Family Square Part II

My mom used to subscribe to a housewife magazine (how else to describe it?) called Family Circle. The magazine, which I last cut apart for a 7th grade project, was filled cheery photos and cherry pie recipes, and stuffed with cigarette ads. As for the magazine itself, I've always understood the title to mean something along the lines of a family in perfect balance and harmony.

Forget a circle, I doubt my family will ever even vaguely resemble any equilateral figure. This reason I call my family "square" is because it is a seemingly perfect shape that is actually very odd. My frustations with elementary school math often came to finding the diagonal of a square, which was always a distinctly irrational number. I also see the squareness as in the sense of "Be there or be square." I don't think that this rationale actually makes any sense, but paradoxes only the heighten my own confused sense of reality anyways.

The additional family members, along with my attempted teenage intellectual rebellions, have contributed to the widening gulf between me and my parents. I find my conversations with them, especially with my dad, to the mandatory conversations of politeness. It's one of those conversations you feel compelled to have, yet neither one of you has anything to say.It also doesn't help that most of these conversations have to do with the one topic I want to avoid the most: college. While I know my defeatist attitude toward college admissions is no good, I can't muster any enthusiasm for the application process. My parents however, see this as the ultimate manifestation of their parenting duties.

My dad will ask me questions like "Tell me about your grades" or "Tell me about your extracurricular activities" with the air of a college admissions officer. When I reply that I am busy and do not wish to divulge such useless crap (in politer and less vitrolic terms of course), there is an inevitable outburst. Then, everything dissolves into a stonewall of silence.

When I try to talk to them about something I do care about, there remains an atmosphere of discomfort and awkwardness. For example, whenever I launch into a long ditribe about film, such as Jeunet and Caro's idiosyncratic flair for visual tricks in Delicatessen, my parents listen politely and reply with a cursory nod or chuckle--hardly encouraging. The language barrier does not help either; how can I begin to talk about film in Chinese when words like mise en scene are far beyond my grasp of the language? Okay, I don't actually use mise en scene, but its the snobbiest sounding film term I can come up with on the top of my head. And my parents definately have no fizzle of an idea what it means.

I find no topics for conversation between my dad's college lectures and my mom's gossiping behind other's backs. Despite the mountains of advice boiling down to "listen to your elders," I'm not even sure I even want to.