Parents 4.0

Wednesday started out a little rough. My date for the night sent me a Skype message to let me know she was flaking out on me and I was still to much of a pussy to ask out my roommate Laura.

Somehow over three months of living with Laura I have fallen in love with her. There are a few million amazing things about her and it has also became my new goal in life to gain as many national citizenships as possible through marriage. I feel the exchange of a United States and Colombia legal citizenship would greatly benefit both our lives.

Back to Wednesday, which was an odd day in that it actually had a plan attached with the day. I had a lunch set up with Wayne and Susan, my newest set of parents.

I met Wayne and Susan a month ago at a South American Explorers Club soiree. The South American Explorers Club is a club ran by ex-Pats who decided that living in the Bay Area or Boulder, Colorado just wasn't hippie enough for them. Once a month they have a wine and sangria soiree to try to get new members.

After my friend Dan and I were five glasses of wine deep, we decided maybe we should branch out and start talking to other people and that is how I met Wayne and Susan.

We exchanged contact information, agreed to get together later on and all I remember was they said something about buying me a beer.

Although I feared hanging out with two 50-year-olds would be awkward, it ended up being a great time and it almost felt like I was hanging out with a much more liberal version of my own parents. We met again the day after I graduated and they ended up buying me a nice lunch as a graduation gift.

A couple more weeks passed and I got an e-mail from them proposing a free lunch for some basic Spanish lessons.

I met them Wednesday afternoon and we ended up hanging out all day. They bought me a great lunch, complete with beer and dessert, and then I invited them over to my place so they could try mate for their first time. Afterward I showed off Palermo Hollywood and ended up hanging out at their place for a few hours.

We discussed how fucked up the world is and they got behind my plan to move to Canada, mainly to take advantage of their socialized health care. I then realized that my biggest problem would be obtaining citizenship and the legal right to work.

Then it just popped in my head. My friend Spencer is a Canadian citizen. I could quickly throw together a sham gay marriage and be in Toronto in no time. Wayne and Susan thought this was genius.

Five minutes later I realized I could even marry one of Spencer's sisters and it would have the same effect and be less gay. Or I could marry Spencer's 900-year-old grandma and I could be a Canadian citizen with a very funny story to tell.

"She's been married like five times, she probably wouldn't even notice," Spencer said after I proposed to him and/or his sisters via Skype.

Aside from teaching me a ton on life there is a lot of other cool shit about Wayne and Susan. Wayne has the great story of having some 1 in a billion eye disease that may or may not make him blind in a few years, hence their exploration of the world while he can still see it (I'm not sure that actually qualifies as "cool shit.") Plus he has taught me a ton on global economics.

I hate to say this is my favorite thing about Susan, but she actually knows who Karrine "Superhead" Steffans is and she's read "Confessions of a Video Vixen."

I naturally bring up Superhead any time Bill Maher's name comes into conversation, because their (now expired) relationship still baffles me to this day and Superhead went to my high school.

They also both attended last year's Burning Man Festival.

Wayne and Susan are the newest set on my list of parents, which includes my bio-parents, step parents, Gail and Jay Rochlin (a UA journalism professor who let me house-sit/ live with his wife and him in the summer of 2007), and now Wayne and Susan.

Despite the fact that I often engage in activities that I don't think any eight of my parents would be proud of, I like to think that having four sets of parents will help me stay on some of what of a right track, even if the track weaves through remote regions of Argentina.