Chapter LXXVIII: Mother Dearest

Image of the Day: My candle from the dollar store

I once surreptitiously watched my mom type in the password to her email account. She had told me to close my eyes, but I only pretended to (this is easy when you're Asian).

J-E-R-R-Y, she clicked laboriously, and I wondered what strange word she was making, until... Hey, that's my name! I remember feeling warm and fuzzy at the time, that Mom used my name as her password, rather than either of my siblings'.

That was several years ago. We don't really like each other anymore (though, supposedly, we still love each other).

My email address is still on her contact list though. At least once a week, she forwards me--and 500 other people--dumb "inspirational" emails. You know the kind I mean. The ones that get passed around so many times that the body is completely unintelligible from all the wierd indenting. Just looking at the mess makes me feel dirty inside, like I'm going to get Internet herpes from touching something that's passed through so many inboxes.

It's been months since I read any of these emails so I only vaguely remember what they say. One of them had a bunch of pictures of teddy bears and was about "true friends" or some schlock. And another one had a 5 megabyte powerpoint file entitled "Is Your Life a Carrot, Egg, or Coffee Bean?"

God damn, it was stupid. When you a boil a carrot, it becomes squishy and weak, so you don't want to be like the carrot. When you boil an egg, it becomes hard and mean, so you don't be like the egg. But when you boil the coffee bean, it gives off a pleasant aroma and becomes even better than before, so you want to be like the coffee bean. The powerpoint file contained some animation to illustrate this trenchant commentary.

Also, most of the emails use the 'Traditional Chinese' character set, which I don't have installed...and wouldn't be able to read even if I did. Just another travail of being trapped halfway between two cultural identities.

So basically, I delete all my mom's emails without opening them. Hotmail being the way it is, I'm unwittingly forced to read the subject lines. The latest was "³oºØ¤ñ³ë ~~ ¤Ó¬r¤F½}!" whatever that means. I thought of Jodie Foster in Contact: "Hidden within the message itself, is the key to deciphering it. We now know the basic equations for true and false..."

She had it easy; aliens from Vega make more sense than my mom.