It’s So My Mom.

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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.

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Okay, so make fun of me, call me backwards, the antithesis of a feminist (that would make my mom happy), etc. But I have HUGE news: There’s a Sex and the City sequel! Almost.

Not everyone will be happy about this. Overheard while watching the SATC trailer in a theatre last year in Vegas:

Eighteen-year-old-skank: “Ugh. Sex and the City? I’d rather watch titties.”

In a couple of years, honey, you’ll be eating your words. I did.

Samantha always reminded me of my mom–in looks only. And the way she articulates words. Ironically, it’s almost Dorothy(Wizard of Oz)esque.

It’s a silent, interior time bomb, akin to the one that kills one of Tom “Scientology” Cruise’s cohorts in the beginning of MI 3: The Mom bomb. That point in your life where some silent switch is turned on, and you suddenly manifest all the mannerisms, sayings and annoying habits of your mom (or dad). Everyone goes through it, to some degree.

So who’s gonna crack and offer the goods? I wanna know how you’re turning into your moms. I know you’re sick and tired about reading how it’s happening to me, because I know I’m sick of reading every other vanity blog. This one is supposed to be cathartic for everyone involved. Help me help you!

How’s this: I’ll share for others first, and then we can all go in a circle (goddammit).

Some information I extrapolated from my friends over Christmas:

One has just started bending like her mom. Says she used to hate how her mother would bend from the waist instead of the knees when picking something up, and now she catches herself doing the same thing.

Another other friend has found herself asking people questions without context. A conversation or idea will play through her head, and without any expositional reference, she’ll ask someone involved a question about it. Like: “Well did they?” No context offered.

I have a similar plight. I’ve developed my mom’s unnerving habit of asking questions the recipient could never answer. Questions like, “Well, what was going on inside his/her head?”

Or my favorite transaction, from last time I was in town:

“Jennifer, did you happen to throw away my salad fork last time you were here?”

“Why would I throw away your salad fork?”

“Well, I mean, accidentally.”

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No telling how many kids will be born on this fateful inauguration day, and no telling how many of them will take “Barack” or even “Obama” as their first or middle names. My boyfriend’s sister is actually scheduled to C-section today, but we were unable to convince her to follow “Jack” with “Obama” or “Barack.” It’s a shame.

Can’t wait to see the inevitable reports on the baby name … and if more people are choosing our new president’s first or last name to immortalize in the next generation …

…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 …

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That’s the goal of new book “Start Talking: A Girl’s Guide for You and Your Mom about Health, Sex or Whatever.” Read the scant, three-questions-for-the-author writeup in the Detroit Free Press here.

Interestingly, writer and sex and intimacy therapist Mary Jo Rapini (can you tell she’s from Houston?) makes the case that young promiscuity can have a lot to do with bad body image.

Even MORE interestingly on a personal level, I had both a teetering body image and a tacit mom on the issue of sex growing up, and I still lost my virginity later in life than probably 85 percent of my Catholic schoolgirl friends. Moral of the story: Don’t talk to your young girls about the ins and outs of sex, per se. Just drill them with the idea that God has a baby ready to give them at age 15, and the only way to get out of it is to do, like, the reversal of sex. Whatever that is.

Side effects may occur: me and at least one other friend have been convinced in the past that we were pregnant under circumstances others would deem as immaculate conception.

I was sent this picture in an e-mail. The subject line: Fwd: Heaven has Sent You an Angel.

The text:

“Heaven didn’t want her, so they sent her to me.
I don’t want her so, I’m sending her especially to you!
The rules are simple: You can send her away, but you can’t send her BACK!!”

The sender? Good ol’ dad.

I get at least two e-mails a day from my dad’s joke listserv, and almost every one has to do with sex. My boyfriend is also on this forward list—and, apparently, another, where dad sends the REAL doozies. In effect, my boyfriend gets jokes addressing how to be a better lover. I told him to respond to those forwards: “I don’t need any help in that department!”

You can see why I would think this would be funny.

My friend Tamre’s dad sends her forwards too, but with a decidedly different feel. The last one was called “WILL I GET THE GREEN DOG BACK?” More of the self-help variety.

My dad is so cool.

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Or she should, rather than pen another mom-daughter memoir. But buy my book when it comes out …

Braindead today by some legalese about old people I must read for a copy writing job. So here is a quick smattering of mom news:

1. A scientific analogy on mother-daughter differences. At the cellular level, man.

2. Carrie Fisher writes memoir about mom Debbie Reynolds.

Fisher and her family are Jewish, so I’ll forgive Carrie her obvious oblivion toward the Christian Serenity prayer: God grant me the wisdom to know the difference … between a book people will actually read and my C-list vanity project. “Mommie Dearest” was already written (that goes for you too, Tori Spelling. And you, Jennifer Aniston’s and Demi Moore’s moms). Inquiring minds would rather know: Did Paul Simon like the Leia braids in bed?

Ouch. That was harsh. Something a little lighter from my boy over at The Straight Dope:

3. Did Spartan mothers really tell their sons, “With your shield or on it?”

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.