Their two-bedroom apartment was painted in bright, bold colors and was full of cool vintage furniture and clothing from thrift shops. Longboards from Colette’s teen years in California were stacked by the front door, and souvenirs from a year abroad when she taught English in Chile lined the windowsills. A porch swing hung from the ceiling in the living room; plastic craft-store flowers weaved through the chain links that suspended it.

I admired the way they seemed more like friends than mother and daughter, envied their thrifting trips to Portland. How idyllic it seemed when I’d watch them bake together in their apartment, pressing pizzelles out of homemade batter with the heavy metal iron they’d inherited from Colette’s Italian grandmother, tracing dozens of intricate patterns into delicate, edible doilies, dreaming of the café Colette someday wished to open, a place where they could sell their baked goods and decorate the interior just like the home I found so creative and charming.

Observing Colette made me question my mother’s dreams. Her lack of purpose seemed more and more an oddity, suspect, even anti-feminist. That my care played such a principal role in her life was a vocation I naively condemned, rebuffing the intensive, invisible labor as the errand work of a housewife who’d neglected to develop a passion or a practical skill set. It wasn’t until years later, after I left for college, that I began to understand what it meant to make a home and just how much I had taken mine for granted.

But as a teenager newly obsessed with my own search for a calling, I found it impossible to imagine a meaningful life without a career or at least a supplemental passion, a hobby. Why did her interests and ambitions never seem to bubble up to the surface? Could she truly be content as only a homemaker? I began to interrogate and analyze her skill set. I suggested possible outlets—courses at the university in interior design or fashion; maybe she could start a restaurant.

“Too much work! You know Gary’s mom start her Thai restaurant—now she always running around! Never have time for anything.”

“When I’m at school, what do you do all day?”

“I do a lot, okay! You just don’t understand because you spoiled. When you move out of house you see everything Mommy do for you.”

I could tell my mother was jealous of Colette—not because of her whimsical ambitions, but because of how I idolized her desultory aims—and the more I rotted into a cruel teenager, the more I flaunted my relationship with Colette as a way of taking advantage of my mother’s emotions. I felt it was payback for how frequently she took advantage of mine.

* * *

—

INTO THE VACUUM of my disinterest, music rushed to fill the void. It cracked a fissure, splintered a vein through the already precarious and widening rift between my mother and me; it would become a chasm that threatened to swallow us whole.

Nothing was as vital as music, the only comfort for my existential dread. I spent my days downloading songs one at a time off LimeWire and getting into heated discussions on AIM about whether the Foo Fighters’ acoustic version of “Everlong” was better than the original. I pocketed my allowance and lunch money to spend exclusively on CDs from House of Records, analyzing lyrics in the liner notes, obsessing over interviews with the champions of Pacific Northwest indie rock, memorizing the rosters of labels like K Records and Kill Rock Stars, and plotting which concerts I’d attend.

On the off chance a band toured through Eugene, there were two venues to play. The WOW Hall was where I saw most local shows growing up. Menomena, Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, Mount Eerie, and the Rock n Roll Soldiers, who were the closest band Eugene could claim as hometown heroes. They wore headbands and leather vests with tassels that hung over their bare chests, and we admired them because they were the only people we knew who had left and accomplished something—a coveted major-label deal and a slot in a Verizon Wireless commercial. We never stopped to question if what they’d accomplished had really been so great, why they were back in town to play so often.

Bigger bands played the McDonald Theatre, where I saw Modest Mouse and crowd surfed for the first time, spending a good thirty seconds on the edge of the stage beforehand to ensure someone in the front row would in fact catch me when I jumped. Isaac Brock was like a god to us. There was a rumor that his cousin lived in the next town over, in the trailer park that the song “Trailer Trash” is about, and this potential proximity made him all the more relatable—someone we could claim as our own. Everyone I knew had somehow memorized every word to his sprawling, hundred-track catalog, including the songs from his side projects and B-sides, coveted albums we were constantly trying to track down to burn and slip into the plastic sleeves of our CD binders. His lyrics epitomized what it felt like to grow up in a small gray town in the Pacific Northwest. What it was like to suffocate slowly from the boredom. His swelling eleven-minute opuses and cathartic, blood-curdling screams soundtracked every long drive with nothing to think about.

But nothing impacted me so profoundly as the first time I got my hands on a DVD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live at the Fillmore. The front woman, Karen O, was the first icon of the music world I worshipped who looked like me. She was half Korean and half white, with an unrivaled showmanship that obliterated the docile Asian stereotype. She was famous for wild onstage antics, spitting water into the air, bounding across to the far edges of the stage, and deep throating a microphone before lassoing it above her head by its cable. Agape at the image, I found myself in a strange state of ambivalence. My first thought being how do I get to do that, and my second, if there’s already one Asian girl doing this, then there’s no longer space for me.

Back then, I didn’t know what a scarcity mentality was. The dialogue surrounding representation in music was in its nascent stages, and because I didn’t personally know any other girls who played music, I didn’t know there were others like me struggling with the same feelings. I didn’t have the analogical capacity to imagine a white boy in the same situation, watching a live DVD of say, the Stooges, and thinking, if there’s already an Iggy Pop, how could there possibly be room for another white guy in music?

Nevertheless, Karen O made music feel more accessible, made me believe it was possible that someone like me could one day make something that meant something to other people. Fueled by this newfound optimism, I began to badger my mother incessantly for a guitar. Having already sunk a hefty sum on a long list of extracurriculars I’d summarily abandoned, she was reluctant to oblige, but by Christmas she finally broke down, and at last I received a hundred-dollar Yamaha acoustic in a box from Costco. The action was so high it felt like you had to wrestle the strings half an inch to pin them to the fret.