4/1/2006 - Jamming with Mommy

I totally jammed out with my mom. It was as cool as it sounds. MAYBE cooler.

She taught me a James Taylor song (honestly I don't really know who this guy is) and a few Beatles songs, Here Comes the Sun and Let It Be. This is how my mom sang when we were playing:

"Let It Be"

C-ing is the C-ing is the C-ing is the C-ing,

C-ing words of G-sdom, Let it F, Let it C

Refrain: Let it C, Let it G, Let it F, Let it C, C-ing word of G-sdom, let it F, Let it C!

.... and yes. She pronounced G-sdom the way you think she pronounced it. Like "gizzdom".AND she did it all in her Big Bird voice. I was laughing so hard I thought I might pee myself. Seriously. Anyone who has seen my mom be silly immediately stops wondering where I get it from.

It's really cool to see my mom pick up a guitar and start playing it, especially since she never does. I could tell that once she was a fucking rockstar, before she popped my brother and I out and put away the instruments to change diapers, etc. for the past 22 years (not that she's still changing my diapers. I change my own now, thanks very much.)

She used to be a concert pianist in the Philippines, and she also plays organ (who plays organ anymore? My mom has a really old organ in our house. It's amazing.) and sings. I see pictures of her when she was my age and I think she was gorgeous, andway cooler than I am now. My aunt tells me she used to be really into astral projection and trance-like meditative states, etc. She was a psychology major in college, specializing in abnormal psychology.

It's all kind of hard to believe, now that she's this ultra-conservative 9 to 5er who likes her American flag on the front porch and voted for Bush. But every once in a while I catch glimpses of something here and there that make me think maybe I wasn't adopted after all.

Did I mention my mom is crazy? Because she is. I always worry that I'm as crazy and temperamental as she is, so I try to be as fair and consistently mellow as possible. It's a toss of the coin whether or not I get her on a 'crazy' day. I think tonight I got her on an 'effin' awesome' day. It was great, we played for an hour and a half and she got up and said,

"My fingers hurt now and my wrist. You keep F-ing and C-ing, I'm gonna go make poop."

Later on that night i'm eating tapioca pudding and my mom says she likes to put evaporated milk in her tapioca pudding. I ask her what the difference is between evaporated milk and condensed milk. She says, "One is evaporated. One is condensed."

As if I hadn't learned anything from her first response I ask her if she knows what tapioca is made of. "Tapioca pearls." she says.

"Yeah, but what are the pearls made of?"

"Pearls. The pearls are made of pearls." She says. Amazing.