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.

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.

Not because I actually want to go anywhere. I just miss driving, alone, at night.

When you write it out like that it sounds melodramatic, but that’s not how it feels. There’s just something about empty roads and music and a tank of gas and knowing you could just keep going. Even though deeper down, you know you won’t. Not this time.

I knew this dude once. Well, he wasn’t really a dude, per se, since he’s the same age as my mother, but whatever, I knew him.

Because it’s been a long long time since I last spoke to him (I don’t even know how he’d feel about me posting stuff about him online), and because his last name rather conveniently begins with an E, I shall refer to him here as Mr. E.

Mr. E was fabulous. Mr. E took time off work to drive me great distances, he gave me a key to his apartment when I was a homeless (though not dormless) misanthropic teenager, and even though neither one of us was the least bit religious, he would sometimes tell people I was his Goddaughter. He was just generally a really great guy. Mr. E was also, in many ways, the archetype of a successful, older gay man: attractive, witty, cultured, solvent, and in a strong, decade-spanning relationship with a much younger, incredibly hot lover. Whenever we had dinner, the table would be fully set with candles, relevant silverware, designated water glasses, and cloth napkins. The man had exquisite taste. Sometimes I really miss Mr. E.

Anyway, one time, as Mr. E and I lounged around in his perfectly appointed living room (or maybe we were driving along some New England interstate highway), he shared with me a brief anecdote from his adolescence. He was born in 1945, and this is set in elementary school or middle school for him, so it must have been right around the mid to late 1950’s.

The young Mr. E did not have an easy time in school. It was a different world, and I imagine things were even more difficult for gay teenagers than they are now, especially one as sensitive as he must have been. He was teased; he had difficulty fitting in with the other boys.

As was his wont, young Mr. E sat himself down and mused over how he might be able to rectify this situation. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that there was, indeed, a solution to his problem. This solution was Football.

All the other boys played football. (We’re talking American Football, by the way, with all the pads and the lining up in rows to beat each other to pieces, not soccer.) Football was the way to fit in. If he could just understand and master football, thought Mr. E, he would be able to understand and possibly even master his peers. This, THIS, would be the key to making sense of the world he was forced to live in.

So the young Mr. E went to the library. And checked out a book about football.

…

There are times when it feels like the things I do to try and get my shit together have about as much chance of being effective as Mr. E’s library book.