life at home

Scene: my mom is picking me up from the restaurant.  I get in her car and say hello and ask her about her day.  Silence....the car is struggling to get through the inches of snow accumulated in the plaza.  We drive down towards our street and make inane chatter until she brings up whatever is bothering her today: "Do you have my People magazine?".  I thought I had put it back upstairs like I usually do - but I may have forgotten, I tell her this.  (it was the Inauguration issue)  She bristles and lets me know that she checked my room but didn't find it because my room is a mess.  (this....again!)  Funnily enough as soon as I went down to my room I saw it peeking out from under a textbook.  Back to the scene at hand.  I try to make light of it by letting her know that I usually replace it before she gets home.  She says "I don't care what you do with it after I've read it but I buy it so I can read it when I get home".  My reaction is to tell her again, that I'm sorry and it must have slipped my mind this one time.  She then starts talking about how I should put things back in the places in which they belong.  I tell her that I did - just not this one time - with the magazine, and I mention that we had this conversation already so I don't understand why she keeps re-iterating.  She's pissed about the state of my room.  She probably thinks that I do this on purpose.  I come upstairs and give her the magazine (we're home by now) and tell her: "You assume that I don't  care and that I just leave my room this way because I'm a slob, but what you don't know is that I had work last night until 10pm and didn't get home until 11 (long commute), I had maybe 80 pages of reading to do for my tutorial this morning and that took precedent over cleaning my room, so I stayed up late and finished it, went to bed and got as much sleep as I could, and went to school, it's not like I do this on purpose to piss you off."  To which she replied "just go to your room, I don't want to do this, just so you can be the smart one and we're all stupid."  

Never in my life have I been more out of place and more misunderstood than in my supposed home.  I'm not trying to be the smartest - I'm trying to explain the internal logic that accounts for my actions.