This is what I saw when I woke up today and found myself alone in the house, my mother nowhere to be found. A lit candle next to a whiteboard full of… ? It looks like something out of an action movie. Maybe she’s planning on breaking someone out of prison?

Whatever it’s supposed to be, it’s a pretty accurate representation of my current state. Incomprehensible figures with lots of arrows and seemingly arbitrary circling. I’ve never really done the whole new year’s resolution thing before, not that I can remember. It always felt a bit silly, to allow this one day such exalted status. I wanted to think that I could make any day a beginning for something if I so chose, that any moment could be midnight on December 31st. And I still do. Want to think that.

But it seems silly, too, to deny this moment its due just out of a sense of contrariness. I do, after all, live by this particular calendar, these particular dates. And I could use a hand with another beginning.

So. Here we are. Resolutions for the new year. Simple ones, about doing rather than not-doing, things that will helpfully cut out some of the circles and the arrows, hopefully tidy things up a little in my brain and make my 2012 another good year. Because 2011– man. That was some good stuff.

1. Write daily.
2. Sweat daily.
3. Shower daily.

That looks about right.

Happy New Year, Internet.

.

.

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It took me a full fifteen minutes of sitting and staring to figure it out, but it’s totally supposed to be a map of Utopia, along with the blocks of the Utopian citizen’s daily schedule.

That seems about right, too.

*

October

*

-Peel garlic. So much garlic. Peel and bag and freeze, hour after hour after hour. Lose all sensation in pads of fingers.

-Help with dad’s jaesa, a ceremony held on the anniversary of his death.

-Make unnecessary promise to attend every single one of mom’s readings over the course of the next three months. (Still paying for this one.)

*

November

*

- Meet a cat and a rabbit who are friends. They belong to a Latvian concert pianist my mother somehow befriended at her yoga class.

-Have minor, impromptu eye surgery. Gross + Ow + Wtf = My Life.

- Catch my mother walking home on a particularly gray day.

*

December

*

-The Garbage Nightmare begins in earnest. My mother is dismayed that I insist on writing lying down. I tell her Nabokov used to write lying down. I don’t know if this is true, and even if it is, Nabokov certainly didn’t write the way he wrote because he did it lying down, but it shuts her up. Victory.

-More babies visit.

-Winter arrives.

*

And, Through It All…

*

-Hensley keeps me sane via FaceTime videochat, with cameos from
Sir Doctor Simon Delicious Esquire, The One, The Only.

That office-use tupperware container? It’s full of fruitcake. As is the kimchi container beneath it. All fruitcake. All homemade. Obsessively. Six months ago. (Apparently you are supposed to age fruit cake. I did not know this, until six months ago.) And then there’s the gatorade. I admit I forgot the milk and the bag of dried dates, but these are recent additions.

See, Internet? I didn’t lie. I would never lie to you.

Chun: “HEY! HEY! DID YOU KNOW THAT ERASMUS WROTE PRAISE OF FOLLY IN LON–”

West (hurrying from the bedroom, startled): “What!? What??”

Chun: “Hey. Did you know that Erasmus wrote Praise of Folly in London, at Thomas More’s house?”

West: …

Chun: “I said, Did you know, that Erasmus–“

West: “Yes.”

Chun: “What?”

West: “Yes. I actually did know that.”

Chun: “How?”

West: “What do you mean ‘how’? The same way you know it. I read it somewhere.”

Chun: “Hmph.”

West: “Why?”

Chun: “Well, did you know they first met when More was only twenty years old? And Erasmus, who was thirty or so, was so impressed with him that he went around singing his praises all over Europe. It was Erasmus who first called More ‘A Man for All Seasons.’”

West: “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Chun: “It was Erasmus who first called More ‘A Man for–”

West: “No, I don’t understand why we’re talking about this. Why you were yelling about it.”

Chun: “What, I can’t yell about Erasmus? And More?”

West: “Mother, it has long been established that you can and do yell about whatever the hell you want, I’m just saying–”

Chun: “Fine. How was your poop?”

West: …

Chun: “How was your poop today? Did you poop today?”

West: “I did. It was fine. Respectable. Satisfactory.”

Chun: “That’s excellent. Congratulations.”

West: “Thank you.”

Chun: “Are you hungry?”

West: “Less so, now.”

Chun: “Good. Let’s eat.”

*The photo for this entry shows a print of Thomas More with his family, given as a gift to my mother by my friend Rory, who mailed it to her from London because he loves her, and she loves him, and they give each other things. It has long been affixed to the top of our kimchi refrigerator. Which is exactly what it sounds like: a second refrigerator, only to be used for kimchi. Ours is situated in the living room, and is currently full of fruit cake and gatorade. Because, duh.

*Some years ago, my mother was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder.
The following should make more sense, knowing that.

Pictured above is maybe two square feet or so of my bedroom wall, here in my mother’s apartment. Most of the wall used to be covered in a collage-mural thing I did back when I was in high school. A couple months ago I tore this thing down, rice paper and photographs and mirror-pieces and scribbles and drawings all– but because I apparently used some incredibly strong adhesive when I was putting it up, it was impossible to do so cleanly. So this is my wall now, all deconstructed-looking.

My mom and I actually did the tearing down together. It was late, maybe two in the morning or so, when she popped her head around the corner as I worked my thumbnail under a particularly stubborn corner of rice paper. With a “That looks fun!”, she joined me. That was a nice thing, a nice moment. And so we stood side by side, chatting and smoking and ripping and tearing for well over an hour until we were nearly ankle deep in little scraps of color and faces and handwriting and the occasional shard of reflective glass. It was, indeed, fun.

As the weeks go by, though, that hour  is also turning into a dishearteningly apt metaphor for our daily lives. Only without the fun. Because, in this scenario, I am pretty much the wall.

We have become more alike, my mother and I. By this I don’t mean that I feel any more or less unhinged than I usually do, certainly not in any chronic way. What I do mean is that I find myself matching her when she goes unhinged, blow for blow. I find I am less willing than I once was to just hunker down and ride out her manic episodes, to try and let her words move through me. Instead I keep engaging, pointing out that, no, there is no causal relationship between X and Y, and, besides, X happened nine years ago, and is therefore completely unfair to bring up, as we are both different people now than we were then, so Y, the accusatory Y currently being hurled at me, holds no water. I keep arguing that feeling N is irrational, as presentiment A, which has just been presented as its foundation, is totally fallacious, and therefore cannot be supplied as evidence of anything, let alone the validity of something so outrageous as N. I keep asking Why, Why must we do this, again? Why can’t we just enjoy this time together? Why must we be so resentful and dissatisfied and Why must everything be so wrong, so constantly?

None of this helps. If anything, it makes her more angry, more irrational, more out of control. And yet I keep doing it. I honestly don’t know why. It’s like I just can’t help myself, as if some part of me can’t stop believing that this time, this time, reason will somehow win the day. Like if I can just explain things better, everything will be okay. Even though the greater part of me understands that it never will, that chemicals, not lack of reason, are running this particular circus.

It was easier to be philosophical about all this when I was at a safe remove, to just sit back and process the old material into narrative, to maintain some level of equilibrium. Now, back here in the trenches, I am mostly just exhausted. It is exhausting. And unpleasant. And hard. Because now, now that I have inexplicably started giving as good as I get, the conflicts occur almost nightly. Almost every single night, now, my mother and I sit across from one another, and our chatting and smoking turns– sometimes gradually, sometimes in an instant, a single unpredictable instant– into ripping and tearing, until we find ourselves once again neck deep in shreds and shards. Everything is dangerous, every topic, every phrase, which makes me feel small, and frightened. But also defiant and self-righteous. Sometimes in turn, sometimes all at once. Left unchecked, this might actually be a good recipe for triggering my very own special kind of madness.

We love each other very much, my mother and I. That’s what makes it harder, I think, for either one of us to accept from the other anything that even resembles bullshit. Though maybe that should make it easier, instead? Easier to overlook, to knowingly embrace instead of challenge? Why this insistence on accuracy, honesty, on the raw and the naked? It’s so much trouble. Very possibly more trouble than it’s worth. Maybe I just need to rethink my understanding of what love entails. That is very possible, too. But it is also probably a project for another, less exhausted time.

Three days ago I got on my knees, the second time in my life I’ve done so, and begged my mother to go back on her medication. She’s been off them for almost two years now, I think, if she’s telling the truth. Which, you know, I’m sure she is. I don’t even know why I said that. She is many things, but a liar is not one of them. Anyway, she agreed, moved. I wept, relieved. Tomorrow we go to see her doctor, together.

This will, with any luck, be a turning point, the kind of time I can point to in a few months or years and say, Yeah, it was bad, really bad for a minute there, but then we pulled it together. We always do.

Here’s hoping.

HWKMUW: Dude, your hair looks fucking crazy.
Me (examining myself in the iPhone screen): It really does, huh.
HWKMUW: How long has it been since you took a shower?
Me: What? I dunno. Not that long?
HWKMUW: You’re lying. You’re only showering once a week, aren’t you. Before your mom’s performance, so you can leave the house.
Me: That… is true.
HWKMUW: Maaaaaa-yaaaaa.
Me: What? It’s not like I’m that dirty. I don’t do anything to actually get dirty.
HWKMUW: What I can see of your hair begs to differ.
Me: Shut up.
HWKMUW: It feels really good to shower. You should go shower right now. Think about it. All that water, washing away the crazy.
Me: Shut up.
HWKMUW: It’ll feel really good.
Me: Shut up. I want out of this relationship.
HWKMUW: If it helps, think of being clean as a kind of rebellion.
Rebel against the garbage nightmare, West.
Me: I’m not good at tricking myself. Not on purpose.
HWKMUW: How much longer until these applications are due?
Me: I don’t want to talk about it. But listen, I washed my sheets. Yesterday. That’s good, right?
HWKMUW (sincere): That is good! Congratulations! Seriously!!
Me: …I didn’t put them back on the bed, though. They were dry, but I couldn’t deal with putting them back on, so I just slept on the bare mattress. For four hours. From one p.m. to five p.m.
HWKMUW: That’s okay, that’s okay. It’s still good. That just needs to happen sometimes. Sometimes it’s just too much, and one must sleep fucked-up hours on a bare mattress.
Me: Truer words, friend. Truer words.

 – Mariah Ford, soon-to-be-Law-Librarian-Extraordinaire

I have been staying away from you, Internet. On the ship you were all I wanted– remember? Remember how much I missed you? And then I got here, the single most internet-connected country IN THE WORLD, with flawless wifi blanketing my every waking instant, and I decided I needed to stay away from you. Because, in case you’ve missed this, I have a Mental Illness, and that Mental Illness is called Making Arbitrary Decisions That Serve No Real Purpose And Then Executing Them, Often To My Own Detriment.

It was a questionable move when I made it, right after the pictures of dogs and children, and it remains questionable, because if I know anything it’s that the all-or-nothing approach usually doesn’t turn out so hot for me. So I am trying to ease back in. See that? See this ease? This aplomb?

Basically, grad school applications are due these next few weeks and trying to actually finish two stories to send in has turned me into what Gabe from Videogum calls a ‘garbage nightmare person.’ (I really like Gabe from Videogum. I like him too much. It’s good for no one, how much I like this man.) I write two sentences, then rewrite them, then rewrite them, then make my mom give me food, then I rewrite them again, then I go for a walk and decide that these sentences are TRASHTRASHTRASH and rush home to delete them in a righteous rage. Sometimes this happens with paragraphs, or pages. Several times it happened with entire stories.

I have also officially started talking to myself.

Which is, you know, fine. It’s fine, it’s totally fine.

Anyway, I have been getting emails and Facebook notifications from people wondering if I’m still alive. At first these were mostly sassy (see above: excerpt from Mariah Ford’s missive), but this last week or so people actually seemed to be getting a little worried. So here I am. I am indeed still alive. Korea is being nice to me, though my mother is driving me crazy  in ways I never expected. Like how she never stops moving. Never, Internet. Never. She is always always always moving, from one room to another, from one part of a room to another part of that same room, opening drawers, closing doors, clinking flatware, doing a small dance, loading dishwashers and relocating trash, walking by inexplicably carrying a hammer, wanting my help right now, now now now, to move a piece of furniture that has been there for six years just leave it three more weeks please until I no longer want to die from lack of words and I swear to god I will move it anywhere you want, I will lift it like it’s nothing, a feather, and carry it to the goddamn moon. Last week I lost it, threw my book across the living room and screamed, The CEASEless MOVEment!!  At which point the temperature of the room dropped twenty degrees and we had it out. And just like that, a SNL skit turned into ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’

With better lighting, we could totally take this show on the road.

In the meantime, I should get back to the business at hand. I think it’s time for another walk-and-rewrite-purge.

Be well, speak soon.

This is Golden Blossom wistfully watching her owner (my cousin Taehee) play a lowbrow but extremely complicated and popular Korean card game, for money, with her mother (my aunt) and my mother (her aunt).

This is Golden Blossom trying to reconcile herself to the situation. After all, she should be used to it by now; this goes on at least four nights a week.

This is Golden Blossom thinking, despite her best efforts: Yes, yes, this is all well and good, very Joy Luck Club and everything, but come on, now. Come on, people. Throw me a bone.

(See what I did there?)

This is what I have to report, after four full days at home. Way, way too much spaghetti.

It’s been a rougher transition than I expected. The loss of momentum I was able to stave off for several months with road trips and cargo ships has finally hit, hard, and here I am, bumming around in the same rooms I bummed around in as an angsty teenager. Only now I am an angsty adult. The added indignity of which fact simply increases my angst.

There is, of course, nothing to do but get over it. And I am. I am willing myself over this hump, visualizing a kind of digestion-of-angst to accompany the digestion-of-noodles I can actually feel happening in my belly. As my stomach acids eat away at the spaghetti, breaking it down, bit by bit, so too will my general malaise disintegrate, its useful components absorbed into the lining of my brain-meats and sent out to circulate productively through my consciousness.

Gross. That’s gross.

I have watched the following video many times today, and I think it’s helping. It is from the Chilean Ship’s Mechanic. We spent a few hours together one evening, and he brought his laptop to the officer’s rec room to show me pictures of his family and his avocado farm back home, about fifty miles outside of Santiago. Mixed in with these photos was the following video, of him dancing with his mother at a family gathering. His mother is ninety-four years old.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9guU2PR6Ss

A good life. At the risk of sounding sentimental, I have to say, I find it to be very beautiful. Enough so that I asked him if I could have a copy to share with my friends.

That’s you.

One perpetual truth of life with my mother is the continuous stream of visitors. The woman holds court at least three or four times a week, and that’s when things are slow. In her mind she is a burner of bridges, a lone wolf, shunned by society, asking nothing, needing less. In reality she is quite a warm, funny person, and there are certain individuals who take to her very intensely. (Until, that is, she decides, often inexplicably, that she has been wronged, and stops taking their calls.) And because my mom doesn’t like to leave her comfort zone (a zone that overlaps very neatly with the floor plan of our apartment), they come to her.

Yesterday’s afternoon visit (the evening was designated for a different crew) was our doctor — our ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ doctor. He is a lovely and impressive man, not least on each count because he treats my mom gratis, just because he genuinely enjoys her company. He gives me my medicine at no charge as well, medicine designed to reduce the heat of my chi. Which is, apparently, too hot.

We’ve grown quite close over the years, this doctor and our family of two, but this was the first time I really got to meet his wife and children. And oh, these children.

They were pret-ty cute. Even with one hula-hooping (I don’t know why my mother owns a hula hoop, though I suppose the question is now moot, considering she promptly gave the hula-hoop to the little boy the moment he showed an interest) and the other banging the jang-gu, a traditional Korean drum (I don’t know why she owns this either, and this question still lives, because the drum remains; as does the threat of impromptu drumming the next time a child visits or the mood so strikes my mother). This is worth noting, because I usually don’t find Hectic to be cute.

Even more noteworthy is how well my mother got along with these children. She likes Hectic even less than I do, unless she is the one producing it. But the little boy, in particular, was able to win her affections completely. Like so:

Well played, little boy. Well played. You earned your triceratops, as well as your amazing-huge paper plane.