It’s So My Mom.

Image by La Ignorancia Mata via Flickr

I’m back from the dead. I let this site go for way too long (totally not cool, especially because I’ve started a new gig building blogs for businesses. Does not speak well for my ability to update content regularly!).

But my work life finally intersected back with my hobby/soon-be-be-author life (that’s this blog) after I went on the Good Beer Show last night to talk about beer myths and chicks. I was trying to wear my food writer hat, but I had met the host, Jeff Meyer, via Twitter, where my profile has a link back to this site. He didn’t mind helping me plug the book a bit, which was great, seeing as how I need, oh, 500 more interviews with women to finish the book.

Plenty of women are sympathizing with the topic–both of women becoming their mothers, and that chicks do drink good beer. I’ll post the podcast when it’s live.

But the whole chicks and beer thing got me thinking … it’s so not my mom. But it also points to the differences between my mother’s specific time in history and mine. I’m young and hip when craft breweries are growing like flowers in sidewalk cracks, finding ways to rise above a crappy economy. (Of course I’ve set the argument up this way to soon examine circumstances when my mother was young and hip, which assumes that she was, in fact, ever young and hip. Not sure. Had a daydream the other day about what it would be like to be back in time and in her body when she was my age. And then I realized that was probably the logic behind the movie “Freaky Friday.” But I digress.)

Plenty of women revel in craft beer culture today–even if some Bud Light-drinking idiot chides us for it, or a misanthrope on Beer Advocate decides to sully a female BA’s rating notes with patronizing comments.

Yes, we do demand clean bathrooms in our breweries, and we’re starved for some cute, form-fitting swag (watch for a possible Short Change offshoot on these topics). But we also edit the top beer magazines and win brewing awards.

In my mother’s time, female beer appreciation probably wasn’t appreciated. She was left stone sober to do nothing but … chores. No wonder we’re so different.

A perfect example of how I will never, ever turn completely into my mom (I mean, really, these interludes offer me a shiny beacon of sanity and salvation).

Los Angeles-based writer Seth Grahame-Smith will release new book “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” on April 15. The succinct publisher summary: “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.” (Jane Austen must be turning in her grave; she’s actually co-billed with Grahame-Smith on the cover, like she consented to this.)

My mom would have reacted like most of these women on Trashionista. I just recently learned of her love of Victorian, Elizabethan period pieces. That fits. But I honestly haven’t seen my mom read anything but the Bible and fashion magazines since, well, ever.

Conversely, I have a deep-rooted dread for the original chick-lit.

Whenever I’m dragged to Anne Hathaway’s latest silver screen period piece, I interject my own Mystery Science Theatre 3000-type dialogue to help bring the storyline into the 21st century (and cure my boredom). The last one she was in also featured a lad with an unfortunately stereotypical English face–that sort of retarded, drooling look–so I took to exclaiming, “Cousin Gooba [Goober]!” at every one of his cameos.

My friend Shanel was not happy. But at least I distinguished my singular and autonomous identity.

I kind of respect myself for wearing crap no other woman would be caught dead in. It’s funny.

Of course, I appreciate the very tailored, very classic dressing aesthetic my mom has bequeathed upon me; sort of like Carolina Herrera meets Anthropologie meets journalist’s salary.

But when nothing is clean, I am not past throwing on the wrinkled black polyester Express pants and open Christmas sweater vest over a way-too-low cami. Top it off with hoop earrings and a too-dressy white gold necklace, and I am tres ghetto.

Image by jdlasica via Flickr

If there is anything I do that is so, so, SO not my mom, it’s how I keep my apartment.

My mother was like the Gestapo of cleanliness. I was a straight A student in high school, but I got grounded repeatedly for leaving the toaster out. My room, though spotless, was “never clean.” People could not come over, and if they did, Lord help me if they sat on the bed. Nevermind that all the chairs were for show, too. We sat on the damn floor, where filthy children belong.

So. I don’t know whether I was always messy by nature, or if this conditioning made me go the other way. The fact remains that I have always been messier than your average bear.

Now that I’m shacked up with a boy who believes that the place to put dirty socks is somewhere around the couch on which he’s peeled them off, there is nothing to keep this in check.

My friends all know about this history o’ mine. Before I moved up and in with the boy, my friend Ronnie imaged our place: it would be littered with fast food wrappers, which we’d frolic around, giggling and naked. Turns out I’m usually the only naked one around here, and nakedness likes company, so I’m less naked than usual. But the wrappers and such, oh yes, that has come to fruition.

Take a looksey. I know I shouldn’t be showing this to anyone, but I have a bad case of verbal diahrrea. Also something that’s so not my mom. More on that soon. First, behold, the mess that is our A-P-T. If anyone knows the next time Oprah is doing one of those messy home interventions, let me know.

Image via Wikipedia

Samsung launched a social media site called “Moms Like Us” last August. The site has all the trappings of a virtual watering hole or peanut gallery for moms obsessed with washer and dryer tips and news.

Inevitably, a man started a thread on the site accusing Samsung of being old-fashioned for assuming that mommies are the only ones that do laundry or are interested in washer-dryer news–and the chance to win one, another of the site’s draws.

But what I find unprogressive–or maybe just more whitewashed–are the site’s hokey interactive polls. The current one asks what it would take “for your husband to help with the laundry.” The options range from “baseball tickets” to “action movies” to “not throwing away his lucky shirt.”

Come ON. In my apartment, my boyfriend does more laundry than me. And if I had to bribe him, he wouldn’t give a flip about those choices. I’m not starring in some color version of Donna Reed here.

And neither are my parents. My mom’s bait would probably entail some promise of three consecutive trips to the buffet, turning off her morning dose of Christian talk radio, or ditching my grandpa from Sunday lunch.

She could probably get a years worth outta my dad if she let him punch one of her proselytizing, vitamin-peddling friends.

And I mean ONE in particular.

My coffee shop friend Carly came up with a fun idea: Do It Island. It’s just what it sounds like—polygamy for everyone. She thought to keep the island afloat by selling the babies such a promiscuous lifestyle would produce. I suggested selling the boys to Japan or China.

The island would be under a no-fly-zone, of course (which necessitates, I suppose, having to float-ship the babies, Old Testament style). Loincloths and grass skirts, for lack of mass-produced clothing, will be the island attire.

It’s a funny thought, my mom on Do It Island.

“All these men keep asking me for a blow job, and I don’t know what I did with my dryer! … Did you see that man’s loincloth? It was tough.”

Image via Wikipedia

Proof I still have my own identity: The Fart Game!

This one’s for my dad!