Yesterday's Judge Alex Episode

Even though it's spring vacation for our school district, my mom needed to go to work. My dad took the day off to be with my brother and me. While I complain about him a great deal, I really don't mind having my dad around for the most part, but I do think it's retarded (when my mom reads this, which she almost certainly will, she'll make me remove the word retarded because it is politically correct to use it only as a clinical term defining a specific cognitive condition; the fact that I'm aware of the lack of political correctness of my usage of the term and elect to use it anyway will rankle her all the more, but I'll leave it in just to know for certain whether or not she's reading what I write) that he thinks he has to babysit his two sixteen-year-old children. He said he stayed home to watch my brother's baseball game, but that doesn't start until late afternoon. He could easily have put in at least eight hours and would still have made it home in time for the game. This is really neither important nor germane to the rest of my post, but I'm sharing the information just so readers will understand the plight faced by in this case both me and my brother. Our parents do not want to face the fact that we are basically grown. Perhaps it's because admitting that we are grown means they are officially old. I can only speculate as to their motives for treating us like second-graders.

I try to watch Judge Alex each day with my limited TV time. My time is restricted both by the reality of my schedule and by my parents' rules. For the most part, the rule limiting my television-viewing time is unnecessary, as I don't have time to watch more than an hour on school days and two hours on non-school days. (If we're sick, the rule doesn't apply. Both my brother and I hate having to lie around in bed or on the sofa all day, so we're not prone to making false claims of illness.) My brother, who has the same rule as well as a simlarly impacted schedule, doesn't usually sit in front of the TV when Judge Alex is on, although he wanders in during one of his roughly fifteen meals each day if anything he hears sounds interesting. Today he knew he wouldn't have time to watch much TV anyway, so he actually watched the entire two episodes. My dad likes to watch so he can critique, although since he's a doctor and not an attorney, he doesn't necessarily know what he's talking about when he offers his critiques.

Often the first episode of "Judge Alex" shown each weekday is a new episode, and the second one is a repeat. Today's episodes both were repeats, but I hadn't seen either of them. The first one featured a cell phone saleman suing the owner of a cell phone store for unpaid commission. The episode was remarkable mainly in that the plaintiff was a rather quirky fellow who laughed at everything. Judge Alex even asked the man point blank, "Do you laugh at everything?"

I'm mentioning this episode only because the plaintiff brought his fiancee with him to serve as a witness. It seems that no one involved in the plaintiff's life can tolerate his fiancee, which was very understandable to me, as I developed an abhorrence of her at first sight. The woman, who was maybe in her early-to-mid twenties, was very short in stature. My brother immediately pounced on this, proclaiming that the woman looks so much like me that she could be my older twin. This bothered me greatly, as I couldn't see even a vague resemblance between the two of us. Our hair and facial features aren't remotely similar. Even if all short people really do look alike, as my brother insists, the woman and I are in entirely different categories of shortness. Without external reference to her height, I would have to estimate her to be roughly 4' 10" at the most, which is where I was more than a year ago, long before I experienced my most recent growth spurt, which has taken me almost to 5' 2". Beyond that, the woman had the "short" look, which I don't have. Because I'm long-limbed, in a picture all by myself I don't appear short because I have proportions of a taller person. My brother said that short is short; my claims of long-limbedness do nothing to alter the facts, which are that I am "height challenged."

I looked to my dad for support. He agreed with me that in his opinion I have very little resemblance to the plaintiff's fiancee, but said that numbers don't lie and I'm still much shorter than average for my age. This bothers me because my family just yesterday celebrated my most recent increase in height, and today everyone's saying that I'm short again. If my mom were here, she'd probably take my side because she is herself under 5' 4".

My dad made the comment that if I don't have additional growth, I will always be considered short. There are worse things to be than short, but I don't want to look like a troll, which is what I think the plaintiff's fiancee most closely resembles. My dad said that if I want to increase my height, it would be a good idea to take in as many extra calories and optimal nutrition for the next few years. This leads to a slighly sore subject, which is my father's infamous growth shakes. He said that without either the milkshakes or the canned nutritional supplement I used to be forced to drink, I wouldn't be even as tall as I presently am. I would really like to give up the nightly shakes, but I would like to grow another inch or two even more. I guess I'll stick with the shakes, especially since my parents will force the issue anyway.

I have a great idea. My father's birthday is in a few weeks. He always says he has everything he needs. We each usually gets him small gifts, but he likes for my brother and me to do something for him instead of giving him stuff for his birthday. I'll buy him a token gift, but his main gift from me will be that for the next year I will drink the shakes without complaining. It won't be easy, but they really might help me to grow. I'll kill two birds with one stone, which reminds me that the blue jay I posted about on Twitter is still crashing into an upstairs window several times a mnute all day long. I don't know what's wrong with the poor bird. Somebody needs to put it out of its misery.

Judge Alex's second case yesterday featured two very odd ladies. One of them allowed the other one, who was just getting out of drug rehab, to live in her home, but she devised a very rigid and equally bizarre point systerm the other one had to follow. Judge Alex thought it was even stranger than I thought it was. He said something about how even if he was feeling really demented, he couldn't come up with such a bizarre system. My father, on the other hand, thought the point system was a great idea. I know he mostly just says these things just to set my brother and me off, but he was positively infuriating when he blathered on about how even if Judge Alex wasn't demented enough to think of something so weird, he, my father, was much more demented tha Judge Alex and probably could come up with something even weirder.

My father is really much too busy to waste time on drivel, as his job mainly involves such things as trying to find better cures for various forms of cancer. The odds that he would ever even devise a system, much less try to force it on my brother and me, are practically nonexistent. To be safe, though, I'm stating that I will move out of my family's house and into the home of whatever relative will take me if he dares to attempt such a thing.