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.

Let’s play one of those crazy stares picture games — you know, the kind where you stare at something and then slowly pull away until your brain realizes heretofore unseen things.

Look under my eye there, where the arrows are pointing, and then slowly pull away from your computer. The din of the screen should reveal the picture’s secret.

See that little blue vein? My mom has the same one in the same place in the same color. So now we’re friggin’ twinkies (twins).

Image by Debby A via Flickr

Ever do something weirdly festishy, and wonder where the hell it came from? I don’t wonder. I know. Who else relishes in sniffing their significant others’ ears? I do. I love sticking my schnozz in my boyfriend’s soft ear fuzz, then attacking all the soft, surrounding cartilage afterward.

If this behavior seems strange to people, let me explain: Not only did my mom do this to my brother and me, I remember my aunt doing it, too, while chanting the following incomprehenisble phrase: “Ese mugoso, so sweet, so sweet, daddy, ese mugoso so swayet!”

Lose translation from Spanglish retardese: “This dirty thing is so sweet.”

On a totally random, unrelated note, it’s hilarious how many women I found lamenting the possibility that they’d understand their mothers AS mommies on this recent installment by my friend Rima at Mommybrained. Ha ha, bitches! I’m not alone! (Boo hoo–it’s gonna get worse when I pop one out …)

Remember when your parents admonished you for not taking care of other people’s belongings? I do. My mother used to tell me, after a stained shirt or polish-stained rug incident, that one day I’d take care of my things, when I had bought them with my own money.

Nuh-uh.

Call me careless, immature, or unmaterialistic, to make up a new word. I don’t usually take care good care of my belongings. Bums would rightfully shun the inside of my car in favor of tidier street corners. (In fact, I got so tired of the hub caps popping off my Corolla that the last time someone followed me to let me know I had lost one, I went back just to watch it roll into a ditch.) My kitchen is clean now that I cook regularly—but when I merely dabbled in it years ago, only the flies and vomity smell reminded me of piling dishes.

I’ve always taken some sort of strange pride in this messiness. It placed my priorities in direct contrast with my mother’s: first comes work, which I like to think I’ve always excelled at; then friends and family; then, insert a million things here, including art house movies, which I rarely watch; and finally tidiness. My mother’s life starts and ends with family and a clean house.

This messiness is my last bastion against the transformation into my mom. I might be turning out just as crazy, but at least I have messy. My Alamo.

So Sunday I’m cleaning the dishes in the kitchen, quite relieved to finally have an empty sink (we don’t have a dishwasher in our awesome, new but circa 1920s-built apartment). It felt so good to have a clean sink that I did a little sweeping in the kitchen. And the kitchen is so close to the dining room, that maybe I should have snuck a little sweep in there too. I did.

And why stop there just because it was technically almost Monday morning? The suitcase in my bedroom—the one I had hauled a quarter of my clothes to the new apartment in about a month ago—needed to be emptied. And all the clothes on the floor needed to be sorted and picked up, too. Also, it was probably a good idea to purge my purses of all their 2009 receipts, for tax purposes.

I’m really, really hoping someone snuck some speed into that broccoli cheese soup I’d had for lunch. But I doubt it.

Because while speed could have made me manic, it couldn’t have accounted for my parlance: “Don’t you like having a clean place?” I asked my boyfriend, who would yell when he couldn’t find his dirty boxers or shoes in the random, mid-room spots where they had been left. “No,” he replied with sullen teenage angst from his computer. And I heard my mother’s voice echo through my head with a familiar but previously unappreciated mantra. “Don’t you like having clean sheets?”

Recycling. That my mother never did. And it’s decidedly un-Conservative. Yes, recycling is surely the answer.

My good friend Tamre is pregnant. I can say that now. I couldn’t before when I first found out: We were about to go on the Good Beer Show together and she called at the last minute to “bail.” Her excuse? “We think I’m pregnant. …Don’t tell anyone yet.” (You can only use that one once every nine months or so … hers turned out to be true.)

Luckily, there’s still something in this for me: I get the benefit of seeing a specimen change right before my eyes. Not just the part about a woman becoming A mom from her previously barren self, but also her becoming a little more like HER mom, specifically, in the process.

I’ll have to ask my mom how she felt when she was pregnant. I can’t help but rail against the natural institution. Especially after seeing movies like Slither, where a pretty young girl is being alternately sucked dry and grossly inflated as the breeding grounds for parasitic, nasty eels. Is the real thing that different?

But the baby isn’t what annoys Tamre about pregnancy. Nope, it’s the dumb, meddling people:

“Five months is a weird month in pregnancy. It’s the middle of my second trimester and the gravity of bringing a child into the world is starting to hit home. I’m big enough that people realize I’m preggo and didn’t just go on a bender at Chipotle. The flood of questions from everyone and anyone is overwhelming. And I mean overwhelming in the lack of common sense department. The contradictions make me want to roll my eyes and since I’m already a hormonal mess, sometimes it’s hard to handle. We’ll start with the easy and most obvious and see how ridiculous thse exchanges go.

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?

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.

… Into their horrificly opportunist mother Nadya with a sense of entitlement that’s probably large as the cow herself.

That’s the big hoopla here, right? The precedent set by Sulemen’s ravenous sucking on the public teet?

What about the more immediate impact she’s going to have on her children’s outlooks? Anyone want to project how much money her brood of 14 will burn through if they continue her communistic lifestyle (she gets $490 a month in federal food stamps and support for her three kids with disabilities)?

Check out her family Web site erected about a day ago. You can send a donation here, or leave a nasty comment here. Comments don’t show up anywhere on the site–wonder why?

You can also harass the Los Angeles-based Killeen Furtney Group for building the wretched Web site, no doubt pro-bono (I’ve sent an e-mail inquiring). I’d like to see how much they’ll make in the way of donations. Unfortunately they’re not compelled to disclose since they aren’t government engineered or forcibly publicly funded.

I can see the book from one of those fourteen kids, in 30 years: “It Takes a Village: How I discovered the joys of having ten-plus kids in a civilized society.”

To lighten the mood a little, here’s a brilliant, self-explanatory interlude from the Huffington post: “Top Ten Suggested Names for the Nadya Suleman Babies A to H.”