ALDERAAN'S GONE

I went to my mom's house this week.  The picture above is the neighborhood I grew up in.  Lots of nice trees.  Lots of tiny suburban houses and tool-loaded garages.  Lots of  pickup trucks.  A handful of the kids who grew up here graduated to temporary prison housing at one point in their lives or another.  The trees are good for hiding that too.

The inner state of a person's house is not unlike the inner state of a person's mind.  You see where they've been, where they are, and what they can't let go of. 

I can't really show you much of the interior of my mom's house, but you've seen houses like it - on Jerry Springer or Oprah's Worst House Disaster segments.  She used to collect nice things.  Now she can't get rid of anything.  The house is a disaster.  The floor is a minefield.   It's depressing.  It's a manifestation of depression.

Our own memories and her memories of us as children still loom in the air, in the photos, in the Star Wars wallpaper she could only afford for a tiny section of one wall.  (Not visible in the photo are the hundreds of tiny perforations in that wallpaper from our teenaged shuriken throwing sessions.  I hated Wookies.  Chinese throwing stars were the shit.)

Sometimes I wish I could blow up the cluttered little house like Alderaan being disintegrated by the Death Star.  If only to get my mom to pay attention to herself in the present.  To live now. 

Everything has a memory attached to it. Except for the cheeseburger wrappers and pizza boxes of course.  Her house is a museum of the past and a dream of an unrealized future.  The present state is just a complete mess though.  There's not much she'll let us do.

I haven't been the best son.  I mean I did become a doctor like she always wanted, but for related reasons, it's actually difficult for me to be "nice" much less affectionate to my own mom.  I'm nicer to everyone else's mother than I am to my own. 

Now that I have kids, I realize more concretely, that you want your children to love you the same way that they did when they were their innocent little selves.  It's okay if they don't, because you still adore them anyways (like when Sun Su is too busy on pbskids.com to hug his appah - me).  But it's just that much nicer if they do. 

So we took her to dinner.  I kept my frustrated comments to a minimum.  My brother tipped the waittress quite well to compensate for the extra headaches.

"I think it went pretty well," my brother commented about the dinner later, "Mom didn't yell this time."

Before we left, I completely surprised my mom and gave her a big hug AND I told her I loved her.  No big deal for most people I guess, but for me, such unprompted affections could elicit exclaims of "Who are you and what have you done with my son?"

Maybe she keeps all of that old memorabilia because I haven't given her any good new memories since then.  I get the feeling that her lifetime won't be so timeless anymore the way she's been going.  Professional instinct of the worst kind, let's say. 

I'll try to give her some good memories before then.

(Sun Su and Ooseung)

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WHAT'S HAPA-nin' ?

Michael Bolton gave me this awesome link to a Learning Corean site with movies and hottie-for-teacher included.

(more hapa hottie pics like this one on his site)

She's half-Corean like me (I'm sure the guy is too but who cares).  While normally I am more immune to the hapa mystique (+4 to saving throw vs. Hapa Magic), I wouldn't exactly refuse her extra credit, IYKWIM (If You Know What I Mean). 

Anyways, thanks again Michael.  You rocked in Office Space.

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FUCK THE GINGER

Terence hasn't sent me any hottie pics, but he is an interesting guy who writes interesting snippets from Singapore, plus he's a nice person (don't tell anyone).  Sometimes I like to imagine alternate titles for journals.  For his I'd pick, "Fuck The Ginger."  (From a picture on his site, not a reference to Gilligan's Island.)