My Mother is Making Me Do This
I distinctly remember telling my mother many, many years ago that I wanted to be a writer and her looking at me blankly like I was Will Hunting and just imparted some great mathematical theory to her, ending it with "How do you like them apples?" She blinked, I think, and I'm pretty sure she told me Cousin So-So just graduated with an M.S. in Math from Ateneo, the best school in the Philippines, and is going to be making a lot money. I suck at math, I remind her. "Well, you could go into Nursing, you know... your other cousins are going into Nursing. Lots of money there," she says. I tell her I suck at math and science. And I have pretty severe OCD, so that really takes me out of the running from the whole touching-people, much less healing them thing. After several minutes of this, my mother threw up her hands in exasperation and said, "Hay, naku, Ebang. Do what you want. You always do, anyway." Nanay has always accepted that I'm a little bit