"Rousseau in the course of his Confessions narrates incidents that profoundly shocked the sensibility of mankind. By describing them so frankly he falsified his values and so gave them in his book a greater importance than they had in his life. They were events among a multitude of others, virtuous or at least neutral, that he omitted because they were too ordinary to seem worth recording. There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones.This is the type that most often writes about himself. He leaves out his redeeming qualities, and so appears only weak, unprincipled, and vicious."
--W. Somerset Maugham

My mother has a certain whine that one expects only to hear out of the mouth of a teenage girl--the sort of girl that would end all conversations with the word 'whatever.' She uses this whine only rarely, but when she does, it is usually accompanied by a slight shake of her clenched fist or a stamp of her dainty hoof. "Lina," she cries, regretting whatever it was that she just said, "Don't put that on your web page."

"Oh Mother," I sigh, "I'm a journalist. I'm obligated to tell the truth," I say, sniggering behind my hand.

"But," she squeals, "you only post when I say something offensive. You don't mention all of the nice things that I do."

My thoughts are that since I mention that she's my mother, the clear implication is that she gave birth to me, which was a pretty nice thing to do. This, despite the fact that she continues to complain about the birthing process twenty-six years after it culminated in my glorious entrance into this universe.

And perhaps she's right. It is possible that I don't repeat every single thing my mother says to me because frankly, most of her popular topics don't appear to be as interesting to the general public as when she talks about anal sex.

It hasn't occurred to her that the easiest way to get me to stop posting every time she says pudendum is for her to stop saying pudendum--at least in the presence of her daughter. This however, is a pleasure that she cannot forsake. She appears to receive no greater joy than to say naughty things in front of an ever younger audience.

Just a few weeks ago, she was holding Holly and Rene's baby. He was only weeks old, and she was cooing softly to him while Holly and I talked about the issues of the day. "Just like the BBC!" I exclaimed.

Holly innocently asked,"What does BBC stand for anyway?"

"Big black cock!" my mother crowed, overjoyed. She cuddled the baby closer, satisfied with both her nurturing and acronym-deducing abilities.

She's not the only one that has had her values falisified on shutitdown, though.

"Your page isn't real," my ex-boyfriend used to claim spitefully, "That's not what you are really like."

I tried to explain that the main difference was that on my webpage I was clothed, whereas in real life I was occasionally disrobed, and therefore he should count himself lucky. He didn't see it that way however. He was enraged by my apparent glibness about the problems that he felt were serious, the jokes about gangbangs (which he also thought were serious). He didn't like the fact that I didn't mention my relationship with him until our break up.

I thought perhaps, in the face of these complaints, that he would prefer that I write about him, so finally one day, a year into our relationship, I offered to include him here. "I want to read the posts first, and I don't want you to mention what country I am from. And don't imply that I'm a homo." These were just a few of the rules that he initally set down, and in the face of this, I decided that he wasn't very good material anymore, and never wrote about him.

As a side note, it was me repeatedly using the term "big black cock" in his native tongue that led to one of our most embarrassing (and public) fights. Fran can verify both the embarrassment and the publicness. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.

Apparently this fellow didn't want to get painted by my writer's brush, one which reduced him to a caricature with little more than a limp wrist and a questionable nationality. And although my mother complains, I know that she enjoys the fact that she's a popular, cartoonish character. It's hard to be honest on a web page, and it's even harder to be interesting. It's too easy to fall into the trap of detailing one's food consumption and cd-buying habits. Luckily, my family keeps me in enough material to avoid writing about anything (or anyone) too mundane. Even more fortuitously, most of them are weak, unprincipled, and vicious, so I'm not often forced to exaggerate.