So Here We Are

Yo, my not-so-little warriors! I thought I would be back here before now but instead I get to be here now. I needed to percolate and process how I would talk to you, if you were here. When I started this, half a million years ago right after the internet got borned and all, you were all still really freakin'small and I din't expect to have so much to say. I also didn't have a road map for how to navigate being a grandma from this far away.

We know each other some now and I know that you read. You read good stuff - man, we're so lucky we get to read and that some of it's good stuff. Aaahhh, but I digress (which pretty much always happens.) I've given way too much thought to what my One Job as a grandma is and the best I can come up with is that I need to be a more consistent writer again, and more fearless. That fearless part is not my fave, because, like every other human I've ever encountered and really liked - I want you to like me. You're super cool and I still forget that I get to sit at the Cool Kids table on some days. (To be clear: I get to sit there ALL the days and I just forget some days. I do have days where I think I might not rock as steady as I do.)

So, I'll just show up here and you either will or won't and I'm cool with it. I'm going to keep the format the same and try to just give you three pretty clear things, but now that you can engage in critical thought - I'll try to provide content that makes your parents ask what you're looking at on your device. My logic is that IF I can hold your attention for longer than three minutes - that is legit...

one FOR sure - graduate from high school. I'm pretty sure that's not really a deal for you guys as you all seem pretty invested in your educations, but it's more than that - learn how to do your laundry and pay your own bills, do the car thing (it's expensive) and the phone that's not on your parents plan and learn how to clean pans without destroying the finish. Mend your own clothes and change your own oil if you can. Buy good shoes and take care of them so they last longer. Know how to sharpen a knife and start a fire. Plant some trees and eat food you've grown. It's more about your utility and self-sufficiency than anything. It feels good to be able. 

two GET.outta.here. Travel as soon as you can and go as far as you can. While it's not imperative that you travel alone, DO travel alone and go to places where you're hungry with curiousity and a little scared so your head's on a pivot and your heart skips some beats. I really hope you learn to speak other languages, too. I learned Spanish a long (long long) time ago and still remember enough to converse under travel pressure. I will always be thankful for that and it's helped me navigate the art and music coming out of that part of the world, too. There's way WAY more to our stories than just this country and ... how can you know what you love or don't if you don't try everything? Travel. Go, DO things and gather stories. All the things, and g'head and be scared - it's appropriate. If it wasn't scary everybody would be doing it and the boujie would smoosh our landscape like a mayonnaise spill.

three Even IF all this AI and ChatGPT works out fine - learn how to write, my little dudes. I swear t'gawwwwd, I will have to haunt you if you squander this opportunity to borrow from your killer DNA and keep the legacy alive. Never stop keeping actual humans creative and productive by reading books and listening to the stories you hear. Write pretty sentences and build solid paragraphs. Storytellers cannot be replaced with bots, no matter how clever they may be programmed. And, don't use that technology to cheat on anything. I would imagine you could if you wanted to, so just don't.

I know I don't have to say it, but I love you and your guts.

I love your brains and intentions. I dig your lil baby agendas. Go.be.do. 

xomomo

Three Things: Storytellers, Spies & Good Seating

 yo. my lil'warriors.

It's been a bit since we hung out here. Leave your shoes by the door and grab a drink. The cat will move as soon as you almost sit down on her. She'll move, I promise, just sit. I'm going to try harder to be a good communicator and maintain some peace in my heart believing that I'm doing everything I can to be a good enough grandma. (note the "Good Enough" part because I really don't want my expectations of being The Best Ever to smash my ceilings over here.)

I like to pretend that we've been meeting up here for almost sixteen (or ten) years. I pretend that you kinda know who I am and sometimes you wish I'd tell you something. While the brain part of me knows that's probably not true, the heart part is totally gonna play to that. It's super-weird that there really is no handbook on how to be a grandma when we have flying cars and whatnot. Ah, but I digress.

Soooo so much has changed, since you were born... since I decided I'd best write down the important stuff and fire up this little blog machine. When I was your age my grandparents were already pretty much mostly dead so I never got to know who they really were. I wasn't a big thinker at six and seven and, turns out - they weren't really big writers. Now that I'm older than the oceans - I have a bunch of questions that I won't ever get answered. Not a big deal, but I get The Curious ... like a virus. 

I'm optimistically clinging to a grain of hope that there's some small chance you'll find yourselves here sometime and you'll gain some deeper understanding into the meaning of life and why things are the way they are. I dunno. It's a total crap shoot. But I do know that if I don't try there's no way we'll know. It's just science.

From now on, the three things that I throw down once a week (oh please let me be that good) will be more than just manners and smash the patriarchy stuff. I'm gonna spill some tea that's way more real than a thousand tired memes.

one I offer this up so as to give you some insight into where I'm at lately. You should totally do a deep dive on Nellie Bly and then make a transfer and lay if on my world. Western medicine is so completely, dangerously broken and corrupt as to kill about 1300 people every day in America (I didn't link that because there is so much data and SO so much conflicting data and you gotta know fosho, the powers that be don't what us to wrap our brains around the truth but y'gotta trust me - Covid was childsplay comparitively.) 

But if you're on the marginalized fringes of this capitaistic life and death nightmare and you need nonscary healthcare - you might be hosed. I've played nice for a long long time in this arena and my compliance has amounted to support and endorsement. I've run clean outta ways to care about how I'm perceived so now I use recording devices and ... enough about me. What's blowing the wind up your skirt lately? I very much hope something is blowing the wind up your skirt, to be honest. And, Nellie Bly's story is fascinating enough to make me pretend like I'm part her, part Queen Victoria, part Lizzo/eilish/prine hybrid... you know what I'm talkin'bout. And, I very much hope you're deep into some powerful plans or deep thinks.

two I always deserved a seat at the table but I didn't believe it. I don't think I even fully understood the concept of that table till I was in my thirties, so there's that. No regrets and I still wish I'd gotten that memo a little sooner in the game. Dude. It was wicked hard to be taken seriously in business boysclubs when I was such a girl. I also didn't have to be the lifesaver every single.freaking.time. I was a cartoon of helpfulness and overachievement fantasy, and I give it zero stars. Do not recommend. I only share because this is a realization I have just recently come to and THAT trips me out. I'm way late to this party, man.

It looks like you guys are building lives with much better boundaries and tons of self-care, so I'm hopeful you'll take care of you and not settle for less than you deserve. Hopefully you'll be better able to separate your bliss from what you gotta do to survive. I'm pretty sure there can be an intersection of these two things and that you aren't building lives that make it necessary to hustle like I did. The hustle is not really great for long-term happiness and I could have hustled less if I'd realized my worth sooner. So, never forget that everybody should love you like I do. Grandma love is free range and so organic it makes you blush. 

three your great grandparents were freakin'crazy rock stars. They were also dangerously flawed humans and not actual rock stars, but way bright stars who got to get their sassy little fingerprints all over some great history. If you ever do a deep dive into epigenetics and start to look at the family lines and wonder how on earth this all worked out like it did, know this: Your ancestors were some ambitious hungry clever nuts.

Your Greatgrandpa Mueller told me that he invented the process by which they turn normal agate into carnelian agate and he gave me a couple stones that I wish I still had. He invented the process that made it possible for road signs to glitter in headlights by crushing up glass and including it in the paint mix. He also said he lived on the reservation and drove a Model A for the Indians in Oklahoma when he was only 12 years old. He joked that he was a runner (for illegal booze.) In the basement of their home he had an entire museums' worth of increidble stones and petrified wood and Indian artifacts that were all donated to the Smithsonian when he died. 

Papa Z was one of your other great grandfathers, and his highlight reel would be a clip of a laminated ID card because he swore up and down that he, singlehandedly with the Jesuit priests at St. Louis University, invented the laminated school ID and it just blew up from there and now we have topshelf AmEx black. Then he'd be on a ship headed to Japan where he took pictures and posed with Disney and wrote aviation stories for the press till magically he appeared and started the first global aviation information empire and publishing business. He was the craftiest of the legendary madmen sociopathic scientists. He turned keeping track of truths into a sweet life and crafted a personal world built on a bed of lies. Killer material for a story, there.

Both these dudes were emotionally unavailable at best and inattentive or abusive at worst, but they both did whatever it took to provide for their families and meet societal expectations. They weren't necessarily worse or better than their peers and when old people say "times were different, man" THIS Is what they're talkin'bout willis. Dads in the old days were not much like dads now (typically.hopefully) They couldn't have done it without the powerful fierceness of your great grandmas who were way too big to discuss here. They get their own three things on another day, and it'll be long. 

Freakin'creatives.

Creative endeavors, creative accounting, creative storytelling and painting and roadtripping and singing and playing and dancing and sitting under trees with people from other countries to watch the sun risings. We are a clever tribe and you're bound to wonder about that, at some point. So I leave breadcrumbs.

I'll just share everything I can remember and maybe someday when you're, like, fifty or so, you'll wonder something and then you'll remember, "OH yea! Snap! Momo left me an entire digital shitton of words over at that one place..." and you'll be glad that the internet got borned and I decided to not shut up.

I love you. 

If I didn't, we wouldn't be here.