screw a title, spew a post

For some reason I wanted to call this post "rolling stone" or something like that and I don't know why. Something about "gathering no moss"? Something strange in my brain, when I sat down and thought, "Today I want to really, truly look at some important feeling in myself and really, truly write it down." and then the Bob Dylan voice crooned in my ear, "How does it feeeeeel?"

Notice that I could probably go on to write an entire post about the mysterious saga of Why I Named My Blog Post What I Almost Did.

Instead, I will try to spew something more honest.

Mom has been dead nearly 13 years now.

Today I found myself in the faculty room for one of those ridiculously extended lunches that can happen when you are there with just one good colleage. This time it was MacTechWitch, my mentor and friend whose mother is dying of cancer. We did crossword puzzles and shot shit but it all leads back to THAT when we talk. I hope that she doesn't stop talking to me. I hope that she isn't looking to not talk about it and I am just always a reminder. I hope I am a help to her and not painful. In any case, we ended up talking about IT again, as always.

I was rather shocked to find myself getting a little teary as we talked. This is wildly unusual. I cry about my mom sometimes but never in public. Not that I work hard not to cry in public or something. Just that I never feel like it. I don't tear up every time I talk about her. I can talk about her easily and with humor and I can tell stories and feel fine and good. It's just not such a big thing, having a dead mom.

Except when it suddenly is. Like, when you are talking about how the dying person feels about the afterlife and how the movie "Contact" offered this bizarrely good level of comfort, only the comfort was half-assed because it came out after Mom died and she TOTALLY would have loved that movie and I have it on tape and watch it every year or so and always think about how much she would have liked it and whenever I come across something she would have liked, a song, a movie, a book, a TV show, I am always WILDLY pissed that she didn't live fucking long enough.

My mother died at age 49 in 1996.

She died before the movies, "Titanic," "Pay It Forward," "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Squid and the Whale," "Running with Scissors," "American Beauty," "Lost in Translation" or "The Object of My Affection" came out. And she would have motherfucking loved them.

Really, all this movie listing is just a stall tactic. If I keep thinking of movies and keep looking them up on IMDB to factcheck myself, I won't have time to write about the fact that she died before I graduated college or graduate school or became a librarian or met my Wessie or got married or bought a house or gave birth to her red-headed grandson.

Oh, look at that. It's 4 o'clock. I have to go home now.