Meet the Parents

You know I sometimes get asked, “Mitchell, why are you such an idiotic, bumbling, blibberish speaking blob of self-love?” Well, I was reminded of the answer this past week, because my parents were in town.

Now, my parents have not visited me in Boulder since my freshman year almost three years ago. It’s not that they dislike traveling; it’s just that for some reason their plane always seems to get stuck in Las Vegas. In the three years I’ve been up here, they’ve been to Vegas about six times.

Mom: “We really wanted to come and see you, but our connecting flight ran into a flock of geese. Luckily the pilot saved everybody by landing in the Hudson River, but we’re going to be stuck in Vegas.”

Me: “Isn’t that what happened to U.S. Airways flight 1549 in January?”

Mom: “Hold on, I’m trying to win back all the money I’m paying for your darn out of state tuition. Hit me… 23? Dammit!” *click*

But since I didn’t go home this summer, they decided to stop by in Boulder for a few days before going to Vegas. Unfortunately, the Greeley Tribune only makes us work two days a week, so that meant I was going to have to be with them during all of this. It’s not that I don’t like my parents, but when you think about it, there is very little to do in Boulder unless you want to go off and hike and climb and raft, which of course nobody in my family ever wants to do because all of those activities result in death. So my parents were planning on coming up here mainly to drink at bars, but with me along this now put a wrench in their plans.

For instance, when I picked them up from the airport, I asked them what they wanted to do. My mother immediately replied that she wanted to get a massage. I politely asked her if she had really flown 3,000 miles to get a massage, which was not exclusive to Colorado the last time I checked. But she replied that this was a special massage that was not available on the Big Island. It was called cranial sacrum therapy, or cro-magnum sacrial or cromial sagro or something like that. When it comes to the newest health scams, my mother is as gullible as a two-year old on laughing gas. Every time I go home, she is trying some new form of physical therapy or taking some sort of berry powder.

After several days of searching, we found a place that offered this massage, so she made my dad and I also go in. Now, it lasted an hour and cost more than a dollar a minute, so I expected five Swedish models to come out and give me an oil bath. Instead, this lady came in and simply sat there with her hands resting on various parts of my body. Not even pressing hard, just laying them there. I’m assuming that the back relief was supposed to come from taking money out of your wallet and thus improving your posture when you sit down. I couldn’t help but feel like I paid to take a one hour nap. Eliot Spitzer has paid hookers less to do more.

Anyway, we also decided to go into Denver, seeing as all of the things to do in Boulder require avoiding mountain lions or being very high. When we arrived in Denver to visit 16^th Street, I ran into a bit of a problem. Namely, all of the roads were closed. We finally figured out that they were having something called the People’s Fair, which was basically a swap meet on steroids. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of swap meets, mainly because they involve walking around in the hot sun looking at things that people tried to make in their backyard, presumably under the influence of several hallucinogens. Luckily, there was a live band that was pretty good. Their biggest fan was a mentally-challenged (that is the pc term right?) man up in the front that was bouncing around and air-guitaring to the music. As much as I wanted to laugh, I had a suspicious feeling that my roommate Chris and I didn’t look much different at the Eagles concert we went to a few weeks ago.

After the fair, I decided it would be an awesome idea to try and go to Cherry Creek Mall. I say try because I myself have only been to this mall once in my life, and I was getting directions from the two Coloradoans in the car with me and I still got lost. But somehow, I managed to get to the mall while only disobeying about twelve street signs. Then I realized that I probably would have been better off getting lost.

You see, I’m not a big shopper, and large malls scare me. Plus, Cherry Creek is made up mainly of stores that are catered to people who have way more money than me. But for some reason, when women travel they always want to go into malls. It doesn’t matter that every state has them, or that they have all the same stores in them. I mean, they travel all that way, and they end up in Macy’s. Then you have benches full of men waiting outside Macy’s, whose souls are slowly being drained out of their bodies.

Not that the trip wasn’t fun. They got to meet some of my friends, visited at least four different liquor stores, and watched the University of Hawaii softball team make it to the playoffs by upsetting top-seeded Alabama. But detailing the parts that were strange always makes for funnier stories, and there were some strange parts of this visit. Or as my mother said, “Hurry up and graduate so we never have to come here again.”