Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo

My mother has gotten pretty good with the whole texting thing.  Too good, in fact.  She has entire conversations with her sisters via texts that scroll into four and five inches of screen space on her iPhone.  I've tried to tell her that texting is not a subsitute for email, that it's for short burts of conversation and information.  She doesn't care.  She does what she wants.

Sometimes I think she'd even rather text than talk to me, especially when she has something to say that she knows I'm not going to be too thrilled about.  With texting, she doesn't have to a) argue with me about it or b) hang up if she doesn't like my opinions about absolutely everything.  Or, she just ignores my text and later claims she "didn't hear it".  Can't really argue that point with a person who actually doesn't hear.

We were talking on the phone this week and she was telling me about a text exchange she had with a friend of hers.  "I was texting, but I was using my fuck-you finger, because that's the easiest for me, especially when my hands hurt and my fingers are swollen."  She has rheumatoid arthritis and when she's in a flare, her thumbs are useless. 

"You mean your middle finger?" I said.

"Yeah.  That's what I said."

"No.  What you said was, 'my fuck-you finger'."

"Well, you know what I meant." she said.

Of course I knew what she meant, because she uses that finger for everything - dialing the phone, pushing her glasses up on her nose, turning pages of a magazine, pointing. 

And she doesn't use it in the way you might think, with the other fingers next to it in their natural position.  Oh no, she actually holds her other four fingers back, isolating the middle finger so there's no mistaking that it's the one prominent finger on her hand.   

Ironically, she never uses it to give someone the finger.

I suppose I should be thankful for that because I don't know how I'd explain why my seventy-year-old mother is cruising around town flipping everyone the bird.



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2012: Honing Her Skills For The Nursing Home
2011: Fire Up The Grill
2010: The Voice Of Tucson Speaks
2009: Crossing Over To The White Side
2008: Eddie Voyager Of The Seas Friday
2007: Indiscriminate Discrimination
2006: Dancing Queen
2005: Sorry, no post on this day. The blog didn’t start until May 2005!