My family is driving me absolutely nuts! My parents are psycho. My mom insisted that I drive today, and because I hate the Villager, she told me to drive the Mercedes. Now, this is the first time I've ever driven the Mercedes. It's my mom's baby, and she usually insists that she drive. I have no idea why she wanted me to drive it, when I could have driven my sister's car, which I absolutely love. Anyway, we all piled in the Mercedes and I drove us all to Snider Plaza, a shopping centre with lots of groovy restaurants. The first thing that I noticed was that the accelerator was the offspring of Satan. Usually, when you're in "drive" and you're not pushing on either of the pedals, the car will slowly inch forward at about 5 miles an hour. Well, the Mercedes just stopped. It wouldn't even *think* of coasting. Naturally, backing down our driveway (which is almost impossible normally) was made even more futile, because I heavily depend on a car's coastability. In addition to the lack of coasting, the accelerator was supersensitive, so that if you as much as dropped a feather on it you would go flying down the road at 90 miles an hour. My sister would yell at me because some of the times when I accelerated from a stop, there would be a slight jump. I think I handled the car very well, considering.

Well, that's not half the whole story. All the restaurants in Snider plaza were closed, so we decided to head over to see what was open on Inwood, a street with a bunch of great restaurants fairly close together. Of course, my parents couldn't decide on which route to take to get to Inwood. I'd approach an intersection and my mom would be insisting that I go one direction and my dad would shout at me to go another direction. Some times, they would just start explaining what I was supposed to do afterwards without telling me which way I needed to turn in the first place. I eventually snapped and told my dad to tell me which way to go, then explain later. Driving with one parent is always fine, but driving with both agitates me horribly. Add my sister to the mix and I'm ready to kill something. I can't explain it. I just feel as though I'm going to go postal whenever my family is around. Anyway, tensions are running high by the time we get to Inwood. We settle on Kathleen's Art Cafe, which used to be my favourite restaurant before they had to go switch chefs. Of course, the art is always nifty, so it's a fun place to go. There's a Roy Lichenstein follower called BRACE who does all these groovy Pop Art pieces and silkscreens. I was especially pleased to see a silkscreen poster thing advertising "HELP", one of the Beatles movies. I was amused. I made a mental note to watch all the Beatles movies again, since I hadn't seen them since I was in 2nd grade. Lots of humorous anecdotes regarding this topic, but that's for another time.

Anyway, I was immediately glad that I'd brought my sketchbook, because my sister immediately took out a huge stack of pictures from her trip to Italy and began the slow process of explaining the backstory behind every last one of them. My parents automatically tuned me out, which was fine by me, because I wanted to get some drawing done. The waiter (who looks amusingly like Mark from Rent) showed up and took our drink orders while we looked at the menu. My sister, who claimed that she wasn't hungry, asked me if we could share my pizza, and I grudgingly allowed it. Usually, whenever I get pizza at Kathleen's, I take home the leftovers and eat them for breakfast the next morning. It certainly beats Raisin Bran 365 days a year. Naturally, when my pizza arrived, they put on black olives instead of kalamata olives, which zaps 99% of the yummy flavor of the pizza. It took ages to finally wave down a waiter to get us some olives.

When dinner was over, we got in the car (with me in the driver's seat, naturally) and prepared to go home. Of course, we neglected to take into account the mobs of people swarming to watch the 4th of July fireworks over the Dallas Country Club. Every residential street we went down was choked to the gills with cars, parked in an unbroken line along both sides of the street. I spent what seemed like ages at a crawl down the streets, my sister griping the whole time about how she wanted to meet with some of her friends and that now she was going to be late. Evidently she didn't realize that I was going as fast as I could, considering the situation. More than once (I think the count was seven), people decided to open their doors just at the precise second so that I would have to slam on the brakes and miss hitting them by mere meters. Of course, every time I did this, my dad would yell at me. I really don't understand my dad. Does he *want* me to hit the pedestrians and rip their doors off? Does he want me to turn to avoid hitting them and crash into the oncoming traffic? Aaarg! Then there was the whole thing about my family never being able to decide which direction to go, turning me into a crazed lunatic.

We FINALLY got home and pulled into the garage. My mom started yelling for me to stop, and I complied, about a foot and a half earlier than I usually park. She thought that I was going to hit the bikes, which were in front of the car, but I knew that I still had a bit to go before I actually got close to hitting them. Of course, eager to get the heck out of there, I stopped where my mom told me to, turned off the car, and got out. Somehow, my dad lost my pencil on the way (don't ask me how, because I don't know. it was right next to my sketchpad), which really irritated me, because it was one of the groovy mechanical pencils that I love, and it was one of two that I had left. I really wasn't in the mood to wait in line at my school's bookstore to get more of them. I searched the car, gave up, and pressed the button to close the garage. A few seconds later, my dad started yelling again. I turned around in horror to see the garage door squealing slightly, forcing against the trunk of my mom's beloved Mercedes. Fortunately, there's a sensor on the door that reverses the action if it touches anything, so the car was absolutely fine. Not as much as a scratch. Of course, my dad's shouting drew my mom, who was furious. I was so angry from the car ride and in shock from the garage door that it didn't even occur to me to apologize. Besides, it was my mother's fault. If she hadn't insisted I park so far back, the car never would have been in any danger. I stormed past the two of them and into my room. I spent about 5 minutes just staring at my computer screen, silently fuming. Then my dad came in to give one of his Dad Apologies, which consisted on complimenting me on not killing two particularly dimwitted pedestrians. I turned on ICQ and talked with Tanja, which cheered me up significantly, and I listened to Save Ferris (after searching madly for it for about 10 minutes). Bah. I still feel annoyed. If you read all this, you get a cookie.