caught with pants down...

ok, here's the latest from the "my mother is driving me crazy" files:

she calls me yesterday to tell me she was driving to her physical therapy appointment when she had a sudden, uncontrollable need to pee. she pulls over on the side of the highway, gets out and by this time is already peeing but goes around to the passenger side of the car and gets her pants down to finish the job. now i should mention here that my mother is 70 and has rhematoid arthritis, a bad back, and a bundle of other ailments besides the obvious incontinence issue.

well, once she's done, she can't for the life of her get back up again. her knees keep buckling under. the more she tries, the weaker she gets. then a truck pulls over and a man comes to help her up. he's having a struggle trying to get her up (not sure why, it's not like my mom is very heavy or anything...). meanwhile, she's trying to get her pants pulled up. finally they make it to the back seat on the passenger's side and the people in the truck are hollering "help is on the way!" the man asks, what were you doing down there? so my mom tells me, i wasn't going to say, well i just thought i'd sit around with my butt hanging out... so she says, i had to pee. next thing she knows, a fire truck shows up followed shortly by the police. a fireman takes her blood pressure and it was sky high. and he asks, what were you doing out here? and she says, i had to pee! and then she hears the cop ask the fireman, what was she doing out here? and the fireman says, she had to pee. the way word gets around, probably half of jackson, mississippi, knows my mother was peeing on the side of the road...

so she says, i don't know why this happened, i took my detrol this morning. and i say, maybe you need to increase your dosage. how many are you taking a day? she says, well, i take one whenever i'm going somewhere. i say, WHAT? they're not like aspirin. you can't just take them when you need them. you have to take them EVERY DAY. she says, well, they cost sixty dollars a month. i said, yeah, so. you have sixty dollars. but if you want to save sixty dollars, you can keep peeing in the street. well, i take them three or four days a week, she says. you have to take them EVERY DAY, i say. there's no point in taking them if you're not going to take them correctly. are you listening to me? i say. i hear you, she says. yes, but are you paying attention? i heard you, she says.

she heard me. and she has no intention of doing what i say. it drives me nuts because i know she will call again with another incontinence episode. and we'll have the same conversation over again. i don't know how to stop.

i guess i'm like a man in that i always want to solve her problems for her. maybe i need to distance myself and just give her sympathy when she calls. I mean, she's 70 years old. she's made it this far without my solving her problems. i guess she can manage well enough on her own.

stella!!!!

my mother is driving me crazy. i'm sure this is not news, but here is the latest in her campaign to send me to the nuthouse.
first, some background. years ago we rented this movie called stella starring bette midler. i honestly don't remember too much about it except that there was this one part where she was dressed in a brightly-colored flashy outfit and we said, she looks just like patsy (my sister-in-law's mother)! because she acted really flamboyant like patsy did, too. come to think of it, patsy would have fit in really well at a pride parade, if only she'd been a man. but i digress. anyhow, mom said she wanted to see that movie again, so i put it on their netflix queue.

well she calls me up saying she watched stella but it is not the same movie we watched before. i say, yes it is. it had bette midler in it, didn't it? she says, yes, but she only dressed up like patsy one time, and i remember when we watched it before she dressed that way all through the movie and she went swishing around on the boardwalk. (much emphasis on the word "swishing.") i say, i remember her being dressed up once, but i don't think she dressed like that all through the movie, and i don't recall anything about swishing around on a boardwalk. i think you have this mixed up in your mind with another movie.
she says, no! because the stella we watched last night was a movie i had never seen before. she says, maybe there are two movies named stella with bette midler and this was the wrong one. can you look it up?

i pull up imdb.com, all the while telling her that there are NOT two movies named stella starring bette midler. i get a list of all the movies named stella (suprisingly there are quite a few. popular name.) and go through eliminating them based on the years they were made (the ones before 1968: too early, the ones after 1999: too late, the one in 1982: east german). we were left with only one stella starring bette midler.

so my mom says, the name of the movie we watched must not have been stella. it must have been something else. i told her, when you think of whatever it is, let me know, and i will add it to netflix.

i am not holding my breath.

netflops

ok, this is what you don't do. you don't let your parents get on the internet.

scratch that. you don't let your parents get on the computer. at all. ever. except maybe to play hearts. my dad seems to be able to handle that task.

but you can't sign your parents up for something like netflix and expect them to manage it themselves. this would be a fatal error.

see, my sister and i had this brilliant idea to sign my folks up on netflix for father's day last year. we'd foot the bill for six months and then after that they were on their own. we figured they'd be hooked by then. and they are. my dad loves not having to deal with going to the video (pronounced VEE-DEE-O for some unknown reason) store. he likes getting the handy little dvds in the mail and then sending them back, no muss, no fuss. (however, for some bizzare reason, he refuses to send back any dvds until all of them are watched so he can put them all in the mail at once. this sort of defeats the purpose of the three at a time deal, but he's pretty hard to reason with on some things. we have since switched to the one dvd at a time plan.)

well, the one caveat of the whole endeavor was that i had to be in charge of adding movies to their queue so they'd have a constant supply because, as i mentioned, they cannot be trusted on the internet.

well, today i was awakened with a frantic phone call from my mom telling me that i'd fallen down on my job because dad had gotten an email that there were no more movies in the queue (qway as he pronounced it. did i mention that my father has a doctorate in education? but he is from mississippi.). anyhow, he gets on the phone and tells me he's tried to go on the internet (NO!) but he can't get on the netflix site with his password because they want him to have one with more than four letters. makes no sense because his password only has four letters so i instruct him how to get to the netflix site. (takes about five minutes) then get him to the member sign in area (another five minutes). finally we get to the point where he can browse movies.

oh, by the way, i have to add that he wanted to know if he could print out a list of the thousands of movies netflix offers. i said, uh, no. why do you want to? he says so he can take it to my mom and read it to her and they can decide what they want to see. i say, wouldn't it just be easier to have mom in the room when you are on netflix deciding what you want to watch? he says, yeah, well, sometimes she's taking a nap when i want to do this. i say, i guess you need to schedule a time when she's available.

well anyhow, we get to browsing the netflix top 100 and i'm telling my dad if he wants to add a movie to his queue, he needs to click the little "add" icon. well he does it and it takes him to another screen where they're trying to push other movies because this is how netflix operates. he freaks out. but then figures out how to get back to the list. adds another movie, gets sent to the other movie promo page again, and, yep, freaks out again. he repeats this process about five times before he's ready to blow a gasket. he says, excuse me while i cuss. but he doesn't actually cuss. which i thought was kind of funny.

anyhow, i asked if he wanted me to pick the movies for him, and he said he'd appreciate it if i would. so now i'm stuck picking movies again. i ought to tell my sister it's her turn, but she'd play the baby card on me and tell me she doesn't have time.

it's really kind of difficult to pick out movies for your parents. at least it is for my parents. i'm thinking, no, that one has a lot of sex, they shouldn't see that. or that one is about drugs, they shouldn't watch it. it's like i'm trying to censor what they watch. but really, it boils down to the fact that these movies are selected by me, and and i don't want them watching certain scenes knowing that i've seen them and endorsed them.

so i have a really hard time selecting movies. i mean, i'm not going to send them 9 1/2 weeks no matter how great i thought it was. but i am running out of films along the lines of good will hunting.

i welcome any suggestions.