Relationship censorship

There's been a mini oil rush upstairs for the last three days. I feel a bit like Joe Pesci from My Cousin Vinny.

"Do they start drilling for oil upstairs every day at 9 in the morning?"
"Nah!"
"Thank God! I was starting to get worri..."
"Usually they start at a quarter past 7."
"Ah...I see. Oh well, I never much liked sanity anyway."

As if a jackhammer to the ears is not enough, YY's mom coming to town and she's booked the drill-YY-about-her-relationship tour. And to finance the stay, she's getting a job here. At YY's hostel. Everything would be fine, but YY insists on taking out her earplugs when talking to her mom--just like that idiot Odysseus---and I've misplaced my ship's mast and ropes so I'm at a minor disadvantage. Here's the latest forecast, based on the many aftercasts of the past:

"Are you and Mark still together?"
"Yes..."
"Are you going to be together forever?"
"He promised me at least till Saturday."
"This Saturday? Or the Saturday before the heat death of the universe?"
"I'll double-check with him, but I'm pretty sure it's the first."
"I see. Well, daughter, riddle me this! What's the point of staying together till Saturday if you might break up on Saturday?"

Now that I think about it, what is the point of expiration dates? I changed the sticker on the jar of peanut butter just when it was about to expire for the third year in a row and I've been eating it with just minor post-consumption hallucinations. Let's just rip the expiration date stickers off of everything and nothing will ever expire again!

I've ruminated on subject for at least three seconds and I've come to the following conclusion: the problem is that YY's mom is from the past, a place way darker and scarier than the future, and even crazier than the now. Do you ever see people suffering in movies where they travel to the future? Never (sometimes). They're always walking around with stars in their eyes and becoming celebrities by reinventing sliced bread. Does anyone ever die now? Never. It's always "wait...did he just die? Damn! I missed it!" But anytime you see anyone time-machining it to the past, they get abducted by the government as food for their crazy scientists (you won't like them when they're hungry!), dragged into holy wars, and generally cruelly and unusually mistreated. Real life is the same way except less romantic. Your parents are the time machine and they come equipped with only one button: Back. Unfortunately, the last time I explained this theory to YY's mom she just nodded her head, an ancient body gesture that is the rough equivalent of the even more prehistoric one of twirling a finger near your temple (or so future me tells me).

Currently YY's mom is in the half-dark about us. That means she can see our silhouttes in the hazy room of her suspicions but she can't tell if we're making out or if one of us is getting CPR ("He's probably just giving her CPR. No wait, now she's giving him CPR...and now he's giving it to her again...I need to read up on the latest procedures..."). Actually, she probably knows everything. She's likely questioned all of YY's friends and relatives, read the latest blogs on the subject and watched the latest recordings from the nano-cam she installed in our ceiling fan. She's feeling very dizzy right now, and our ceiling fan is just a painting of a ceiling fan. She knows everything...but since YY hasn't told her anything explicitly, she probably thinks that what she knows is merely what she thinks she knows. If she finds out that what she knows is exactly that--what she knows, I may soon find myself in the censored area of foreign relations, along with this blog.