Future Me

I am not smarter than a fifth grader. I do not have a Doctorate or a master’s degree. I have a Bachelor’s degree in English and on most days I cannot help my eleventh grader with her math homework because “New” math kicked me off the learning curve over twenty years ago. I find myself feeling ignorant of the ever-changing economic structure of our country and I am at a complete loss for an understanding of why people on social media feel the need to gripe, complain and criticize someone else’s content that they were not invited to review. It seems simple to me:  do not like what you see? Unfollow. Scroll on. A fifth grader probably understands all the reasons that people need to share, and all the reasons why the creators read, listen to and respond to the people that hate them for what they share. In contrast, I have gotten some positive feedback for the things I have shared openly.

In recent years I started telling people to expect a few things from me as I age:

      1.)  I do not remember things well unless I write them down. So please don’t be offended if I ask for an explanation or a plan more than once.

2.    2.)  PLEASE stop me from buying shit off Instagram. Definitely look out for me when I start talking about the princess in Egypt who is being held against her will and can only get out alive if I buy large amounts of gift cards and ship them out of the country to her.

3.    3.)  Put on your big-kid pants, plant your feet and cover your ears because this girl is going to become Maxine from the Shoe box greeting cards. In the famous words of my dad, “Nuff said.”

The fact that I know I will be a forgetful, gullible, cranky old lady is partly a true acceptance of the anxiety and neurosis that have plagued me my whole life, as well as an understanding of the road that they were destined to lead me. You do not have pads of paper in every room, a “Car Can” for each new driver in the family or a family and friend reputation as the bitch that never has enough time for anyone, without having travelled well-paved roads to those destinations. If the hardest part of solving any problem is first admitting that there is a problem, then assuredly the above roads will be paved in diamonds. Very bumpy diamonds that I will forget to pick up along the way because I didn’t write it down before I headed that way.

I may not be able to name every country in South America or name any of the presidents between Van Buren and Lincoln, but I have learned over the years who I am and mostly how I function, and more importantly, why. It would take a book and not a blog to cover all my discoveries, and that may be part of the road I am destined to travel at some point as well. For now, I am comfortable admitting that I do not know it all. I Google the things I don’t know or understand. And I am thankful every day that I can accept who I am, where I have come from and where I am headed.