After my friend Zach finished his internship this summer, he was unemployed for six weeks. During those six weeks, he did a lot of activities, most notably one of which was finding an amazing job in NYC, but on more than one occasion, it was texting me that he was eating both pizza and pasta for breakfast. In addition to eating meals with inappropriate amounts of carbs, Zach also spent an inordinate amount of time posting Buzzfeed articles on my Facebook wall. He posted articles on my wall so frequently with such relentless dedication and about topics that ranged from mild to disturbingly inappropriate that it caused my mother to think we were in love, which is hilarious because Zach is actually in love with her.
Zach met my mom at my college graduation party and it was love at first sight. Ever since he met her, he has referred to the song "Stacey's Mom" far too often than is comfortable to define our friendship. On our last night living in Muncie, the two of us sat outside The Chug at 2:30 in the morning, drinking beers and taking selfies to text to my mother. She was not pleased. Also, this backstory has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post.
Anyway, one such article that Zach posted on my wall was called “22 People Who Are Having A Worse Monday Than You,” a compilation of photos of, well, people having a worse Monday than you were. I couldn’t read past the first item before I burst out laughing in my quiet office at work.
“I did that,” I text him. “I broke the handle off someone’s car door once.”
I have accidentally done this to someone's car (and, he still bought me pizza afterward).
Zach and I have the unique experience of dating people who have also dated each other. Proving that the world is terrifyingly small, my ex-boyfriend got dumped by his ex-girlfriend in Zach’s basement in high school. (That girl, coincidentally, is also Zach’s ex-girlriend). Because of this, he knows whose door handle I demolished and, after I’d told him that the guy didn’t get mad at me when it happened because “he thought it was cute,” Zach used his ever-gentle way of words to describe my behavior:
“That’s not f---ing cute,” he text me. “Cute is being locked in the car when he’s dropping you off. You’re just awkward."
He’s right. Last week, I wrote an article about my Jamba Juice incident, a true, short story that illustrates how uncomfortable I can make other people feel. This story is not an isolated incident — the awkwardness epidemic really does follow around our entire family.
On my brother Jonny's first day of middle school, he came home with a black eye. All the Prandato’s were horrified. Thinking that he’d been beat up on his first day of school, he could barely get a word in as we were all peppering him with questions about who did it and how to get them expelled immediately. After a solid fifteen minutes of this, he quietly announced that he had not been beat up.
He’d actually just been walking and ran face-first into a pole.
Our family’s awkwardness is something that I have grown to love — although, it definitely took awhile. I remember when things would happen to our family and I’d recount them for people as common occurrences, I’d get strange looks because these were things that did not happen to normal people, like when I told the story about us staying at a swanky hotel and Dana getting stuck in the revolving door. I used to just think we were weirdly unlucky, but as it would turn out, all those experiences have given the five of us Prandato’s a pretty cool bond.
In fact, we’re not unlucky at all — we’re actually the luckiest.
One thing that can be said about the Prandato family is that we’re all close. I didn’t realize that other families weren’t as close as ours until last summer, when my friend Annie lived with us for three weeks.
“I love your family,” she told me one night as we were all about to sit down for dinner. “You’re all, like, something you’d see in a movie about family values.”
Which, I suppose, is true. Whenever my dad gets home from work, no matter where we are in the house, someone will yell, “Dad’s home!,” then all of us run down the stairs or get off the couch to give him a hug before we all sit down to a family meal every night. I literally existed for 21 years before I realized that the “Dad’s home!” phenomenon was not something that occurs in every household.
I was recounting this story on Halloween when I was at my brother’s apartment. Jonny lives in Allston and I sleep at his apartment all the time. It doesn’t even have anything to do with his ridiculously close proximity to Urban Outfitters — even if the store wasn’t a two minute walk away, I’d still enjoy staying with him because I genuinely love spending time with my brothers. The night I was telling this story, there were eight of us sitting on two opposing couches, eating the meal that Jonny and his roommate, Graysen, had made for all of us. Jonny and I hadn’t seen each other in a few weeks and we were having a side conversation, catching up on everything that had happened and, unsurprisingly, quoting Kanye West lyrics, when I noticed his friend from across the room, staring at us.
“You guys actually like each other,” he said, surprised. “Like, you get along really, really well.”
And, we do. I really don’t think I’ve had an argument with either of my brother’s since I was probably in seventh grade and feeling a lot of preteen angst. Jonny and Dana are my two favorite people in the whole world and I love that not only are we so close, but that other people can tell how much we all really do care about each other.
The way I see it, my brothers and I all for sure possess three qualities — a supreme knack of getting in and out of awkward situations, an inexplicit and unexplainable appreciation for Kanye West’s music and, most importantly, the genuine excitement of running down the stairs because “Dad’s home!,” knowing that means we’re about to have family dinner and that, solely because of this, we are incredibly lucky.