Fuck Yin and Yang

So Stark, the narrator of my favorite novel Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith, hates good things happening to him. He has this theory that everyone has a certain amount of luck alotted to them, and somehow, he got shortchanged. This means that anything good that happens to him is just a foreshadowing of ten times more crap just over the horizon to balance things out. (Yeah, that's where the "Stark" in M. Stark comes from. The M. is for Marty, an unofficial Jewish name given to me by "Zoe" since back then, I was too neurotic to be a yellow bruthah goy but just neurotic enough to be a Jew - and before you start calling Zoe an anti-semite, well, some of her closest friends were Jewish, like, her parents.) And usually, Stark is dead on.

OK, so what's the big woop? Open house for my condo unit was today, so to piddle the time away, I travelled around various record stores. I managed to find the latest Craig Armstrong CD three days before it was supposed to be officially released, and it's incredible. I hung out at Hakone Gardens and chilled with the koi. But the coolest thing was finding a promotional Region 1 copy of Massive Attack DVD that was sent to a record store at the Stanford Shopping Center by mistake (the DVD had been only officially released in Region 2 - Europe - and there's no plans to release it in the U.S.). I haven't been that happy since meeting L.A. Chick.

Then I got home. I have a Bang and Olufson answering machine with caller ID capibility, so despite the fact that one of the messages was a loud ass disconnect tone, I knew my mom had called me. And to preempt your "Aw, your mom is just worried about you," I was subjected to the following points for the next 90 minutes when I made the mistake of calling back good ol mom:
1. She's the only one who cares enough to give me a reality check, and reality is this:
2. It's tough to succeed as a writer, and I've already been at if for a year, so I need to snap out of it and stop dreaming;
3. No woman is going to want to date me because being a writer means being unemployed;
4. Being a writer also means I won't have any friends because writing is a solitary career;
5. I don't know how much worry I'm putting her through because I don't have a steady income;
6. My dad, my sister and my friends either don't give a shit or are too stupid to tell me this (I'm not exaggerating);
7. She doesn't see why I'm taking the tough road where I'll most likely fail when I could just get a job and a steady income;
8. She's not being negative, despite what my dad and my sis say, she's being realistic;
9. In the year I took off, I could have made $163,000;
10. If I took more years off, other people will have made more money whereas I'll probably make nothing if I keep writing;
11.A repeat of point #2 in that I am dreaming if I think I can actually succeed as a writer (but she hopes that I do succeed);
12.She'll only stop worrying if I find a job and a wife, and so what if I hate my job, so does everyone else, it's just reality;
13.She expects me to support her when she retires; and the kicker,
13.I shouldn't get angry / frustrated when she tells me this, and it's my life so I shouldn't worry about her.

How the fuck is any of this constructive? I have enough self-esteem issues to deal with, and she pours this all on me. Yeah, so you can see why I have a lot of issues.