I wish I was like you, easily amused

My grandparents lived with my family for a period of time while my mom was sick and for a few years after.  They used to keep the TV on at night.  I’m pretty sure half the time they weren’t even watching, since my grandmother used to read the Chinese tabloids and my grandfather would continually play solitaire while sipping on Remy Martin or Johnnie Walker.

For whatever reason, my grandfather had decks and decks of cards from Northwest Airlines.  He lived with my older cousins for years before that, and he had those decks even then.  If you open the drawers in my parents’ guest room (their old room) there’s probably you’ll probably still find an unopened deck of Northwest Airlines cards.  I’m not sure how he got them, but every card game I played when I was younger was played with a deck of Northwest Airlines cards.  He was an accountant into his 70s, so maybe one of his company’s clients was Northwest.  Who knows.  Usually I would just sit and watch him play.  Every once in a while I’d reach onto his nightstand and grab a deck.  He always had more than one deck on the nightstand.  I got so excited to deal out the cards so the solitaire game would be all set up.  I’d play for about 10 minutes and get stuck.  My grandfather would glance over at my game, hint at a move I was missing and go back to his game.  In the time it took me to finish one game, he probably finished three.  But I digress.

Most of the time, I would crawl into their bed just so I could watch TV.  I didn’t really even go in to watch TV.  A lot of the time, they were watching the Chinese news, which I understood almost none of, since it was all in Mandarin.  It was more along the lines of, if my grandparents would let me watch TV, there’s nothing my parents would do about it.  Really, I just went into their room because I liked sitting in between my grandparents.  I think my parents let me be, because they liked that I liked to spend time with my grandparents and it allowed them to worry about one less kid while they were trying to get my younger brother and sister to bed.

I used to have a habit of sitting in front of the TV mouth agape (that’s a funny word).  My grandfather used to always tell me to close my mouth, telling me that that was something only the lower class did.  I don’t do it anymore, so it must have worked.

Which brings me to what I originally meant to write about (tangents are great).  Howard Dean clearly didn’t sit next to his grandfather while watching TV.  If you stumble upon him on one of the cable news shows, watch for about a minute and you’ll see what I’m talking about.  If they go to a split screen and the other talking head is, well, talking, Dean can’t help but to leave his mouth open.  It isn’t exactly gaping wide, but it’s open, and it irritates me.  Am I the only one who notices this?  And, after years and years on TV, shouldn’t one of his staff have mentioned this to him and have it fixed.  It looks like he’s getting rid to suck on a pe, errr, popsicle.  He ran for President.  Was his image consultant a complete mook?  “Keep your mouth closed when you’re not speaking.”  That has got to be part of public/media relations 101, right?