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.

Play Nice & Get Outta Here

 Hay.YO, Mi Familia!

Welcome back to These Three Things! And, yes - Yes it has been a long time since we met up over here. I think I was just trippin'about the state of the world. I didn't get especially bummed out, but I was having a terrible hard time with being me. I couldn't commit to anything. Anything like talking or reading or eating or writing or thinking... Even a short little howdy over here, for you guys, seemed like it was way above my pay grade and I wasn't smart enough to pull that off. I know that's ridiculous, but it started before the Covid and just grew into a beast that I couldn't shake off.

And, then one day - A trip to Mexico (I'd never been but always dreamed of it) was on my calendar. I was going to find out if all the places I thought were paradise, watching TV as a kid, were as perfect a they seemed. I was all about Gilligan's Island and Swiss Family Robinson, I figured at the very least I would get to see beaches and turquoise blue seas. I saw all that and realized at least three things. 

one Do not go into a foreign country knowing nothing about their basic customs. I recommend learning the language enough to talk about simple things, too. It's about courtesy, being nice and playing smart. By learning about the place you plan on visiting, you are being respectful. It's what a lot of people do before they step outside their comfort zones. If you're going to Mexico (5 Stars. Highly recommend.) Just do a little research, learn a little language. Don't even tell me that you've got "an app for that." I will whip out my zzztpff.zzztpff zippety zip finger and say, "Don't even." But, it's adorable when you think you can just saunter into a second world country and enjoy the some level of connectivity that you do here in America. Just learn a little Spanish. It's not like somebody's saying you gotta wear a mask. (bad humor? Too soon?) 

two Unless you are made out of money, it's best to lock down your plans before you leave. This will be a whole lot more meaningful when it's your credit card that's being used for reservations, but just know that if you want to be an adventurer, you have to first learn to be a researcher. Every single thing from the transit to the accommodations and meals and customs and banks are all going to matter to you. Each consideration comes with it's own set of criteria and it takes FO.EVAH to work all the details out on each one of those things. It really does work to your advantage that your parents have gotten out and about. They've been adventurers, at one point in time, and they understand what it takes to get out... and about. You guys are super lucky. And, it's always a great time to start learning how to travel smart. I got to see two crocodiles get into a total throw down, just two feet in front of me. And, no - it probably wasn't exactly safe, but I'll bet I win the next round of Good Crocodile Stories. That stuff just never happens in our home towns.

three Any time you can choose to be kind, do that. If you've taken yourself outside your room, you've kinda signed an invisible contract that says you won't be the Problem Child and you'll play nice and do your best to not make life miserable for the people in your orbit. When you're nice, you're more inclined to notice nice people. Sometimes nice people tell other people something nice and it's cool. When somebody that I've not yet met tells me they love something I did - I just get nice and happy. Even with the mask, people can see your eyes smile and that makes things better. In general, if you tell somebody a nice thing you will be more likely to come by nice things. When you are kind it turns everything around to kindness and you might just make friendships that last a lifetime. 

I could go on all night, with that last one, but just know that we have way more power with love and compassion than we do with competition. I'm sure you'll get tired of hearing me go on and on and on about it (mucho blah blah blah, as they say....) but you'll survive. 

I love you more than seashores and luchedore masks.

xomomo

©2021 

Love in The Times of Contagion

Hey My Loves!

Again, I know it's been too long and for that I apologize. I wish I had a decent reason for being gone so long, but I do not. If I were to write you guys, every time I think of you, we'd have a million stories and words. I'm going to do much better at dropping by more often.

Right before Felix was born I decided I was going to start this blog and make it like letters that my Momo used to write me - full of love and fun things while also passing along little things that she knew were important. In the twelve or thirteen years that have passed since Felix arrived, I've changed format and my mind and top-secret spy locations a whole bunch of times - now you guys are pretty much all grown up and capable of understanding more complicated things and sentences and whatnot. So, I'm just going to keep doing this but make it more like a letter or a journal.

*Do you guys keep journals? If you don't, you might just love it. Get yourself a sweet empty book

with pages you love to touch. Find pens that fit your hand and have ink in colors you like. Tell yourself that every day you are going to write something. Anything, really. From what I've seen - you're very smart and you write well. Journalilng (I think that's what they call it) is a kinda cool way to do a whole bunch of things. Not the least of which is ....

one  Learn how to write well. Write your name, write your address, write numbers and letters and symbols in ways that show your style or attention to detail. Writing is a blast. When you have just the right ink, on just the right paper - it's like beautiful power. You can do or say or create anything you want and nobody is the boss of you but you.

I hope this little spot of staying home is at least a little fun for all of you. I also very much hope it's only a little spot and not some kinda long-term plan, because I'm just not really loving it so much. I do have to wonder though - what DO you guys do at school that makes it last all day long. I'm getting to help teach and herd a couple most-excellent teenagers, a little here and there, and we pretty much have all the actual school work done by noonish.

What's it like at your house? Are you missing all your buddies at school? I miss my friends so bad it hurts sometimes, but I think I'm getting better at being happy doing nothing, all by myself.

two  Learn how to enjoy your own company. Learn how to sit still. I could make each one of these things their very own books (like the bazillions of writers before me have done) but for me, they are so closely related, that I think you need to learn both at the same time. I also think that when I say "sit still" I really might mean, learn how to do nothing and be happy. What with the whole world screeching to a halt, I've found that I really do have time to not be doing something. I'm still not very good at it, but I think when you get to be an adult and you have to pay bills and whatnot, you forget how to stare at clouds or chase frogs... basically - do nothing. I really hope you don't forget how to be happy all by yourself, doing nothing.

three Get a job. Yea, I know you're still a kid, but I was on payroll when I was 8 or 9... your

mom or dad was too. It's a great way to make your own money to buy your own cool stuff. Just 'cuz all your friends don't have jobs means you have to be unemployed, too. Just put down these screens and go offer to mow the lawn or clean an entire bathroom; Ask where the cleaners and rags are. I'll bet you dollars to donuts, your parent will smile and ask if you want PayPal or Venmo or what. All y'all are going to be looking at dorm rooms or apartments within the next handful of years and you're going to want the nice stuff that you've grown accostomed to. Chop chop, buttercup. 

That's all I got besides don't ever give up hope. 

I started this note to you at the end of March.

It took me THIS long to remember that we got this. 

Protest where you can, smash the patriarchy

&

Don't touch your face.

xomomo

Three Thinky Things

Hey Shorties!
Sorry it's been so long since I dropped in. I fell prey to one of the oldest obstacles on earth and grew afraid to write and speak and sing and play, mostly. I've surrounded myself with people who are so insanely talented, it's made me question the treats I bring to this party. My vintage body waged a war that benched me into submission and forced me to crochet blankets for all my loves (just act surprised when you open your Christmas gift) and while I've imagined a billion things to write, I've banged out none of them.
What.ever.
I'm over it. 

Today's three things are a little more thinky than some others, and I might be using bigger words and more of them, but you're in middle school now and I know you come here. I see everything - like Santa Claus but more digital and less jolly. If I use a word you don't know, click over to your open Google tab (up there, at the top ... it looks like a tab resting on the address bar) and open a dictionary or thesaurus. I'm not writing down to you anymore because you're almost taller than me.

one One of you guys (or two or three) needs to launch an initiative to bring integrity and truth back to informative media. Start here - one of you needs to invent a TIME/DATE stamp that is present on every single page we can find on the internet. For the sake of this paragraph, just please for the love of all things holy, one of you kids needs to write the code for a time/date dealio that is always in red (or whatever your fave and logical, well thought-out color might be) in the upper right hand corner. Of  EVERY single.page indicating the last moment it was touched by the content creator. We put men on the moon way before you got here, I'll bet they'll teach you something in high school that will make this possible. But, just do it. Please. Then make it a law or something. It wouldn't hurt anybody.

(Backstory on this: Papa Z was wildly unique in many ways, but his attention to details, like who what where when why and how, was insane. It was his business to sell data, so it had to be fresh. Fresh hot data. If he found something in his daily stack, which included everything from our report cards to super secret government memos, that was not stamped in exactly the same place on every single page - he freaked the fuck out. He'd start bellowing "STALE DATA! This is DEAD to me NOW!" It was a much larger display than just all caps here can convey, but when Zulu got mad, our whole area code went dark. It was scary. As much as I wish this attention to detail didn't matter, it does. The internet is a dumpster fire and I hope you kids get it cleaned up. I apologize on behalf of all of us who came before you and tore into this technology like a toddler high on coffee cake under a Christmas tree.)

two Vote. Vote anytime voting is an option. Rally and gather and protest and resist and rise up, if you're on the wrong side. Vote in school elections and learn how the current process works. It could go without saying, but it would be verrrrrry unmomolike of me to not say it: I am pretty sure the whole poliltical process is trickery. Sadly, I invested my ten thousand hours in marketing, advertising, researching and entertaining, so I missed way too many memos about how our government really works and... I'm pretty sure capitalism is a scam. You guys have no excuse because I'm telling you now: Learn and research and vote. Study the French Revolution and see how it worked out for those guys. Build beautiful, smart and huge posters to take to marches and protests. Go to YouTube college and learn how to build the sturdiest torches and check amazon for the best deal on pitchforks. Go radical if you have to, just learn how to NOT get arrested. Your parents will teach you. I've seen them. So far - no arrests. Let's keep it that way if possible. And, please vote smart.

three You might not love this one, but I've seen your bedrooms and I would be remiss if I didn't just suggest this: You should consider the 100 Things lifestyle. If you start now, while you're still young and your brains aren't so hard-wired to associate joy with owning stuff, you could be some of the most chill adults in 30 years. Here's the deal - I didn't adopt this minimalistic lifestyle on some wild whim, it was the byproduct of inheriting about seventy kabillion things from dead people who just never threw anything away and kept on buying stuff. When they died, they did not take their stuff with them and I got to deal with it for years. I aged like a mofo in my 40s, it was not pretty. But, it was just stuff and it was eventually all gone. What would you grab if you were being chased by zombies and you could only keep what you could carry? Just pretend like you can carry a lot, because 100 things can weigh a ton if you're thinking you want books or weights. You will be so surprised at how much easier your life becomes when you just own what you need. Your brain will work better, you'll be less stressy (the average American spends 60 hours every year just looking for misplaced stuff) and you'll appreciate what you have way more than your mates who surround themselves with plastic crap from Walmart. 

Just a thought or three. I know you're young, but I'm sure I'll mention all this again. 
I love you and miss you like thunder.
Send mail.
xomomo

Judged by the Company

yo.

I completely forgot about this old thang, over here but have a kinda urgent and compelling need to see if I've got something resolved and I get to go find a new dealio to identify. I know I used to just you three things, but you're growing up so nicely I shall give you more.

Shoutin'out to my posse, today. My small but exceptional group of humans who are most all of the good and none of the bad are the reflection I see of myself, on my best days. I'm defined by the company I keep because I'm tragically empathetic. Like for real tragic and crippling and probably in the DSM with warnings and the support of Big Pharma. 

(Also worth loving is the fact that the reason we get to have cliches is because they are built on truth. My mother's most favorite cliche was "You lay down with the dogs, you get up with fleas" and that is where this has been percolating in me for the last few years. I was accidentally way too nice to a whole bunch of folks who had even less than I do, but I forgot about boundaries and almost without exception, woke up with the fleas who had stolen my money and car.)

Now, I'm sure you're wildly curious about why my posse rocks so hard and I'm gonna do my best to be specific and fast. So hold on.

I love that my loves don't daydrink whiskey or do coke/crack/meth. I'm immensely proud of the contributions they make to our world - they teach and volunteer and use their resources to make the world a better place. They don't abandon their babies with their parents and they accept responsibility like a boss. I get to sit on the porch with giants. They edit books & direct middle school plays, they are full-time caretakers for parents or children or they work 12 hour shifts on the oncology floor. I don't aim to glorify work or define anybody by the career they've worked hard to build (I do know that when they succeed, I always feel like I'm succeeding.) It also allows us a super cool place to vent about our jobs, too... mostly because we have them. I'm sure it's elitist or some other equally horrifying cruel statement about our times or my color, level of entitlement or the country I live in, but I love that I get to hang out with people who use their time well. They've always expected a little more out of themselves and they've actively engaged themselves in finding it. 

They compose and engineer or plan daytrip adventures and they never ever make people they've just met, feel Less Than. Ever. They open doors and offer up chairs. The people I most want to be like are kinda like my grandparents were, in that they understood social grace, boundaries and kindness. They don't consume rooms with narcissistic shocking acts designed to give them stage and OMG how I love that part. They practice or pray and they relax and laugh like their lives depend on it, but they seem to understand that there are times for a little of everything, in a full life. On our best days they make me feel ten feet tall.

I get to love people who give generously. They donate money that they don't really have and time pulled from the thin air of an impossibly overbooked life, to help people and not even make social media posts about their generosity. My world involves a lot of "Please" and "Thank you" and an occasional "Sorry" when it's called for.  I love it when we say "good morning" and "g'night" or "drive careful" and we know it won't be met with silent stares or angry grunts. I'm hopeful that we can bring these little things back into vogue... make them cool again. (Maybe these words are grown in volunteering, because they all do some of that, too.)

One of my most favorite things in the world has become people who can engage in a conversation instead of delivering a soliloquy  Almost none of my hours are spent enduring mansplaining or gaslighting, anymore. This family or posse or tribe or whatever the proper term is, has no trouble communicating. And, I don't mind tellin'you: THIS rocks. It's also made it easier and faster to identify the feelings these tricks produce in me and the volume of their insufferability I've never had so little stomach for foolishness. Nor have I had such a fine-tuned ability to distance myself from the fleas who do this. That part is every kind of cool.

My people are some of the chattiest and most clever idgets on the planet. We can talk from coast to coast and it makes cross-country trips feel like afternoon outings. We pun and have inside jokes that crack us up. We laugh a lot. A.LOT, a lot. We are also world-class cryers and can flood a room with tears for days, when the occassion calls for it. I think I'm just glad to be surrounded by people who get to be in touch with their feelings to both give AND receive love so authentically. They're real and multi-dimensional. 

We've gone through life well enough to listen as well as we talk so my loves actually know things about me and my family of origin or the students I play with and some of my most beloved clients. We all know each other's birthdays and special days that need to be handled with care (sadness anniversaries.) Listening is a lost art, it seems lately, and this part of the party is incredibly awesome.

The thing I speak of most here is that my loves got some mad respect. They hug with meaning, heartbeat to heartbeat for at least a hot second, for maximum pleasure. They are not shallow and duplicituous and they work overtime to not offend anybody. They do what they say they're going to do and they show up mostly ontime. They help babies and old people and they rescue dogs and cats. I am not shitting you when I say that I am surrounded by the most solid group of pioneers I've ever gotten to be near and I'm grateful.

When and if I ever judge you harshly for keeping friends who I don't think are good enough for you, I will hope that you get it and allow me just a slice of judgey mcjudgerton because I think you're better than that. And, you'll know That when it arrives and you'll want better for yourself.  I would give everybody in the world what I've got, if I could - but the best I can do is tell you about it so you can go find it for yourself. 

That is all and I love you and carry on.

xomoe

Yo. Felix.

I miss you, man. I miss the sound of your laughter in my house.

You should tell your dad to come visit soon, and remind him that you have unlimited Momo access and read my blog and I can talk you into things... like, coming down for a quick visit. 
We'll hit Nifty Nut House again and grab a taco or something.

You're Three Things for today are long overdue, but will always be true:

one Don't stop. Always rise up. Never stop rising up. Don't let the bad minutes drive the direction of your days. All days are gonna have rough spots and you are defined by the grace I see you share. You got this.

two Don't be afraid. Fear is a liar. I've been too wrapped up in my own head to sit here and write you three simple things, for months. That's not how this is going to work. We really have nothing to fear and we're kinda unstoppable. It's in our DNA. I'm not going to stop talking (writing.) 

three Build yourself a website. I know you don't think you need it, but I think you might. At the very least, you're gonna need to build some killah skillz to get your hustle on tight, and I think this internet thing is going to catch on. Learn about extensions, add-ons, apps, SEO, metrics, reviews, copy writing, editing, brand management and creating an empire where one didn't exist before. Jus'sayin. When I was your age, I was working full-time as a proof reader. N-numbers of airplanes. For real. Most tedious job ever. It's a new day - you get to do better. Do it. I can't believe you're ten and you don't fill out taxes yet. 

Move along. I love your guts to the moon and back. Tell your dad to call me.

xomomo