Let me list all the things that went wrong today.

What? You don’t want to hear it? You don’t want to hear about a day that started with a paper cut, featured yet another fight with the insurance company, and ended with the realization that my stereo speakers are shot and will have to be replaced? Yeah, well, I don’t blame you.

In the midst of all this I got a call from Tim, asking my opinion about something that’s none of my business. And for some reason, he wouldn’t take stuttering silence for an answer, so I fumbled my way through the most noncommittal response I could come up with. I’ve actually had some practice in that art, so I think I handled it well enough.

He’s throwing a surprise birthday party for his father (the Boss) at the Kennel next month. He plans to invite his sisters and their families, but that means he can’t invite the Boss’s girlfriend. For some reason, even though he and their mother have been divorced for two decades, these otherwise reasonably sane women can’t tolerate Julie. Tim wanted my opinion, but he didn’t specifically ask the question. What he said was, “What do you think?”

Well, he doesn’t really want to know what I think. What I think is that I don’t want to put myself in the middle of this nest of cuckoo birds. What I think is that the three daughters should get over themselves and join the human race. What I think is that it’s probably not going to be much of a party, and I should reschedule my vacation in case I get invited

What I told him was that instead of trying to keep Julie in the dark about what’s going on, he should sit down with her and explain what he’s doing and why. She’s the most reasonable person in this whole extended asylum, and she’s even offered various olive branches to the Boss’s family (and found herself lucky to come away with all ten original fingers).

It’s not as if there will be a conflict between Julie and the Boss’s ex (Tim’s mother), because the ex will not be invited. I didn’t even have to ask. She and Tim haven’t spoken in years. He refuses even to talk about her. Something happened between them that I don’t even want to know about. He won’t say, and I won’t ask her. I know most families are more or less dysfunctional, but this one takes the cake and spells it out in frosting on the bathroom mirror.

But that’s not even one of the things that made my Monday so miserable. That was a pleasant diversion, amidst the paper cuts and the insurance battles and the speaker crisis. There’s only one of those three I can handle, and the band-aid keeps falling off whenever I wash my hands. So there’s a fourth problem. Sheesh.