mama gorbel done tol' you

1,2,3,4

So I will be honest. I don't know what to do with babies. I am not really a baby person. I don't fawn over them. I see that your baby is cute but don't ask me to hold them. I am afraid to hold them! It is just too much responsibility. Don't entrust me to babysit your offspring. I am far from the whole mothering thing. And baby videos. I don't get them! They plague America's Funniest Videos and YouTube and I just don't get how they are watched and loved by millions and millions of viewers! Simple videos of laughing babies are HITS but I still don't get why. However, I can't stop falling in love with this video of Mags (Mates of State offspring) doing her rendition of Feist's "1,2,3,4" (and notes that Feist doesn't count right, not in video but blogged about on her mommy's blog). It's a cute video. It doesn't weird me out. It wins in my book!

weekend recap

Anyone else in LA notice how absolutely gorgeous it was all weekend? The lovely weather prompted me to recover from my crazy Friday Night (more on that later...) and live like I was in San Francisco or Paris again. We drive enough in this city anyway. So I put on some comfy shoes, packed my reusable Starbucks thermos (in case I wanted some iced green tea), and my cameras (one digital and one manual) and set out for the LA street. I really had no idea where I was going but I was going somewhere with all the time in the world. If I got tired then I could always hop on a bus.
Great weather, great to peek into abandoned buildings, great to rest in thrift stores and find a comfy chair that I eventually bought (yes, it's my new favourite thing in my apartment. Thank you, Ann, for picking me and my new/old chair up!)
After dropping my chair off at home, we ended up driving to what was supposed to be my walking destination: Barnsdall Art Park in Los Feliz. My elementary school is across the street from it and I remember taking filed trips up there before they closed it off for renovations (and what I thought was construction of a metro station...).
It was gorgeous up there with the view of the city. Moments like that made me adore the city. My trip also ignited my "need a new hobby" flame and I may end up taking some sort of art class there. I'm thinking ceramics even though I really want to take a children's papier mache class. (They refuse to let me even after I begged).

I got restless again on Sunday and after lunching with mom we got on the freeway and I just drove south on the 101, not really knowing where I was going. It was so pretty out that I proposed a trip to the Griffith Observatory (since I hadn't been since they re-opened it). Since you can't park up at the top we had to park on the side of the road and hike up. FUN! No, really, it was. I did, however, get dizzy the higher up I got.

The Observatory seemed much smaller than I remembered. I loved how excited my mom got with the telescopes outside. She just kept shoving quarters in and looking out towards Downtown LA or the Hollywood sign.

The planetarium show was really fun (but it kind of made me sick, it was so dizzying). And I must say that I actually enjoyed the younger children there. It was cute to hear this kid next to me get super excited before the show because he actually thought we were heading off to the moon! No kidding! When he saw some guys go into the show's control room he thought it was the captains cockpit or something. The kid totally killed me. He was so into it! The teenagers on the other side of me, on the other hand, were really annoying and it made me really sad to think that I was probably that annoying and saying those really dumb things. It pained me to my very core to listen to them. It also scared the hell out of me to think that I will have to endure putting up with that if I ever decide to have children.


Yes, a very touristy weekend of sorts for me. Next weekend I may hop on one of those Hollywood tour buses and tell folks I'm from some random place like Canada or South Africa or some Asian country and pretend I don't speak Engrish.


My face looks quite chubby in that left photo. A chubby Asian tourist.

i want my mommy

For the past few months I've been having these dreams where my mom leaves me. Just up and leaves! Premise is always the same:
- she packs up and leaves without telling Z and I
- we scour the ends of the earth for her
- when we find her she denies having run away then sneaks away the next chance she gets
- she remarries some creepy guy
- she starts a new family
- she doesn't want to have anything to do with us anymore

Scenarios will be different but it's always the same plot some way or another. And I wake up horrified at the thought of losing her! Death becomes this major cloud looming over my head and I panic and cry. Losing my mom terrifies me. The idea of dying myself is also terrifying.

I missed my mom alot today because I had another one of those dreams last night, and thought about how I couldn't stand being away from her. When I was younger, I'd cling to her leg, curl up by her tummy in bed and listen to her pulse/heartbeat. Then I'd hear stories about how that was the only way I'd fall asleep as a baby - on her chest listening to her heartbeat. I'd always hold her hand in public. I'd hug her incessantly and tell her I loved her. We'd build forts in the living room every Friday night and camp out there, with snacks and rented movies. We were this trio and were all each other had - still are, really.

Then Z and I grew up and it was uncool to do all that with mom anymore. And it made it harder to be affectionate. Our family is not really big on openly hugging and telling each other we love them. It's like a cultural thing. So now that we were older it made it harder to just pick us up and shower us with kisses and make us giggle.

I wanna go back to that, to be young again, sans souci. To be in an innocent bubble. A time when I called my mom "mommy". Goodness, I wouldn't know what I'd do if I lost her - when I lose her. It's weird looking at her now and seeing the lines on her face and the wrinkles on her hands. God, I used to hold her hands so much as a child and admire them - how pretty, smooth, and lily white they were. We found old albums of hers from when she was in her 20s. Boy was she pretty. I was watching her as she flipped through the pages and you should've seen her face light up! She said, "When I was younger I would always wish for time to speed up because I couldn't wait to grow up. Now I wish it would slow down."
We looked through our baby albums and mom's smile glowed! You could see her just traveling back in time in her head. Time is crazy. I wonder if she ever gets scared the way I do. She believes in Heaven so she might not be as scared. And if she were she'd never show it. Every so often I wonder what it would be like. I told my best friend, Karen, about how I've been so scared of dying and asked what they thought it would be like. "It will be nice in the afterlife." She's spiritual as oppose to religious so she believes our spirits will turn into another energy and live on somehow. As for me, I broke away from my Catholic upbringing. And that's why I'm scared because I don't really know. It would be nice, though, if it were just like falling asleep and dreaming nice dreams, just very seamless and fluid.

Before I depress myself even more here's a little video I dug up of my mom from a year or 2 ago. We were discussing how I have a hard time winking and proceeded to go around the table and record ourselves winking. This was her attempt...




So badass!