Resipiscence

My mom woke me up this morning (at two in the... afternoon... making it not morning, except for me, but we'll ignore that). And then she sat on the bed and asked me in that anxious/suspicious Mom tone of voice "what [I] do on the Internet when [I] stay up so late."

... well, first, I'm half awake, so it's a bad time to be asking me halfway complex questions, by which I mean any questions not satisfactorily answered by a monosyllabic grunt.

Second, there's a lot of stuff I do online. I email, forum, talk to people, do my website, journal, peruse webcomics, visit other peoples' homepages, read some online journals and blogs, research interesting things, catch up on the news, waste time, drool over other peoples' art...

I think I kind of summed this up by grunting "I... uh... talk to people... visit websites... read stuff..." into the pillow. I just woke up, for crying out loud. Did she want an annotated summary of my internet activities?

She just kinda frowned and walked out of the room.

And she just did it again, since it's two am and I "should" be going to bed.

Mom: "Tell me, what is it that you do online all night? Where do you go?"
Liadan: *shrug* "Why are you asking?"
Mom: "I'm just getting worried."
Liadan: "Well, come on, it's not like I'm doing anything wrong, anything sexual or looking up bomb recipes... Please tell me you trust me that much."
Mom: "Well what do you do, then?"
Liadan: "Look, why are you so worried about it?"
Mom: *sigh* "You should go to bed, we have church in the morning, and you're going to be tired."
Liadan: "I'm always tired in the morning. I'm not a morning person. I'm a night person."

After a while and a few significant glances and grimaces and such, she kind of gave up, not being a night person at all, and shuffled back to bed.

I've been wondering about that first thing all day. I was even going to ask her what prompted the question. It's an odd thing for her to ask. My parents have always given us kids their implicit trust about our web activities. We've never had any kind of nanny software or filters or anything like that since we got rid of AOL, and they've never had a problem with me or any of us having our own computers in our own rooms.

And I wasn't lying. There's not much I do online that could be construed as wrong, and that's only if you consider looking at anything not rated PG "wrong." I'm not a porn addict, I don't seduce adolescent males in chat rooms, I don't try to download the Anarchist's Cookbook... the bulk of my online research is about religion, in fact, and most of it's about Christianity. I could be doing a lot worse. The worst thing I can think of is a couple of webcomics I read that are maybe R-rated at the most.

My theory right now is that she's putting together information from up to two sources.

One is my brothers. Since they have a nasty habit of bounding into the room to stare at my screen, I always have to minimize whatever I'm looking at, especially if it's Whosoever or something similarly gay-related. Maybe Ignatius or Sigismund said something about my habit of hiding my screen.

The second is my dad. See, a while back when I got the new keyboard, I had some problems installing the new software for it. So I asked for his help. In the process of looking for support on the manufacturer's website, Dad couldn't have possibly missed the "christian lesbians" link on my start page and the folder titled "Gay" in my bookmarks menu.

Granted, my dad has always been really good about letting us kids, especially us teenagers, have our privacy. As I understand it he's completely against reading diaries and emails and that sort of thing. My mom, on the other hand, is not a big privacy advocate. If I remember correctly, she says it's entirely permissible to snoop through a child's things when the parent suspects something might be wrong. Which is why I don't keep a paper journal or leave treeware evidence of where I go online. So my question is whether Dad would keep this to himself or tell his wife. I think Dad's implicit sense of honor about privacy and honesty would mean that he'd think seriously about revealing something that's obviously an issue I'm not prepared to bring up yet. Or considering the relative seriousness of the gay thing, he might have thought it necessary to tell my mom about his suspicions. I can't tell.

On a related note, my dad has the computer knowledge to know how to check up on where we go online, but I doubt my mom does. If I have to tell her that the "message box" on her screen is one of those fake banner ads, she's not going to know to look in the history file or check the recently visited list. She knows I have a website, but she doesn't know where it is, much less where the journal is. (Plus, even if she wanted to turn on my computer and look for herself, she'd never find the power button. It's very well hidden. *pats Renny*)

Even at the second conversation, I asked her straight out (heh) why she wanted to know. But my mom's never been the direct sort. She prefers to sidle over to the discussion conversationally rather than accuse someone to their face of anything. A direct question, in fact, is fairly unusual for her. It was odd to get something even as confrontational as "What do you do on there?" She'd never just ask "Are you doing X?" That just not how she works.

I'm not sure what this means. Maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe I'm justified in my paranoia because they really are out to get me.

Labels: family, Teh Gay