My little brother was in the corner doing shots of coke (he's totally not allowed to have caffeine - if you ever meet him, you'll understand) while all of this was going down.
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My little sister got Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid for her birthday from the same Uncle that gave me a Lassie coloring book for my 13th birthday (this was in 1993!). (Our mom makes us invite him - he's really too weird, but that's for some other entry.) Now that she's "a teenager" she feels much too mature for babyish gifts like this. He went on and on about how she should know the REAL story, not just the Disney version. He insisted that she look at the lovely illustrations. At this point, I guess that she must have been slightly embarrassed in front of her friends because she's really not such a brat, but it went down something like this.

*MU: But look at the illustrations, they're lovely.
LS: I've seen them, really, I'll look at them later.
MU: (somewhat huffily) Well, when I was your age, we appreciated the classics. Do you even like the story?
LS: I like the moral.
MU: (pleased) Oh yes, and what's that?
LS: Never save a man.

For some reason, my mom blames all of this on me. I wasn't even there. When I asked my little sister about it, she said, "Well, it was time for him to leave anyway, he was looking at the cabinets and doing that thing with his eye. I just knew that he was going to start alphabetizing them again. Really, thatMarygirl, how would I have explained that?"

I said, "Ah yes, grasshopper, I see."

* - Moronic Uncle

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written at 2:53 p.m. on 2003-09-13