The Secret Life of Fathers and Daughters Finally Revealed in All Its Evil Splendor

[My Attorney] works at home sometimes. Her MO is to sit down on our slouch, pull the piano bench in front of her, open up the latest American Idol and start working. That's about the time her blackberry vibrates off the bench and scurries across the carpet, its contents a volatile email with attached documents demanding that she solve the legal equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorum within the hour. Suddenly Randy is frozen mid "dawg" and My Attorney's hands go up like shields and the household is admonished to SHUSSSH!

Now, because we respect the sheer magnitude and complexity of what it is (whatever it is) [My Attorney] does, me and the kids generally respect her wishes, drop everything, and start disco dancing. We'll keep it up, pumping and thrusting like our life depends on it, until she screams and grabs her head and cries out in anguish "YOU PEOPLE ARE SO WEIRD!"

This morning, her Blackberry throbbed like a quarter-fed hotel bed, shot off the table, and stabbed [My Attorney] in the forehead whereupon she ripped a leg off the table and threatened the 14-year-old-95th-percentile-ISAT-tester-Anime-Superfan and me with bodily injury if we so much as breathed deep while she gnawed her arm off to get out of some bear-trap-legal-document deadline crisis.

Rah and I were eating Captain Crunch. Our eyes were unfixed and wobbling in our heads--she because she's a teen and me because I broke my coffee maker--when [My Attorney's] urgent outburst snapped us out of attention. We looked at each other and, reading each others minds, started tapping our spoons against the edges of our bowls.

It started out as just a mildly snarky jab but as we gazed into each others eyes, our inherent malice leaked out like burning tar and our light tapping morphed from synchronized cereal consumption normalcy, directly through 'let's raise our glass for a toast' wine glass clanging, all the way to a Nibelung anvil hammering cacophony of seismic proportions.

Gleefully evil.

Maybe I shouldn't be proud of how my girl-spawn so easily slides into maliciousness but I am deeply pleased that we have that silent Vulcan mind-meld and I am even more deeply pleased, my joy, in fact, is boundless, at the knowledge that this psychic connection is rooted in mutual sarcasm.

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