Lemondrop

I'll admit it -- I've had a good life. I got lucky in the parental department: My mom and dad put the clothes on my back growing up, fed me through my ravenous high school years, and paid every last dime of my college education. And now, on the brink of graduation, I'm more grateful to them than I've ever been for their support.

My angstier years were filled with the same arguments that any teenager has with her parents: We fought about my curfew. My fluctuating GPA. My "cleavage"-baring tops. But there's one realm of my life in which I've always felt the parent-kid roles are reversed, and that's when it comes to anything that deals with a computer. For starters, my mom clearly doesn't understand the concept of a Photo Booth filmstrip (see above).

In fact, in just the past year, I've made a list of the top five technological wonders that have passed my otherwise fairly savvy mother by.

1) Copy + paste. Yes, a simple function like this. Despite the fact that, as a real estate agent, my mom's constantly sending out online listings to her clients via long, laborious-to-type links. In order to copy, she had actually been toggling between two windows and typing out the link, letter by letter. If she needed something pasted with urgency, she'd call me over to her room for assistance.

Before I left for college, I was determined to teach her to copy and paste once and for all. The whole family celebrated when she achieved right-click nirvana. (My handwritten instructions remain taped to her desk -- between you and me, Ctrl + C is probably too much to ask.)

2) Blogging. "Huh? You write for the Internet?" she asked. It's been years since I started blogging, and my mom still thinks it's "cute" -- in the same way my finger-paint creations were in the third grade. She can't really fathom what a blog is at all. She only knows she can't stick it up on the refrigerator.

I used to have an internal struggle: publicize my writing, or take the risk of having my mom find out about my sex life and drinking habits? Later I discovered that either way, I was in safe territory. Beyond technology, there's another language that's more effort than it's worth for her to bother with -- English. "Why is there so much text?" she asked me. "I only look at the pictures."

3) Upgrades. A couple of months back, mom dropped her laptop, all but breaking the screen off in the process. My brother insisted on purchasing her a new notebook, much to her frugal, "It still works perfectly fine!" chagrin. When it arrived, she used it for all of two days before declaring it unfit for use. Her use, that is, seeing as she couldn't get her Chinese version of YouTube to function.

She continues to use her old laptop ... that's literally taped together at the hinges. As long as she can watch her Korean soaps, right?

4) The iPhone: "You know," I told my mom as I navigated her to the airport on my iPhone the other day, "you'd actually probably really like having an iPhone. There's GPS, you can look up restaurants ..." For a couple of minutes, she looked like she was deep in thought. Then, finally, she broke the silence: "But where are the buttons?"

Later that day, she asked me how to insert numbers in a text. So much for the iPhone idea.

5) Or, for that matter, texting. My mother puts painstaking care into each text she sends out; after all, it's a rare and special occasion that warrants an SMS. I fill her inbox with random, emoticon-happy messages on a regular basis, but she's pretty anti-text. "Why wouldn't you just call somebody?" she always says.

Which is why I was surprised when I received one on Mother's Day. "Thanks for Mother's day gift.Have Nice Weekend. =3," it read.

Don't get me wrong -- I was impressed by her efforts. I just didn't know how to tell her that her symbol of love more closely resembled a penis than a heart. Normally, I would have attempted to give her a detailed instructional on which buttons to press to produce the intended result.

This time? I thought it best not to frustrate her further. After all, she'd tried. And so I did what any good daughter would do: I just sent her a =3 back.

Teresa Wu is a freelance writer in San Diego. She runs the humor blog, My Mom Is a Fob, a depository of hilarious emails, texts and conversations from a plethora of technologically challenged Asian moms. For more, check her personal blog at By Teresa Wu.