My Sister Needs To Shut Her Pie Hole

First of all, my sister is nice and everything, but she’s got a lot of nerve trying to tell me how to live my life. “You shouldn’t talk about your wife in your blog because it probably hurts her feelings,” she said. So I said, “Well you should spend a little more time learning how to cook so maybe people will stop making fun of you.”

I’m serious, my sister just can’t cook. Okay, maybe she can cook, but not anything you’d want to eat. If you spent the last ten years in prison and you stopped by my sister’s house for dinner, you’d end up holding up a bank so you could go back to prison for better food.

And just try talking to her about it. You’d have a better shot trying to convince Tom Cruise that he needs to get his kids on Ritalin.

She just doesn’t get it. Just like the other day when I had to stop by her house to borrow some money. She brought out this plate of cookies and I said, “Mmmm, burnt cookies.” But she thought I was kidding, so she laughed and said she’d get me a glass of milk. Then I said, “No thanks, I’d rather have less to throw back up so no milk for me.” She didn’t laugh at that, though. It was worse.

She started digging around in my life because she just read a John Gray book about relationships. She thought I was using the cookies as an analogy for my inability to express my feelings, and that it was the root of the issues I have in my relationship with my wife. So I told her that at least my wife can cut a roll of cookies and cook them without setting off the fire alarm.

But it didn’t shut her up. It was like the go-ahead to lecture me on how to create an environment that was safe for my wife to honestly express her emotional issues. I told her that I would do that as soon as my wife stopped having an emotional issue every twenty God damn minutes.

She insisted that I was using exaggerations and humor to bury my feelings, just like I was doing with her and the burnt cookie analogy. So I finally said that she was right, that I do use analogies to communicate. So I said that talking with her was like eating burnt cookies, and that I’d like her to shut her pie hole.

Well, she finally broke and it was pretty funny. See, when she gets mad she still tries to look like she’s not mad. But those veins on her forehead start flaring up and thumping. I can’t help but giggle because even though she still forces a smile, I always expect blood to start squirting out of her ears any second. It never really happens, but it cracks me up to imagine what it would look like.

But that’s just how my sister is. You can’t talk to her about anything and it’s been like that since we were kids. I used to tell her that I’d give her a hundred dollars to go buy a sense of humor, but then I started using that line on my wife because I live with her so I’d rather she got a sense of humor instead of my sister.

It must be a woman thing because it doesn’t seem like any of them have a clue about what people are trying to say. I used to think maybe it was just me, but then what are the odds of every woman I know being so irrational? Slim to none. So now I realize that it really is just a woman thing.