Update: I’ve renamed my blog “Just Thinking” to reflect the more thoughtful mode I seem to be slipping into day by day…

Me Ma and I have a cordial relationship; not the lovey dovey, mushy eyed, i-miss-you-always kind, but more like a pragmatic, mutually respecting, i-have-your-back-so-you-can-call-me-if-you-have-an-ish kind. My bad though, I’d not called her for a week so she was just a weee bit justified in calling me up.

Apparently, she had done quite a bit of running around for my kid sister’s wedding in April and she needed to vent. Only snag though was that I knew that was only the hook, the full gist would encompass many other things….. Plus I was grilling some chicken, and fantasizing about the eating part.

Like the ‘good son’ that I am, I listened patiently to her rant about the various things she was having to chase, silently fuming, cos i knew all this was prepping me up for the big question. And then the first question. Was I planning to attend? Thankfully I’d just confirmed my return ticket so I could check that box “Yes”. And then the big ish — was I ‘seeing’ anyone at the moment? She probably heard my sharp intake of breath, and quickly proceeded to add that she ‘was only asking o’, so she could be ‘praying along with me’.

Like the quintessential, hard-nosed pragmatist that I am, I quickly let her know I wasn’t and that if she was interested, I could set up a conference call with she and my Dad to go through my current version of the 5 year plan…… The 5 yr plan is infamous in my house for being methodical and near fool-proof to all the parental arguments. She quickly pulled out of the arugument – cosidering it was quite a few minutes past 11pm her time, she opted to just defuse the tension and let me be.

The chicken? I thought I’d turned off the grill when the initial discussion went past 15 mins, unfortunately I’d actually raised it up to the highest level. My chicken ended up like burnt toast, thankfully it didn’t set off the fire alarms which would have been a whole different issue.