My First “Ask Me Anything”

Topics covered: a third child, clothes I design, screen time, the Sims, the people who used to live in my house, and more

Welcome to the first ever mailbag post for this Substack! I will probably do more of these depending on how this one goes. Basically, I asked my Twitter users to ask me absolutely anything, and I would answer. And I really mean anything—some of these questions were super personal, others were super silly…I answered them all! This mailbag post is free, but my book is available to paid subscribers (one chapter per week, plus audio recordings) so please subscribe any way you want!

I was laid off in 2022 (aren’t I always), and right around that time I was starting to get interested in making clothes for my son because he was turning two, and that age is absolutely terrible for boys’ clothes if they aren’t into really stereotypical boy things (trucks, dinosaurs, etc.) and if you don’t like the whole sad beige aesthetic. I wanted to make clothes for my son based on stuff he actually liked.

Fun boys’ clothes!

So I did that, and then as I was doing that I realized I could make clothes for myself, since I struggled to find clothes that perfectly fit the bill of my favorite color (yellow) and my favorite cuts/patterns etc. Once I started I really couldn’t stop because sewing is really tedious but it’s also very tranquil and meditative. It’s hard to find time with kids and work but about once every two weeks I stay up till 2 AM either writing or sewing.

The short answer is that I drop the ball at work quite often.

The longer answer is that I have a very helpful husband who works flexible hours, a part-time nanny, I type extremely fast, and I’m not very good at my job.

Brontosaurus, although I was informed by a four-year-old at the park that this type of dinosaur never actually existed (chat can you confirm?)

So I’m not sure if this is a direct answer, but my username came from those ridiculous clickbait ads you’d always see in the late 2010s that said things like, “Dermatologists HATE HER! Mom of 50 looks 25!!!” Fun fact, my original plan for my username was “Deep Thots,” and the only reason I didn’t use it was because it was taken. I know the CHH moniker didn’t really age well since those ads don’t exist anymore but I’m very happy I didn’t choose Deep Thots.

I’m not sure if he counts as a cartoonist, but Sir Michael is hilarious. He does some cartoon-adjacent stuff; I don’t really know how I’d describe him other than a really talented Internet comic. I also really like Tony Zaret who does a lot of flawless satire work on YouTube, again not exactly a cartoonist but elicits the same reaction.

This would require me to alter all the clothing that I’ve sewn for my small boobs, and that would take months of sewing labor. If time is money, the cost of a boob job would significantly mog my annual Substack revenue. But hey, if you feel so strongly, buy a paid subscription!

This is a great piece of lore that I hadn’t thought about in a while, but basically when my husband and I moved into our new house, the people who used to live here (who now live across the street for some reason?) would hang around outside our front gate and smoke. It was totally legal because we don’t own the area outside the gate, but also super fucking weird. The most troubling part of this dynamic is that they never spoke to us. Aside from us being white, it’s really serving Jordan Peele movie realness.

Anyway, one day my husband just said hi to them (I think we were a bit afraid to do that before) and they were super nice. They do still smoke outside our house, however.

I actually think about this a lot. For most of my life, I’ve tried my hardest to appear normal and tone down the parts of my personality which ironically have resonated pretty well on the Internet (granted, thousands of people have me blocked, but that’s okay!) Sometimes I wonder if I should just quit it with the normal act in real life, and just “be myself” since apparently it worked so well to make Internet friends, but I truly don’t think it transfers. I think I’m unlikely to meet the type of terminally online people who like me on Twitter, in real life. That said, occasionally I do meet someone who clearly would like that side of me. Two of my coworkers subscribe to my Trump impressions podcast. I’ve sworn them to secrecy (hi, guys!)

For the rest of you real-life people: you’re getting the fake me. At least at first. Sorry!

Hell yeah! Four COVID shots and one actual COVID infection, so according to every crazy person on the Internet, I’m totally fucked either way.

I lean toward wanting a third. My husband leans against it because he only ever imagined us having two and he considers our family complete. I have to think about whether I want a third child because I actually want three, or because I just don’t want to ever say goodbye to the newborn stage—which is pretty short-lived. It’s not like having a third is going to enable me to have a permanent newborn. After that, will I just want a fourth?

I think it was this outfit, which had seven bows:

I can’t explain why I’m so obsessed with the term gooning; it’s ironic because I actually don’t think about porn or masturbation that much in my daily life, I just don’t have the time and even if I wanted to take up gooning as a hobby I don’t think I’d have the privacy to do so. But I simply cannot stop writing about gooning. It’s just the perfect punchline to any joke (some may disagree, I don’t care.) I even have a group chat with two of my best friends with the title “Goon on the Go.” I just can’t stop. Much like gooners. Many such cases.

Because my first was born during peak covid, we definitely erred on the side of “screen friendly” parenting. He never had an iPad or anything, but we had the TV on at home all the time. After we re-entered the world, we still reverted to letting him watch videos on our phone if we were in a setting where we really needed him to be well-behaved, like a restaurant or airport. After a while, this created more problems than it solved. He would throw tantrums if he didn’t have our phone. He also learned to navigate, so even though we always made sure he was watching somewhat acceptable stuff (Curious George clips, Hey Bear dancing fruit videos) he somehow navigated to even more inane and brainrotting content (still age-appropriate, but very much in the “slop” category.) He was getting to the age (3) when it wasn’t unreasonable to expect him to participate in the experience at a restaurant and have a conversation with us. So I made him a deal: no more screens at restaurants, and only half an hour of TV a day (maybe a little more on family movie night), and no more YouTube videos of any kind. In return, we would make him an activity table in the kitchen. Shockingly he agreed to this. We have the activity table and his current screen consumption consists of a little bit of TV every day, usually part of a kids’ movie.

The one exception we have on YouTube is Hey Bear—we let him watch Hey Bear if he’s at the doctor’s office and needs to calm down, or if we need to cut his hair and need his head to stay still (as an aside, nobody in our family has stepped foot in a barber shop or hair salon for 8 years or so. We all cut each other’s hair.)

Funny enough this is a perfect question for my husband who is obsessed with all of these things. Of course, I have no idea.

I was thinking about this one for a while and I struggle to answer because I have a pretty strong belief in personal liberty and letting people do what makes them happy, but I also think the majority of people would be happy by doing more or less the same thing (getting married and having kids) so society should somehow be built to enable that and make it easier and more pleasant, without making life harder for people who don’t want to do that. I’m not sure how plausible that is!

Part of the issue that I’ve written about before is that people have fewer kids than they want, in part because their resources/time cannot compete with ever-increasing standards for most things in their life, especially for their kids. Some things could be compromised on—like maybe we need to be a little more comfortable settling down with someone before traveling the world if we want to make room for the parent-years…but also, it’s good to have high standards for other things, like not wanting to live in poverty, or wanting to make sure you have enough time to dedicate to each child.

One thing that makes this especially hard in 2024 is that few parents have a “village.” Moms on my mom groups keep assuming everyone has that—like, if you’re having a hard time watching your three kids all day just “call a friend and have them come over!” But that just doesn’t exist. I have nobody outside of my household who I could expect to “drop by” and help me take care of my kids for free. And I’m not that person for anyone else. A lot of people forget that receiving help from your community also means giving it, or putting up with members of the “village” who do things differently from you (refusing to speak to your mother-in-law because she tastelessly called your newborn son a “ladies’ man” is not conducive to building a village.)

People have attempted to manufacture co-ops and communes but this is a problem because the people who do this are often crazy and annoying, and not the kind of people with whom you want to build a community.

I hate that this is the first thing that popped into my mind, but when I was a teenager I was playing Sims and one day the parents went to work and the kids were left at home. Normally, a nanny would show up, but something happened where the nanny was blocked from entering the house. The parents had put a quesadilla in the oven before leaving. You know where this is going. The house burned down and all the kids died, and the parents returned home from work to just…an empty lot with some piles of ash. It was so depressing I had to stop playing for a while.

On a more cheerful note, in my thirties, I had this Sim (in Sims 4) who I became so obsessed with that I tried to make her experience everything possible without any cheats—she was a painter, a writer, and basically completed every creative career challenge. She had three husbands (the first two died- I promise by accident!) and ten children. She was legitimately so cool that I kept extending her life via plus-ups to keep her around (her last husband was way younger than her.) She even died from cold exposure once, and the game had gone on too long for me to quit without saving, so I had her husband became a spellcaster and rise to the top of the spellcaster path to bring her back to life with some kind of potion. I loved her so much that I even built a museum in her name, adorned with her face on the entrance. This is her:

You know, surprisingly nobody really says anything. Maybe I get a woman here and there complimenting my clothes but I’m surprised at how I can dress with seemingly nobody looking or saying anything. My husband will tell me if he likes my outfits, but often I hear this when I’m wearing my most boring outfits.

I think strangers might think it’s rude to say something in public? I actually would love if people commented on my outfits, but they never do, so that’s why I post on Twitter for the fashion girlies! One person on Twitter even called me “Shein Olivia Rodrigo” which was so funny that I actually kind of enjoyed it.

I’m pretty open about it. My husband gets the most information, mostly against his will. Most of my friends, and my entire family, and even some of my coworkers, know about CHH. I don’t really hide it because I’m embarrassed or because I think it would harm me socially. Most of the stuff I say on CHH are things I’d say IRL. The main reason I stay anonymous is that it fits with my brand of balancing the normie and extremely online degenerate within all of us. I don’t think using my real identity would be that big of a deal at this point, it would just make the whole thing less fun and expose me to some of the most unhinged people online.

This is a reference to my older child, who inexplicably asked me to call him Anthony Pizza for a while. Turns out this was a character from Curious George (I knew there was a character named Professor Pizza but didn’t know his first name was Anthony.) He only did the Anthony Pizza thing for a few weeks, then he moved onto Petey, the main villain from Dogman, among other aliases (at one point he was really phoning it in and asked us to call him “Window.”) His current alias is Johnny, which is actually a character from his current favorite movie, but it’s also a regular name so we call him that in public and nobody thinks it’s weird.