I feel like since I don’t mention my friends as often in these blog posts as you read them you’re probably thinking about some loner teenage girl, sitting at home with her family all the time. I sit at home a lot (because of shows, you know), but I promise I do have friends. Now that that’s cleared up, tonight on my agenda was watching a movie with my mom, and eating some popcorn. We turned off the lights, gave in to our instinctive choice of Harry Potter, and then silently took our seats on the couch. Believe me when I say that I love Harry Potter, but after watching it so many times it becomes comfortable to the point that it doesn’t have the same luring power of gaining full attention. Yes, the Harry Potter magic. Yes, to all of that. However, when anything isn’t played in a setting that emerges you into the entire atmosphere of the film (basically a movie theater), and you’re watching it for the thousandth time, it requires you to do something in addition to the usual silent observing. It was also about 12:00, and being in that drowsy state further inhibited by ability to just watch. So that is why thirty minutes into the movie I pop my head up from playing on my phone to a similar surrounding light, only coming from the adjacent couch. I naturally smile to myself since we’re both probably playing the same stupid game, and then turn off my phone. My mom catches on a minute later, and then she turns off her phone. But there wasn’t a mutual desire to sit away and watch the movie, so I kind of jump a bit on the couch, voicelessly begging her to suggest something to do.

Even with all my tricks to get her to say something, she just kind of stared at me, toying with my desires. And so I then paused the movie, turned on the kitchen light from behind me, and asked my mom to play charades with me. I don’t really know why I said it, to be honest. We’ve never played that game before without the app (or being in a long line at Disney), and so I think it was just a kind of animal inside of me, longing to come out. When she finally agreed to playing (and I explained how the first fingers held up meant number of words, followed by the syllables), I thought of my first phrase and then began acting it out. Just so you have an idea, my first phrase was “cutting my nails,” a harmless and easy group of words that I thought would get us in the mode. Little did I know that my mom would take everything acted way too literally, and thought it to be continuous from the previous action. You’d think after seeing so many episodes of Spongebob, in which characters are constantly disfigured one second and back in form the next, she’d understand, but there was no similar concept of that in her. And then, after she got the word cut I’d urge her to keep going so she could get the ing, which oddly ended up with me having to introduce a whole other word like walking, to then break that apart and have her connect cut to ing. This whole process would take so long that by the time she got the phrase, I basically had mouthed two of the three words. My second phrase which was the classic, “pick your nose,” led her to believe I was yo-yoing boogers on the ground.

We were laughing so hard that my dad actually decided to come out of his sheltered darkness, and join us. He eagerly demanded to go first and we let him, knowingly encouraging a tragedy to happen. He didn’t even start with the words and syllables, he was that bad. He just began dancing, full on shaking everything (too much if you ask me). And so we guessed the reasonable actions, going as far as refuting the effects of alcohol, and still were met with his dismayed head shaking. Well my mom and I got pissed at that point, and so finally he decides to actually act out the phrase, which ended up being an awful interpretation of the movie, “Saturday Night Fever.” My mom and I were utterly shocked that his first impulse was to just start jolting away, worsening his osteoporosis or whatever. Of course he then justifies how what he was doing completely reflected the nature of the phrase, despite giving us even the number of words, and that led to a mini brawl.

And so yet again I learned a valuable lesson in the effects voiding routine, as that the best way to entertain family members is to watch a movie, even one that no one has the capacity to full-heartedly watch again. Because the minute you decide to stray from tradition, you end up getting scarred for the rest of the night with the site of your dad’s chicken legs snapping back and forth.