My mom found this blog.

Ooooh, momma.

It’s my own stupid fault. I linked her to the entry about my dental adventures, largely in celebration of the fact that they are finally over – my permanent crown is now in place and I no longer look like a crackwhore. I wanted to share the surreal nature of that whole experience with her, and I didn’t think there was anything in that particular entry that was too incriminating. I had blind faith in her technophobia; I thought she’d never figure out how the site worked, that she’d never find the other entries.

And you know, I wasn’t wrong. SHE didn’t. But she apparently showed the goddamn post to someone else, and that overly helpful human linked her to the main blog page. Luckily (THANK YOU, POWERS THAT BE), she didn’t go into the archives, where the entry she must never see now lives. I don’t think she found the podcasts either. Dodged a bullet there.

I was talking on the phone with her when she revealed that she had read the five posts I made between Jan 1st and Jan 16th. She seemed particularly mystified by my obsession with ninjas and moats. “Why,” she asked me, “would you write something like that?”

Oooooooooooh, momma.

Deep down, despite all the crazy, my mom is a true intellectual. She has a deep love and respect for words, language, literature — she absolutely reveres the act of writing. I tried to explain that this place is just where I dump the detritus that builds up in my brain, that I’m goofing off, that I don’t actually think this is the path to producing great literature. I asked her to please not read this anymore, because the thought of her concern makes me uncomfortable. She said okay. And I know she’ll keep her promise, that she’ll never read anything on this site ever again, because that’s the kind of person she is.

The next day, she emailed me an essay by William Saroyan, one of her favorite authors. I know she probably hasn’t looked at it in over a decade, that she simply remembered it in this, her daughter’s time of need. She tracked down the book, sat down at her computer, and typed it out, word for word, into the body of an email and sent it to me, with no hello or goodbye or anything. Because that’s how she is. It’s a bit long but worth reading, if you have the time. Click here: “Why I Write,” by William Saroyan.

My mom, she’s a wiley one. Anyone who knows anything about me will be able to see the obvious parallels: the loss of my dad and my irrational fear of forgetting moments/things that have been said. It’s why I save every IM conversation, even the useless ones; it’s why I write down funny things friends say on scraps of paper that end up floating around my room for months on end, until they get sucked into the vortex where lone socks go to die.

And honestly, I want to write, too.

It’s just that usually, I want to write about ninjas and moats and Kiefer Sutherland.

Oooooooooooooooh, momma.

As of 2:50 a.m., January the first, year two thousand and seven, these are the things I would like to do before I die.


1) Master a deadly martial art (until able to pass, at will, as mysterious hooded ninja type figure).

2) Become a (part-time?) drummer for an eighties-style synth-oriented band, the lead singer of which must have large, feathered hair.

3) Raise a fiercely loyal, highly dangerous, ridiculously large dog, possibly named something  overtly biblical/apocalyptic.

4) Become one of those people who is effortlessly neat and tidy, but not in an assholeish manner.

5) Go back to that Hungarian restaurant I went to that time, the one with the amazing dumplings.

6) Track down Clive Owen and make him understand that no one, No One, will ever love him the way I do, never ever ever ever.

7) Own some sort of property that includes a siege-worthy moat. And a maze. Like in the Shining.  (The maze in the Shining, not the moat. There is no moat in the Shining. Fool.)

Move to Barcelona for a while and live an aggressively stylish, continental existence involving  lots of attractive casual nudity and ironic disenchantment with the world at large.

9) Come up with an honest, year-by-year soundtrack for my life, starting with that first 1989  purchase of WHAM!’s greatest hits and pushing right on through to All 4 One and Boyz II Men.

10) Live in a turret of some sort, or at least a room with charmingly irregular ceilings. And a  window seat. Like in Anne of Windy Poplars, or whichever the one was where she went away to teach and lived in that house with the trees and the pushy cleaning lady and wrote Gilbert Blythe all those letters.

11) Survive a large-scale zombie uprising, during which I prove my mettle and save an innocent  baby or a bus full of kindergarten children. Or Clive Owen. Yeah. Maybe just Clive.

About six months ago, my mom hit me with a real… whopper(?) of a question. (Whopper? Apparently I am now writing to you from the 1950’s.) I talk to my mom every day on the phone; as creepy as it may sound, she is the single most important person in my life. I forget what we were talking about on this particular day, but it started out fairly routine: inane recaps of daily activities, discussion of who had a cold and who didn’t, etc. Then the topic turned to me, my life, and my work habits.

“What,” she asked me, very very soberly, “do you think might be wrong with you?”***

It was a good question. I can’t stop thinking about it.

*** For anyone who is not familiar with my mother and/or my relationship with her, this might be a good time for a bit of a heads-up. My mom is a very unusual specimen of human. She’s charismatic and strong and exciting and scary and vulnerable, often all at once. By the standards of polite society, she can be more than a little bit crazy. People tend to feel very strongly about her, one way or the other: it’s either intense mentor/friend-crush or active dislike. She’s a professor of literature, and one time when I was eight, she spontaneously started singing at the top of her lungs as we walked down a crowded street; I slowed my steps and pretended not to know who she was. She still talks about this and uses it as an excuse to call me rude names. I call her them right back. A good time is had by all.

When I was six this paragon of motherhood persuaded me to call her by her given name instead of saying ‘mom,’ because, really, the whole ‘mom’ thing was “a bit much.” It didn’t stick, but I still remember the glorious two weeks I got to scream KYUNG-JA! as I trundled down the hallway of our building, announcing my safe return home from kindergarten. That same year, in the same run-down, low-rent apartment, she convinced me that the leaks in our bathroom were special, possibly even worthy of outright celebration, because hey, who else on God’s green earth got to use their umbrella, indoors, while they peed?

She is a remarkable woman.

(I say all this confident in the knowledge that she will never read this; she may be remarkable, but she is also a woman who lives in constant fear of clicking something wrong on her desktop and effectively ending civilization as we know it. The internet is not her friend.)

Now, this might be hard to believe for some, but the question of what, actually, might be wrong with me wasn’t designed to be hurtful. Worth noting, too, is the fact that I intuited this; it bruised my ego, yes, but my feelings weren’t hurt. We may not have a storybook mother-child dynamic, but we’ve also managed to avoid most of the bullshit baggage mothers and their grownup daughters so often seem to struggle with. We tend to say what we mean. It was a legitimate question, motivated by sincere curiosity tempered with real concern, and we followed it up with a reasonably humorous, fairly fruitful, very lengthy exploration of various possible answers.

Could it be, we pondered, That my innate laziness and inability to keep deadlines was somehow pathological? Perhaps there was some clinical way to diagnose and treat this issue. Should we maybe look into getting me a psychiatrist? I must be missing some crucial socialization chip to remain so brazen in the face of losing any and all credibility with every publication/grant-giving organization I’ve ever worked with. What, exactly, did I do all day, every day, for weeks and months on end, with all this time that I refused to devote to productive work of any kind? What, exactly, was I doing in London, since I’d already quit two universities and had no plans of going on to a third?

Dearest Mother, said I, nonplussed. Whatever can you mean? I DAILY undertake marathon viewing sessions of entire TV programs, good and mediocre. I strive tirelessly to improve what will one day, God willing, be an encyclopedic knowledge of the beautiful medium that is the adapted BBC miniseries. And you know what, Mother O’ Mine? Sometimes, just to spice things up, I forget to pay my rent and spend three straight days creating a podcast about angry mice that nobody understands. Once a month, in between getting drunk and stoned, I’ll even grudgingly submit to the inevitable and wash a truly epic pile of socks and underwear. What? What’s that, you say? Can you possibly be insinuating that you wanted more for your only child, that you expected more from the proverbial apple of your eye? Come, come. Turn off the oven. You’re not pulling a Plath on my watch. If you just look below the surface, you’ll see that these are all useful, marketable skills, skills that will allow me to support you once you retire, three short years from now. No, a little deeper than that. Deeper. Well, it’s not my fault if you can’t see it. Can’t blame me for that.

…

Yeah. No. That last paragraph? Didn’t happen. But maybe it should have. Maybe in the spirit of complete honesty, something the two of us have always prized, I should let her in on the full extent of the portents of doom that currently riddle my existence. She deserves to know.

Then again, I could just write about it and post it on the internet, a belated, passive confession to everyone in my life who isn’t her, my way of saying sorry, Sorry mom, really, I am. I know I was supposed to have a PhD by age 20, I know you hoped I would paint or write or oh, I dunno, do something. I know you worry that I haven’t found anything to be passionate about, anything to really devote myself to; I know that’s what you want for me more than anything, even if my ‘passion’ turns out to be (as you so colorfully put it) running a hot dog stand. I know a lot of things couldn’t be more wrong. But I promise I love you, and even if I’m not quite sure how yet, I promise I’ll make everything right, and sometime soon we’ll get to laugh laughs without even a trace of irony.

I miss you.

Christmas has somehow come and gone already — a flurry of last-minute gravy cooking, wine drinking, ribbon untying, and Twin Peaks marathoning.

We’ve only got four days until The New Year is upon us.

Remember how, when you were little, the three short months of summer vacation would just go on forever? Friendships could be made, solidified, and dissipated. Romances (such as they were, at age could be carried out in full, from that thrilling initial whack on the arm to the gradual, mutual loss of interest. You could laugh, fight, cry, make up, and ride your bike across town and back all in the course of an afternoon — and mean every bit of it.

The months go by so ridiculously fast these days; I know I’m not saying anything new here, but sweet CHRIST, I canNOT beLIEVE the year is over.

…

Alright. Even for me, that is slightly too maudlin a note to close on. So, in an off-topic attempt to inject some levity into this circus, I have copied and pasted my ’06 Holiday Epiphany below:

manicmaya: You know what I think?
manicmaya: I think
manicmaya: Orlando Bloom looks like a rat
manicmaya: and everyone just needs to accept it.
manicmaya: The man is not attractive, NOR can he act.
todytheshroom: He definitely peaked when he jumped on that horse
all Crazy Elf Style in the second Lord of the Rings.
todytheshroom: It’s all been downhill from there.

So, continuing on from the first installment — I’m moving to America.

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to relocate to Austin, Texas.
So far, four out of every five people I’ve told has responded with a knee-jerk: “Texas?? WHY?”
The fifth: “Austin?? COOOOL.”

…which proves… nothing, really. I mean, other than the sad fact that only twenty percent of my friends are aware of how amazing Austin is. If you happen to be part of that other eighty, please, feel free to verify and fact check. Eventually you will have to accept that when it comes to general lifestyle, live music, film festivals, good schools, interesting people, ‘vibe,’ and (relative) affordability . . . Austin’s got it all.

So sometime this coming spring (March? April? May?), I’m going to pack up my mountain range of possessions, ship it surface-mail to my uncles or aunt, and hop on a plane to someplace American-y. In this place, I will get a new driver’s license (old one’s expired), buy a sturdy-ass used car, and wander down to Austin to find an apartment, dropping in on unsuspecting friends along the way. Once I do find an apartment, if there ends up being some lag time involved before I can move in, I’ll do some more driving and seeing of people. The goal is to eventually stop in and see all y’alls in and around Boston/NewYork/LA/SF/Seattle/Chicago.

Then I’ll settle in to my new place, go into debt buying overpriced furniture and kitchen utensils I don’t even know how to use (happens Every. Time. I. Move.), and figure out my life. Possibly transfer my old Wesleyan credits to UT Austin and finally get that impossibly elusive… B.A. (And thereby stop bringing shame down onto my elders.)

I’d never even visited Austin until last summer, but I am officially happy with this plan; it’s pretty solid, financially and logistically (minus the whole furniture thing). Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of trying to be on my own someplace – actually on my own, with no one around to lean on.

It will either be deeply liberating and wonderful, or trigger an all-systems meltdown of truly epic proportions. Either way, something will happen.

What more can you ask, really?

———–

UPDATE: Yeeeeah, no. Portland, Oregon. I am now moving to Portland, Oregon. Long story.

I arrived in London last September. I have never, to my knowledge, been more bright-eyed or bushy-tailed. Not when I was seventeen and transferring to my dream high school, not when I first went to college, not even when I boarded planes to exotic places like Egypt or Reno, Nevada.

London was my fresh start, my second chance to do this whole university thing right, to stay on track, to go the full mile, the whole shebang, etc. etc. I’d lost weight, I was feeling good, I was “ready” to really study, and my best friend just happened to be with me, getting her graduate degree: the stage was set for my long overdue metamorphosis into SuperMaya, the Platonic Ideal of Me that has lived in my head since before I hit puberty. It was LONDON, for fuck’s sake. How could it NOT be perfect?

Nothing — and I really mean NOTHING — went the way I planned. I dropped out of my course in the first semester, disappointed in the lectures, the people, the professors, and myself for not being willing to stick it all out regardless. I made some friends and moved to Camden. I decided Art School was the answer. Four months later, I accepted that it wasn’t. Since then, I have done nothing but cultivate my prodigious talent at doing very, VERY little, other than make time go by and speedily gain back the weight I worked so hard to lose.

Still, a year and a half later, I think I can say that I don’t regret coming here. Like the countless multitudes before me, I’ve fallen in love with this city. London truly is remarkable. I’ve met some great people and I’ve come to really care about them. We have dinner parties and spend whole nights just talking. Life is good here. A part of me, the part that inexplicably thinks it has millions in the bank, wants to live here forever and just figure my shit out as I go along.

Unfortunately, the rest of me very pointedly does not have millions in the bank. It barely has hundreds. This part needs to move on, to relocate someplace where a pack of cigarettes doesn’t cost ten dollars. (Oh yes. You heard me. TEN.) Someplace where I can continue on with this insufferably tedious journey of ‘self-discovery’ without squandering my (and my mother’s) life savings. A magical land where drunkenly logging into eBay at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and placing outrageously high bids on every Bruce Lee movie ever made (“For SHAME! I can’t BELIEVE I’ve never seen Enter the Dragon. How can I even LOOK myself in the EYE!?”) won’t necessarily put me in the poorhouse. A place otherwise known as America.

After six years of doing everything in my power to not return to the States, next spring/summer I will be doing exactly that.

For as long as I can remember now, my first instinct has been to take refuge in the role of the jaded, disillusioned, pseudo-intellectual alterna-American, the one who makes cracks about what “Americans” are like, so crass, so uptight, so conservative and backwards. Always the fat girl who casually brings up her weight so everyone can feel comfortable, I’ve also become the American who mentions Bush so everyone knows I’m on the right page, that I’m not really that American. (Not my finest hour, perhaps, but true nonetheless.)

Despite all this — and believe me, no one is more surprised than I am — I’m actually really excited about moving back. I guess I never really bought into my own bullshit, not fundamentally. I’m looking forward to big open spaces, to long stretches of empty highway, to must-see programming, to old friends, to new people who prove that being American doesn’t necessarily mean fulfilling a stereotype, to seeing my grandma, to maybe getting a dog, to putting down some real roots for the first time since October 1998, to getting a part time job without needing a visa, to really giving a go at writing. Hell, I’m even looking forward to overly friendly American cashiers.

I could go on to detail where, exactly, in America I will most likely end up, but I’ve been rambling for a while now and it is somehow 7 in the morning already. I feel the need to watch an episode of Arrested Development (I’ve already seen every one at least fifteen times, but the urge never goes away) and then possibly get some sleep. I apologize for the abruptness of this closing. Part II of ch-ch-ch-chaaaaanges will be posted tomorrow. Or the next day.