magazines flying everywhere.
"Did you take twenty dollars out of my wallet?!" he roars, baring his little rounded teeth, "Did you? Did you?!"
Here, I am, forty-seven years old, and my privacy is worth nothing in this household. What did I tell you about the Nazi thing?
My father yells more, "Did you make long-distance prank calls last month? Did you?!"
To avoid my parents' banal existence, pervading my very soul, I confine myself to my room nearly all day. It gives me time to think, sort through the myriad of insightful things that pop up in my head from time to time..
It's hard to escape, though. My parents have made it a habit of theirs to barge into my room every once in a while, brandishing self-help books, all the while reciting the "encouraging" words paraphrased from the Dr. Phil they'd watched just that afternoon. They say things like, "Your younger brother Jared is in Harvard! Doesn't that make you want to do something?"
Yes, it makes me want to slit my wrists in the bathtub.
My intelligence will not be measured by society's ruler of mediocrity. Harvard is just another place the zombies of America gather to repeat the crap fed to them by their dumb yuppie professors. I will not be lured into conformity.
When I am famous and living in the Playboy Mansion, they'll come to me, shivering in the cold and holding out old soup cans filled with change. Jared too, because the stock market will have failed or something and he will be out of a job. I'll answer the door with a cocktail glass in one hand, laughing, "Oh, Brad, Angelina that is so funny but don't let any of your kids touch my authentic Rembrandt. It cost a fortune." Then I'll give my family a look like I don't know who they could possibly be.
"Please," they whisper in breathy voices, reaching out their dirty hands to me, "Let us stay in your house. It's so cold here. So cold. We cannot survive the winter."
I'll consider it for a while, hum and tap my toes and they'll quiver in anticipation.
"I guess I could cancel my nightly orgy," I'll say, "To accommodate you."
Jealousy will wash over their features but they'll say nothing.
And, yeah. They'll be sorry.
