Jumping Beans

I freaked out earlier at an irregular clicking sound coming from my nightstand. Turns out it was my new beautiful Mexican Jumping Beans, sent to me from New Mexico by Hannah. I was going to take a picture of them, but a still photo of jumping beans is just not that interesting. A short video, however, is much better. Now I understand the true need for video cell phones. Check out my jumping beans in action.

My mom was annoying me earlier tonight because my brother was in a funk and she called me to see if I thought it was ok for her to go out and what I thought she should do. He's 16 and depressed. Funks happen. I spent most of my childhood and adolecense in a funk and my parents never even noticed. So now I'm somehow the funkmaster/depression guru. This wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't supposed to be my mother's area of expertise. I don't mind being more knowledgeable about music than my mother or social graces than my father because neither of them claim to be particulalry skilled at those arts. But my mom has a masters in social work, wrote two books on motherhood, teaches family sociology classes, and has been a therapist for over 20 years. She should not come to me for advice. I should not be more observant of behavioral stuff than her, particularly when I don't even live with the subject in question.
I was thinking a lot about this sort of thing during the days I didn't have internet. It allowed and forced me to write things that wouldn't be seen, so I worked through some parent issues. The most notable realization was that I'm so hard on my mother because she was supposed to be perfect in that "nobody's perfect" sort of way, so I blame her for proving herself human. My dad somehow escaped this because he always seemed human to me. He's very hard on himself and did things that were so obviously wrong to my child mind, I never had issues expecting more of him. My mom, on the other hand, was the prodigal middle child and always tried to make everybody happy. I get very upset when she doesn't understand something because it always felt like any miscommunication clearly had to be on my end of things. Hell, pretty much any time she and I disagree it has to be because I'm wrong-after all, she's perfect. And forget about blame; there's no way we didn't both contribute to these misperceptions. I just need to get used to the fact that she won't always do or say the "right" thing. There are pleanty of things she will always do better than me. Powers of human perception just tend not ot be on that list anymore.