loud mouth.

backstory: if you've been paying attention, you already know that my mother's side of the family is bizarrely close.  i love this.  in fact, i may or may not be a tiny bit obsessed with the fact that at family parties, i add extra vodka to my mixed drinks at the behest of my great-aunts.  that is amazing.  another, perhaps less fun fun, consequence of having a close-knit family is that everyone always knows everyone else's business.  growing up, my grandfather knew about all my medical issues and boy problems (mostly because my mom has a giant mouth).

current story: this is why i'm shocked, literally shocked, that no one has mentioned the car accident to me.  i wrecked the car on thursday and friday night, my aunt hosted a shabbat dinner (that was less about shabbat and more about wine and challah, as usual.  my cousin and i "blessed" the candles and the bread by reciting a prayer ending in "neir shel chanukah," which is really only funny because it's the chanukah prayer, guys!  not the blessing over the shabbat candle!*  come on!  god, we're hilarious).  anyway, on friday, i knew my entire family knew about the accident because my mom obviously could not keep it a secret from me that she had not kept it a secret from them.  therefore, imagine my surprise when not a one uttered anything remotely suggesting i'd just been an in accident.  not even my grandfather, who has called me frantic over much lesser crises (such as what brand my birth control was - yes, seriously.  although in his defense, i was using it as an acne medication and having struggled with it himself, at a time when dermatologists locked patients in lead rooms for hours with UV rays bouncing around,** he was concerned with helping cure me).  i still can't believe he didn't say anything over dinner and am especially blown away that when he called me today to talk about getting together for lunch tomorrow (see.  close family.  can't help it.  same dna.  i was born this way) he talked to me for five minutes without mentioning it AT ALL.  it's actually freaking me out.  what are they planning?  probably a huge driving school intervention.  typical.




*for the uninitiated among us, like those who cannot claim that they dropped of out hebrew school after four months at age 12 (like me) or that they occasionally stock their cabinets/fridges with matzo and kedem grape juice as soon as the passover aisles go up in the supermarkets (also like me), many hebrew celebration prayers begin with the same few lines (the appealing to god parts), and only differ in their references to whatever individual celebration/food the prayer is meant to be blessing.  we use the chanukah prayer eight times a year, in rapid succession, and for those of us who only have the supposedly weekly shabbat dinners once a year with our family when we've already had several (very alcoholic) mojitos, its repeated use makes the chanukah prayer much easier to remember.


**my grandpa recalls this time in his life fondly.  in winter in berkeley in the fifties, he had a better tan than anyone he knew.  perhaps the best one of all.  (although, it's maybe more important to note that he didn't get some form of horrible skin cancer from the lead rooms/UV ray double whammy.)