In which I win at life.

[dira]

It was... way more pleasant than I expected. We talked about the usual things--family, how badly she needs to get a job.

I think I managed to convince her that my youngest brother, shaws_ghoti, is not going to die in Spain, no matter what he writes in his LJ posts. Yesterday, after his first long post, which I assured her she didn't need to read because it just involved the stewardesses being robots and the buses running over hordes of children, she said, "Are you sure this isn't some fic chapter for a novel he's writing?"

I said, "Uh, you could think of it that way."

Today she was worrying that he'd never, ever remember to eat or take aspirin. Ghoti, take aspirin when your head hurts, okay? Or I'll never hear the end of it.

Then we got to talking about the job she quit a few months back, and about her working life in general. She reminisced about how when she started working, she was determined that nothing would change from when she'd been at home all day, and...

"And you made yourself crazy," I said, quite neutrally.

"I made myself crazy," she agreed. I managed not to point out that this was an understatement of magnificent proportions, go team me.

We talked about this and that. I told her about how my little brother who bought all his Christmas gifts this year on Ebay managed to get me something totally ridiculously useless, and of course that reminded me of a story about estrella30 and brooklinegirl, so I told my mom the story, only I used their real names because I have this ongoing campaign to convince my mother that all the people I know on the internet from writing gay porn are real, (relatively) normal people. Who buy tiny commemorative plates on Ebay. Ahem.

That went pretty well (when I told her brooklinegirl's former roommates are getting married today, she looked more puzzled than anything else, and I quite breezily pointed out that as they live in Massachusetts, they can do that), and we moved on to other topics of conversation, like, iuliamentis, who is, at the moment, doing a lot of paper-writing that she brought entirely upon herself, because she's such a freaking overachiever.

"Well," I remarked, in explaining this to my mom, "Writing is Iulia's best thing at school, so I'm sure it'll go fine."

My mom looked at me, almost suspiciously, as though I might be making this up. "You're good at writing." (For those coming late to the game: I told my mother nearly two years ago that I write slash. I told my dad last November. Everyone--including me--mostly likes to pretend they don't know.)

"Well, yeah," I said, "But Iulia's good at it differently. We--" and I made a little puzzle-piece-fitting gesture. "We go together. She's good at the technical stuff, and I do the creative stuff. Everything I write, she edits."

My mom nodded. "Is that like, I write, you edit?"

No, mom, because I understand paragraph structure. But I didn't say that! I said, "Well, kind of. She's good at structural stuff, and she wrangles my commas. I go a little nuts with commas. She edits--actually it's called beta-reading. You know, like beta testing?" In retrospect, I doubt my mother has the slightest idea what beta-testing is, but she went with it.

"So," she said, again like she thought I might be making this up, "Is there... demand for that?" Which was almost exactly what she said when I told her I was writing gay porn about characters from defunct TV shows. Like I might have invented this hobby, just to freak her out.

"Oh, yeah!" I said. "Yeah, beta readers are very much respected and valued. I try to keep Iulia all to myself, although some friends--" who write things that wouldn't horrify you, I meant, but I thought it would be too difficult to explain, so I didn't go into it, "also have Iulia edit for them. She's really, really good at it."

...So, somehow we eventually managed to get off that topic, and I started telling my mother about how fashion has come around and knitting and crocheting are once again trendy (I used qe2 as an example, only once again used her actual name, because, yes. I like my mother to think my friends are human-type people instead of voices in the computer box.) and we chatted about this and that and so on. As we were getting up to leave, my mother offered to take me to the fabric store to look at knitting supplies, so I could take it up again. "Nah," I said, casually, "I've got a lot of writing to do. I promised qe2 a story for her birthday. Which was two weeks ago."

"Ahh," my mother said, as though birthdayfic--and the tardiness thereof--were old hat, or as if she were trying not to hear what I'd just said, and headed over to the register to pay the bill. We wandered out to the parking lot and stood a while, talking about my next-older brother and his girlfriend, and my father's various schemes to make my life easier by a) giving my furniture away, or b) trading my car for his car.



So finally, my mom got into her car, saying she'd better get going. I mumbled that, yeah, I'd better get, too, and she said, "Yes. Go write."

I managed not to swallow my tongue, nor to ask her to put that in writing. Thus, I win at life.