My Shared Minute

"Most of us pretend, with greater or lesser success, that the minute we live in is something we can share." ~Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)

I crawled into the kitchen this morning for some coffee and found nothing but a bare pot. "Maybe I'll just eat some grinds," I thought. If that isn't an indication of how long this holiday has dragged on, I don't know what is. By Saturday, Hoop and I will have celebrated Christmas FOUR times! As a kid I would have thought that was pretty cool. But as an adult? My "holiday cheer" and "good-will to men" is stretching pretty thin. Papa Bear is going to burn the tree this weekend. Because, well... We're apparently redneck like that. If you see some chick roasting marshmallows over her flaming tree, it's me.

The point of all this mental vomit is that I don't really have anything great to blog about. The holiday has sucked the funny right out of me. So instead of some clever post with "Daily Hoop Conversations" and such, I'm going to tell you a horror story. It all started with a very sincere and thoughtful gesture. My Grandma, the one from my Father's side, sent me a Christmas card the other day with her email address written inside. So I wrote her and then she wrote back. Evidently that's how these things work. Attached to her email was a photo. "Your family," she wrote. I was curious, I hadn't seen any of them in over ten years. What I saw when I clicked on it though made me wish I was adopted...

It looked like a homemade production of "The Hills Have Eyes." Some of my cousins never grew into their heads. Others were lacking necks and waistlines, hidden under pudgy rolls of fat and fur hair. We are Italian afterall. All but one was frowning, and he had holes where teeth should be. Babies were being held up by their arms, bodies dangling, as if their parents were proclaiming, "Look what I made!" One cousin wore make-up so black I thought her eyeballs were missing. "That is not my family," I thought while deleting the picture. I still haven't figured out how to delete the memory of it though. So my question to you all is... How long do I have? How long until my Father's freakish genetics kick in? Cause I swear they all looked normal when I was a kid!