It’s So My Mom.

I was chatting with this fellow on a flight a few months ago about my childhood. We two, both being overindexing cerebral types in the much-too-for-our-own-good category, expressed a certain solidarity in shared unhappy childhoods. Nothing tragic had happened: We were simply unified in having had the simple understanding, however, of far too much, so much that so we knew nothing. I still don’t. But still — for me, this dreadful insight was heightened and manifested in a single microcosmic cause, gathered on the pinpoint of A Certain Phobia that haunted my first 18 or so years of existence. I only started to live after.

The only thing this has to do with my mother: A certain mundanity that we all impose upon our juniors when we reach a certain age and start carting them around in mini-vans and private school uniforms. The kind of mundanity (to make up yet another word) that smells like Sunday did: Wet, humid evenings signaling an impending school week, sticky and heavy with chest-crushing fear and foreboding. Of tests, politics, and The Phobia. Same shit, different island.

Sunday was always the worst, ruled by the gut-churning sameness that must be the bane of Purgatory. There were bright spots to my childhood: Cousins in faraway cities with late nights, movies, novel food. But Sundays in San Antonio. Always the same furniture store with the same dark wood loveseats and sleigh bed frames, weighing heavily on my bored chest. (Furniture shopping still feels alien, like playing my parents in a movie. I buy online a lot.) Hours of neighborhood trolling for houses we would never buy. Every Sunday: Poor kids with their faces stuck up toward the opening of a vanilla frozen yogurt spigot at the buffet. Would this be life? Even then, I contemplated the finality of it, on account of the banality, wedged in small spaces with little legs pointed up toward wall-rested feet. If I followed this path, it would go too fast.

And yet, if my parents so much as moved the comforter stand, my life fell apart. Things would never be the same: There was visual, spatial proof of that. I might as well have moved to Mars. We can’t blame our parents for everything.

These days. My mom represents something different. When I shipped out to college, I missed our powwows at La Madeleine intensely. During breaks at school we’d go and order the large Caesar and cups of tomato basil, then grab countless ramekins of jelly and butter and fill endless tiny plates with free bread. Mom would get drunk off Brandy sauce and ask me about school and boys. Or to drive home. Even without a license. Even then, when we’d fight literally tooth and nail, she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in person.

Months later I’d stand in some public university bathroom on break, thinking: I wish I were there, right now, with mom. Politics, religion, personal interests aside.  Then, back to class. Waiting Always on Tomorrow.

Try as you might, you just can’t outsmart evolution. You know, that thing that dictates how people came about, and continue to grow? Call it fate, for our sort of shorter-winded purposes here.

You see it all around you — even in this episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares.” The coevolution of old age and marriage have made a distinct set of behaviors practically inevitable, which I have witnessed from my own matriarchs, and which I fully expect to realize at the end of my own rope.

…And which, most importantly for our post, are demonstrated in the relationship between old-time couple Adele and Bill (below): Woman grows into a crabby ol’ prune from years of thankless service, directing her resentment toward her old man because, well, he’s closest, and the people who inevitably feel sorry for the ol’ happy-go-lucky-bastard don’t know all the shit he pulled when he was younger. Behold: Destiny. *

And what does Poor Bill have to say?

*Special thanks to my beloved, long-suffering Bigchap for his brilliant editing of those copyrighted clips. There’s nothing that engineer with an actual personality can’t do.

So I know I’m always complaining about issues my mother has saddled me with, implying that it’s her fault that I sometimes seem unfit for the non-loony world. But sometimes when a prism shifts, you see it in a new light.

I’ve often lamented the paranoia my hypochondriac mom has bequeathed me. And on a business trip last week it was in rare form.

In fact, it started running rampant from my first flight—not surprising, actually, as the fear of flying is something I’ve cultivated on my very own. I also lay claim to my very overactive imagination, which conjures all sorts of Final Destination-worthy scenarios that could bring planes down. Like birds flying at 30,000 feet.

But a much more realistic fear in light of both near and not-so-recent acts of terrorism is crazy plane passengers. And being that I was New York-bound last week, there was a motley cabin crew. And one of them had a turbin.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and I am ashamed to cop to the prejudice, being closer to a Democrat that the dreadful alternative and having dated a Syrian boy for four years. I tried to calm myself at the scene, reassuring myself, from my experience with my former Middle Eastern family, that only Indians wore turbins, and Indians aren’t terrorists at all!

But what about Pakistanis? I tried desperately to remember their headgear.

So I scoped the dude out extensively in the terminal. If this is sounding worse and worse, rest assured that I literally did the exact same thing to my own kind, a suspicious looking cholo (Spanish for thug), at the San Antonio airport last month. I intercepted him to ask if he had a brother named Mike, just so I could tell, from his response, tone and texture, whether I was dealing with potential shoebomber material on my connection flight to Dallas. (I swore I had heard someone page “Anthony Padilla,” and wasn’t sure if airport personnel were as up to speed on their terrorists as I.)

Back to the New York trip. I had done my homework in the terminal enough to assure myself that this guy was more Ghandi than Genghis (a stretch, but they both hailed from the eastern hemisphere).

That is, until he started hanging around the bathroom toward the end of the flight, “innocently” plying our stewardess at her station for apple juice. I was sure he was just biding his time so he could step inside the lavatory to mix up whatever he had brought in tiny parcels that had inevitably gone unchecked in our lax security screenings (which, by the way, did earth my suspicious looking box of business cards).

There was nothing I could do. I sat not in my seat at that point, but in the vacant back aisle, breath held, listening for my moment of intervention—tackling, plastic door storming, whatever needed to be done. I was sure that once that swirly-headed man went into the bathroom, he wasn’t coming out until he had everything together for our own little D-Day party.

And then he came out, took his apple juice, and returned to his seat.

Of course.

It’s times like this when I question the very thread of my sanity. Like, what witches brew of my mother’s overzealous caution mixed with my own rampant imagination has rendered me useless to this world? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

But a few days later, everything became crystallized. Like the food allergies that give the otherwise uberimportant immune system a bad name, my fixating on my momentary hyperventilations is missing the forest for the trees. What I’m getting at is that this paranoia is useful.

You know that fictional (or maybe fictionalized) character in Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones”? That would never be or have been me. You know why? I’m extremely observant.

Mother always told me to be aware of my surroundings, and by God, it stuck. Like last Thursday, when I had my first taste of New York City crackpots.

I was sitting in Dean & Deluca in the Borders at Columbus Circle mall, the only place besides the overstuffed Starbucks that had a free wireless connection (for a $12 latte and quiche). Over the course of my zealous e-mail answering and article writing, I became vaguely aware of an older man at a table across—but not too close—from me. He was checking me out.

No big deal, right? Until the person at the table to my immediate left left. And Old Man Creepy slid in there to replace her.

Most people probably wouldn’t have bat an eyelash at that, but it struck me as weird. Struck me as weirder when I caught the guy’s gaze looking not toward the book where it was pointed, but sneaking frequently at my face, and mis-matched stockinged-feet.

It was time to go, I decided. I hurried to the bathroom before my departure, then—drat!—realized I had left my scarf at the table.

But I needn’t have gone all the way back there to retrieve it, because Old Man Foot Fetish was waiting patiently outside with it when I reemerged. I thanked him and dashed down one set of parallel down elevators, turning back every second to make sure he wasn’t following me. And goddammit (sorry mom) if the old fart didn’t pass me on the floor below to bid me a forced friendly adieu.

I watched him pretend to go out the glass doors to the outside world, feigning another escalator descent. But I didn’t descend. I waited to watch until he went all the way past my view, into a world with other possible harassees. But right before he would have disappeared from view and into that world, he turned around to come back in—and stopped short when he saw me staring.

Who knows what this guy was up to. A mugging, a serial killing, a raping, or some harmless spank bank material. Thanks to my mom and the screws loose in my brain, I’m never going to find out.

Pikachu is my parents’ overfed, 9-year-old Chihuahua. I like to say that if he were a real man, he’d be a 300 pound Mexican. The kind that walks around with his stomach poking out of the bottom of his white t-shirt. (Disclaimer: I’m part Mexican, so I can say that.)

Needless to say, this is not a dog who has been particularly active. Now the plumbing’s not quite working, and the poor dear is incontinent. My mother’s solution? Slap a diaper on him.

Except that he never actually pees in the diaper. Instead, they’re dropped like poorly hidden Easter eggs around the house: two near his doggie bed in my brother’s room; one at the door where he pines for my father; one in the kitchen, where he managed to wriggle out of the thing in record time.

My boyfriend laughed so hard at the spectacle that he started to cry. But he sobered up in the car to insist: “That’s just not normal.”

I’ve decided that I don’t completely disagree with my mom on this issue. “Not normal” is my mom swaddling our months-old Chihuahua, Lady, in doggie diapies. She’s not totally potty trained yet, and in the interim, what should be looked at as inconvenient carpet piddles are considered an unallowable horror in my parents’ house.

But what else are you going to do with an incontinent dog than slap a diaper on him?

Many currents of similarity are emerging from my research on women becoming their mothers for my upcoming book. Among them: When you start to do things your mother would, your boyfriend will call you on it–and by your mother’s name.

Don’t do this, men. You wouldn’t shock your girlfriend/wife/baby momma with a Tazer, would you? Then don’t do the verbal equivalent.

My boyfriend calls me “Little Lonia,” a derivitive of my mom’s name, which also alliterates nicely with “loony,” “loonbag” and “loonbaggery.”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Maybe I’d feel differently if I were a mother, but listening to the whole ruckus about Ty Inc. possibly having fashioned two darker skinned dolls after the first daughters–so what? I detest how politicians use their children–intentionally or not–to project themselves as a wholesome family unit, then scream that they’re off-limits when it behooves them. It just doesn’t work that way.

And these girls are better role models than the other choices out there (ahem, Miley Cyrus).

Image via Wikipedia

Finally! From catnmus:

“My mother would leave the TV remote on the table (in front of her) and reach over and press the buttons with the thing still on the table. Instead of picking it up in her hand to press the buttons. Sometimes she would even use her other hand to steady it on the table as she did it. Every time I do this, I think of her, and it comforts me. She passed away from breast cancer 18 months ago.”

Had to blog about this on my new fav site, Open Salon.com, which isn’t exactly a guilty pleasure so much as the future of journalism. Check out my post and spill your guilty pleasure so we never have to whisper about loving Twilight, John Mayer or Manga ever again.

…And I want to know how. Send me some anecdotes or even video clips, and I’ll post ‘em. My own clip to come soon …

It wasn’t until I shacked up with my boyfriend about a year ago that I started to become that derogatory “C” word ubiquitously used to describe women. Crazy.

I admit having used the word to modify my mother many, many times in the past. And yet, the last time I visited home, she took the words right out of my mouth: “If women are crazy, men must do something to make us this way.” (Amazingly: I couldn’t agree more at this juncture in my life. Amazingly, because my mother and her pro-life friends dismiss feminism as the work of Satan. I think it did more good than harm, though I’m no left-wing feminist nutjob.)

My boyfriend sings this little song neither of us could have imagined describing me a year ago, before I left my life of independence for one of requisite football watching, questionable boys’ weekends and dealing with the “grumpy troll” I’ve turned him into: “Oooooh! You’re a crazy chap.”

Am I a little crazy in that lovable Shakespeare shrewish tradition?

Sure.

I can admit it.

But nobody else can say that about me. If they do, they must know me, and it’s an inside joke.

If they do and don’t know me, that’s just bitchy. It’s just–well, see the “C” word I use below. The other “C” word.

Fast forward …

I’ve been quite taken with Culture 11.com the past month or so. It’s like the moderate-right version of Salon or Slate.com.

Most of the female bloggers that comprise the varied voice of “Ladyblog,” then, are Conservative with a capital “C.” It follows suit that many (not all of them) espouse the idea that feminism is hateful and passé, and they demean it overtly and subversively often. This is ironic at best. These women, with their national platforms and careers, are insulting the movement that established them as rational enough to own their own businesses, choose not to have children, or dabble in the political arena. The argument is unintentionally ironic, at best.

Case in point: This article called “She’s Crazy, Get Rid of Her” by Ladyblogger Fausta Wertz. She counsels any man dating a “crazy woman” to let her go. I guess she believes she’s supporting this (not) earth-shattering tenant by citing “evidence” that’s only tenuously linked to the ground she has covered thus far: there are more “crazy” personal blogs penned by women than men out there, she says.

If you’re wondering how Wertz defines crazy:

“Women who write erotica about men who ignore them; women who believe themselves to be engaged to men who do not want their identity disclosed; women who glorify self abasement and humiliation; women addicted to plastic surgery; women addicted to drama and emotional upheaval; women whose favorite artist is the ever-narcissistic Frida Kahlo. I can go on and on.”

Obviously these topics have more applicable explanations than the too-simple, dismissive “crazy.” More importantly, I can rattle off myriad self-indulgent and silly blogs penned by men, and finally come to the conclusion that women should not date the crazy ones. A reader brought this to the attention of the author, and she promptly plugged the opposite sex into a similarly themed post.

But choosing to open the strand taking aim at women is telling: “Crazy,” the author feels, is clearly a brand cornered primarily by the fair persuasion.

Resurrecting the lambasted irrational female in this non-empathetic light is not making any new or compelling arguments–say, why people should make other people’s crazy significant others their business, or why classicly Conservative tenants like marrying a good man for money jive with the true nature of feminism (empowerment to start your own business!).

There is a fine art to lobbing the “C” word. Admitting that you’re a liberated but sometimes crazy and hormonal woman is cool. It gives other women the opportunity to relate and chime in as they see fit. But one empowered woman branding a vague mass of others as poisonously crazy? That’s just the useless, holier-than-thou cattiness of my mom’s—and even some of my—“Good Christian Bitches.”

Let’s cover some new ground and lob some grenades into the other camp. I’ve got a new “C” word. It’s Coulterish. Add it to the Urban Dictionary.