(My mom and I have come for an arranged weekend of activities at the university I’ll be attending in two months. I stay in the dorms while she stays at a nearby hotel. I have, unfortunately, let her pack for the both of us. We immigrated to the US three or four years ago, and our habits and customs regarding basic things are a bit different, though I have not yet fully realized just HOW different. Mom does all the shopping for all of us at home and buys only the most basic toiletries. I’ve never even been given a chance to go to a store by myself before, so I just make do as best I can with basic things I need. When I open the toiletries she packed for me, I discover shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste and brush, deodorant, a razor, and nothing else.)

Me: “We need to go to a drugstore to pick up some things.”

Mom: “What? What things? You have everything there.”

Me: “I need at least a bar of soap or something.”

Mom: “What on earth for? There should be soap provided at the dorm’s sink dispenser things. Did you look?”

Me: “No, not for washing hands. I mean to shower with…” *long confused pause* “You know, to wash your body while you’re in the shower?”

Mom: “What are you even talking about? What on earth does anyone need with soap in the shower? When you wash your hair with shampoo, the runoff that comes down from that just automatically cleans everything else! You don’t need soap to wash anything!”

Me: “…”

(I just had no words. Though I didn’t even know about body- wash back then, I’d at least been using bar soap regularly since around puberty. I hadn’t realized just how backwards my parents were. My mom was 44 years old at the time this happened. Yes, I got my soap in the end.)

(My dad is chronically unserious, even when he really ought not to be. He and my mother are in the intake of an ER, as he’s managed to injure himself somehow, and a nurse is doing the standard intake questions.)

Nurse: “Religion?”

Dad: “Orthodox Agnostic!”

(The nurse starts to write it down, then pauses and just looks confused.)

Mom: *exasperatedly* “None.”

Way back in the 1990s, when computers were new and floppy disks roamed the earth in great herds, my parents bought a new game for us all to play on the family PC.

We installed it, booted it up, and a happy little computer chip appeared on the screen, welcoming the player. Then, he dramatically announced the arrival of the game’s villain: his exact words were, “A Virus Has Been Detected!”

Cue my dad shutting down the game, uninstalling it, and running diagnostics on the family computer for the next several hours.

(My dad has recently gotten very religious in his old age.)

Me: “Dad, you know what? I read that Jupiter has a storm that can fit three Earths in it!”

Dad: *looking disturbed* “God is great and God is big; if you believe in Him, that’s all you ever need.”

Me: “Wait, what? Why did you start talking about God?”

Dad: “Jupiter is big and God is, too. He made the Heaven and Earth.”

Me: “Did he make Jupiter, too? What about the other planets?”

Dad: *looking really disturbed* “Yes, of course.”

Me: “Why?”

Dad: “Just go read your bible. That’s all you need to know, not outer space facts.”

(This takes place shortly after “Aladdin” is released in theaters. A friend calls and invites me to go and see it with him and his parents. My mom is out of the house, but my stepdad allows me to go. When I get back, Mom is home, and she looks a little upset.)

Mom: “So, you went off to see Aladdin with [Friend]?”

Me: “But I got permission. [Stepdad] said I could go.”

Mom: “That’s not the point. I wanted to go see it!”

Me: *confused* “Wait, what?”

Mom: “Well, I hope you enjoyed the movie, because you will be going back.”

(Sure enough, a few days later, she ended up taking me back to the theater just so she could have an excuse to see the movie herself. I certainly wasn’t complaining about having to see it again, though.)