In honour of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which begins the evening of Friday, Sept. 13 and ends the evening of Saturday, Sept. 14, and indeed in honour of atonement rituals in religions everywhere, K&K resumes its yearly atonement series, begging forgiveness for past mistakes, misdeeds, egregious errors in judgment and moments of all around douchey-ness. Once again, we’re sorry.
• Our mother-in-law can be a tad passive at times and although it doesn’t irk us tremendously, it does fill us with a misguided sense of superiority where we feel it’s our duty to engage in a series of “behaviour modification” exercises, which don’t always reflect well on us. Case in point. A few years ago we were left in the car with our mother-in-law — a lovely woman, by the way — while our significant other ran into the store to pick something up.
After a few minutes, our mother-in-law, who was sitting in the back seat of the car, says to no one in particular, “It sure gets stuffy in here.”
“Yes it does,” we replied, knowing full well she wanted us to open the window but would never come out and say it.
We then sat in silence. Two minutes later, our partner returned, realized the stalemate that was taking place, ordered us to roll the window down and later admonished us for purposely ignoring our passive passenger’s cues.
“If she just asked directly, we would have gladly rolled down the window,” we said. But apparently it just made us look more like a jerk.
Sorry, mother-in-law, for not accepting the fact that you don’t like to directly ask for things and would rather passively hint at them until we have to offer you what you wanted all along. Sorry, significant other, for treating your mother like a misbehaving pet in need of training. Sorry, self, for forcing you to sit in a stuffy car with the windows rolled up when you really wanted to breathe in cool fresh air — just so you could make a stupid point that the intended recipient probably didn’t even pick up on in the first place.
