Me: "Because you're my MOM."

Don't tell her how Orkut is becoming a proxy marriage site. It's apparently starting to take market share from the websites dedicated to finding spouses, and parents in India want to make sure that their kids' Orkut profiles are sufficiently awesome.

My mom just gave me some girl's number and told me to call her. She is in San Jose but goes to law school in San Francisco or something. She has no idea what she looks like, but she's known her mom since childhood, so she probably looks good. She's light-skinned, at least.

Mom: "Then why won't you accept my invite??"

Me: "Because you're my MOM."

I have my dad on my Facebook friends list. He's cool and funny and writerly, and rarely drops by Facebook, though. My mum, I wouldn't add. She'd whine on my wall about how I haven't phoned her since Sunday...

So why haven't you phoned your mom?

::thanks the gods and little fishes every. single. day. her mother is computer clueless::

She's light-skinned, at least

Well thank goodness for that?

My mom is a Facebook friend. So are my sister and brother-in-law. And mom's partner, and most of her extended family.

I very carefully filter things. Some of my gay friends' discussions can raise MY eyebrows, much less a bunch of Nebraska-raised Catholic Irish straightfolk.

Interesting eptomology on Pumpernickel bread:

The Philologist Johann Christoph Adelung states about the Germanic origin of the word, in the vernacular, Pumpen was a New High German synonym for being flatulent, a word similar in meaning to the English "fart", and "Nickel" was a form of the name Nicholas, an appellation commonly associated with a goblin or devil (e.g., "Old Nick", a familiar name for Satan), or more generally for a malevolent spirit or demon. Cf. also the metal nickel, probably named for a demon that would "change" or contaminate valuable copper with this strange metal that was much harder to work. Hence, pumpernickel is described as the "devil's fart", a definition accepted by the Stopes International Language Database,[2] the publisher Random House,[3] and by some English language dictionaries, including the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.[4] The American Heritage Dictionary adds "so named from being hard to digest."

So why haven't you phoned your mom?

I am a bad daughter. And she is Irish.

::thanks the gods and little fishes every. single. day. her mother is computer clueless::

I try to remember this every time I do tech support for my family. No matter how many times I beat them with a cluestick, they still have no clue.