The Ties That Bind And Gag.

Sometimes living at home can be fun. Free cable and internet. All you can eat tomato paste and 7 grain crackers. Piles and piles of useless furniture collecting dust and reminding you of your childhood.
Sometimes living at home is less than fun. Not being allowed to play Rock Band past 11 with your friends. Waiting until Perry leaves to throw parties, even the ones that do not include hookers, coke on the glass topped table and massive amounts of beer and big, hairy bikers. Having to restrain your make out sessions to cars (if you're lucky enough to have make out sessions, not being able to find boys that think living at home is less than lame).

And then, there's the family. Sometimes having them around to keep you entertained is special and fulfilling. Sometimes it's exhausting and loud, like when my mother and sister watch American Idol and compare their opinions with Simon's. Sometimes it's just confusing.

Take Saturday for example. We have a small couch in our kitchen, and a table with chairs all around it. The table is small but it does take up space in the middle of the kitchen. Nonetheless, it provides a place for me to prep food, and a place for us to gather around for a cup of tea with friends. More importantly it provides a place for us to rest our plates on when we want to eat. However, my mother decided that the couch could fulfill all these functions just as well as the table, and she moved the round table into the dining room to take its place next to the OTHER table that already sat in the the dining room. I must confess, I helped her move it. I naively thought it would be moved back, after she finished the mopping she was about to start. And then I left to go to Virginia Beach for the weekend, so the absence of the table in the kitchen hadn't struck me until Monday night, when I came home and mistakenly thought we were moving out sooner than expected. The kitchen sat, bare except for a flowered couch, with chairs left over from the table, crowded around it.
When we had spaghetti for dinner I asked aloud, where are we going to eat it? thinking that we were going to be like a real family, my mother, sister and I, sitting down together. Again, I was mistaken. My mother sat in front of the TV, my sister on a stool by the counter in the kitchen, and I sat at the computer desk, continuing the conversation I was having online.
"I think we should move the table back." I said. I was ignored.

In the morning it was no better. My sister sat at the counter in her bathrobe, eating a bowl of cereal. My mother leaned against the counter drinking coffee. I asked where I was supposed to eat my breakfast. My mother said, "I find that you can sit on the couch and put your plate on the chair in front of you and eat."
"You know what's easier than that?" I asked, before I had had my morning coffee, "A table."