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New Favorite Website, chapter 2

Jill

It’s not as adorable as the Daily Puppy, but I am hooked on Postcards from Yo Momma — mostly because it is exactly how my mom talks when she IMs me. There are always lots of exclamation points, and my mom is a huge fan of large blocks of text in one IM — she clearly has a series of questions she’s been meaning to ask me, and so she asks them all in one block. She also calls it “emailing,” and signs off with “Ok honey talk to you later! Love, mom.” It’s really cute.

My mom has yet to discover Gchat, but apparently some other moms on Postcards have figured it out. This one is my fave:

* me: Mom, did you watch the Sex and the City trailer?
* Mom: Oh Hi, can you see me right now? No where is it?
* me: hi! No, this is just instant messaging. I just sent the link to you, check your inbox
* Mom: ok, aren’t you impressed with me on chat!!!!!!!!!
* me: no, you are way too slow, stop typing and go watch the trailer
* Mom: Fine, is it goood?
* me: SO GOOD
* Mom: How did you type that back so FAST!
* me: Mom.
* Mom: OK I am going to go watch it now. bye bye
* me: no don’t go anywhere, just watch it and then tell me what you think
* Mom: ok
* Mom: I CAN”T WAIT!!!!!!!!WOW!!!!!YEAH!!!! when does it come out? It probably said, I am going to watch it again…
* me: May 30th
* Mom: I better get moving, talk to you soon, Love Mom
* me: get moving where? what do you have to do today? i’m the one who has to get back to my job, I have to go
* Mom: Work work work
* me: you’re ridic, lata playa
* Mom: Bye, Lata playa
* me: Mom don’t copy me
* Mom: Word

Thanks to Deanna for spreading the word about this amazing site.

Posted in Fun

46 thoughts on New Favorite Website, chapter 2

  1. haha! that would be my mom, if she ever figured out how to use instant messaging! only she’d be telling ME to type faster! lol

  2. Wow. haha That’s great. My mom can hardly e-mail. And she misspells things horribly. If she ever ended a conversation with “Word”…just…wow.

    hee That was fun! I’ll have to check out the site.

  3. Apologies for being the grammar police, but can you please change “explanation” points to “exclamation” points? For whatever reason “spreading the world” doesn’t bother me so much.

  4. Apologies for being the grammar police, but can you please change “explanation” points to “exclamation” points? For whatever reason “spreading the world” doesn’t bother me so much.

    That is totally what I get for making fun of mom’s typing skills. 🙂

  5. ZOMG! those are hilarious! it’s like my mom, only she starts freaking out that people can see her name…she is so funny.

    thanks, Jill!

  6. MY MOM DOES THE EXACT SAME THING!!!

    Seriously, the “love,Mom” sign offs, and calling it ‘e-mailing’ Every time. It’s amazing.

    Usually when something like this happens, I assume that all the Moms got it from NPR (which is what I blame for every friends’ mom I know being against the Simpsons through the early 90s), but now I listen to enough of it that it can’t be from there.

    Maybe they have a newsletter.

  7. How is it that all moms have the same online habits?

    I remember when AIM was in its heyday, right as I began college. My mom was always, “Can you see this?” and she’d go on and on when my away message came up, thinking it was me typing to her.

    away message: “At class”
    mom: “Oh. How are you doing? ……… Sarah? Sarah?”

    Also, she uses a lot of exclamation points over email, and uses a lot of run-ons.

  8. Oh, that’s so wonderful. My mom is the exact same way. It’s hilarious, because she’s actually a good writer when she’s writing something formal. But on e-mail, she’s just like everyone else’s mom, with the health suggestions and the exclamation point and ellipses abuse. I think the funniest was when she got GMail and didn’t know the difference between e-mail and chat, so she sent me a message, shut the window down, and when she found my response later, typed out: “This chat business is the coolest thing ever!”

    My estranged grandmother also has online access, which is less cute and more sad. She sends me the sort of e-mail forwards that belong on MyRightWingDad.com.

  9. Sabotabby, I think your gram knows my aunt, who sends me the most awful bigotted, racist and sexist jokes, along with all of the chain letters, God Bless Our Troops and Country stuff, etc- even though she knows my views and that I’m a life long atheist. Considering blocking her as spam- sends me 5-8 emails a day…

    This will never happen with my mom (who, because of my dad, “is not allowed to have a computer”…), but I have GOT to learn how to IM so I can do this to my daughter!

  12. I’m sorry to take over this thread but I’ve been reading that site for about 20 minutes now and I have to smile and *sigh* at the common theme(s) all the emails and chats share. Moms just want relationships with their kids. They want advice about clothes from their daughters and help with tech issues. They try so hard to be “with it” so they and their children can relate to each other somehow. And they miss their kids terribly when they leave the nest.
    Also, they give hilarious pet updates.

  13. MY MOM DOES THE EXACT SAME THING!!!

    Seriously, the “love,Mom” sign offs, and calling it ‘e-mailing’ Every time. It’s amazing.

    OH MY GOD. I thought my mother was the only person who signed off chat with “Love, Mom.” That’s awesome!!!

  15. It took my mom forever to realize no matter how much she said “are you there? pick up” on my voicemail, i couldn’t hear her.

    also cutely, my dad text messages me about 2-3 times a week and it’s always cutesy stuff he’d never say in person, like telling me about the daffodils that are shooting up in their front yard, and giving me updates on my old cat. he also uses a salutation and sign-off for each text message.

    my uncle tried to friend me on myspace last year and i didn’t know what to do. it wasn’t so much that my content would be scandalous, i was more worried about comments from friends he might see.

  17. Actually I’m way more into the internet than my daughter… but then I’m only 41 and she’s only 14 so maybe that’s part of it?

    I’m sure I do things which embarrass her horribly, but in my case they mainly involve making video game references in public.

    But I imagine I come off as “someone’s mom trying to be cool.” Sigh.

  18. Happy to spread the love. When I sent it to my mom, she replied with, “Hmm… so far I haven’t seen anything wrong or unusual with them.” hee hee hee

  19. OMG, I also just spent about 20 minutes on that site, too — it’s fantastic. It’s really crazy how we seem to all have the same mom when it comes to email communication.

    Did anyone get as far as to read the email from the mom who said that if her child couldn’t come to dinner (presumably, the son/daughter was on a roadtrip that would go though their hometown), she would WAIT AT A PARTICULAR EXIT WITH COOKIES. So that she could give her drive-by kid a hug and cookies. Wow!

  21. Wallflower –

    That mom waiting at the exit with cookies sounds so much like my mom. She’s ALWAYS going way out of her way to make or send or do something for us. Sometimes it’s a little too much, actually, but God, I love her.

  22. Mom writes emails that check on how I am doing and whether I’ve eaten well. Other than some minor grammatical errors and a tendency to forget capitalization, she does not attempt to be “with it” by using current slang.

    Dad, however, is a total technophobe who won’t even touch a computer, much less actually use one. No matter how much mom shows him the wonders of her Mac notebook…including the built-in Chinese character inputs of OSX Tiger/Leopard….or my showing him how easy it was to find Chinese language news sources and scholarly journals….he’s just cannot be bothered.

  23. Oh that is so cute and funny!
    My mom and I never e-mail or chat (but she texts me like 15 times a day, stuff like “current standing in the hockey game: 5-2. Yay!” or “sunshine! Yay!”), but I do hope she’ll learn some day.
    I’m not holding my breath though, when I got my first computer with Windows 95, she got that “illegal operation”-message from Windows and she totally freaked out and thought she had done something illegal and that a police report would be filed or something. It was quite funny once I had calmed her down… 🙂

  24. my mom definitely does the cryptic three line emails (she types with literally one finger) and abbreviates “please” to plz. it’s pretty awesome.

    on the puppy not (jill, that website was ABSOLUTELY adorable…you have now forced me to waste MORE time at work):

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7RejaJGrCY

    adorable. i need one…now!

  25. My mum signs off everything with LOL – at first I was confused about why she was laughing out loud at the end of every text or IM. When I asked her about it, it transpired that she thought it stood for Lots of Love 😀

  26. Violetfishy, my husband used to think the exact same thing. One day I sam him IM’ing his brother and he had used LOL in a really inappropriate place- I can’t remember what it was, but I think a pet had died or something along those lines and I was horrified that he was laughing about it, but he thought it meant “lots of love”.
    My mom, on the other hand, I refuse to IM because it takes her three hours to type out a response. The only reason I IM her is to tell her I need to talk to her, will she please call me on her cell phone.

  27. Jill, thank you. I now have tears streaming down my face and I laughed so loud people down the hall heard me. This website is hilarious.

  29. Not to harsh anyone’s mellow, but apparently, my mom is an alien. When we (rarely) chat, it’s identical to how we talk. She’s pretty tech savvy, and there’s no fashion or cute pet things. It’s “how’s the dissertation coming?” and “I sent you some soy milk coupons in the mail.”

    I wish we could discuss cute pet things.

  30. Not really grasping the “quick conversation” aspect of chats, my mother writes huge email-like blocks of text — all grammatically correct — and I’ll forget I’m chatting with her for minutes at time until the window flashes and there’s this huge message.

    My father will read email if he has to, but he has never answered as far as I know (he says it’s foolish to email or chat when you could just talk to the person) but I think he’s scared, really. Heh.

  32. Here comes Debbie Downer:

    I’m fortunate enough that my mom’s a lot like that too (maybe not quite so over the top) but in my life, I’ve always been aware that I was incredibly lucky and unique in that respect, at least compared to my friends/lovers who are basically all queer/trans… Reading that all I could think about was how much the people I’m closest to would give to have their parents act that caring and affectionate and supportive towards them–I’d never show that site to my gf, for instance, she’d probably feel devastated by it. Surrogate moms for queers needed plz!

  33. talknormal, your girlfriend can borrow my mom if she needs to (borrow – I’ve grown rather attached to her). My mom ended up as a big of a surrogate to a number of my friends throughout my teen years. “Honey, who’s that sleeping on the couch?” “That’s Ian. His parents went out of town and didn’t tell him.” “Oh. Would he like pancakes?”

    Coolest mom EVAR, because she never tried to be the cool mom.

  34. I feel really old now and I’m only a few days away from 41. I never IM because I’m too slow of a typist and too vain to send messages with many abbreviations and slang.

    Also, why the mocking of salutations and sign offs? Don’t you say hello and good-by when talking to people on the phone or in person? But, then I alway include them when

  37. LOL, g od my dad and my adopted Aunt both do the “Love Dad” or “Love Wendy” when they sign off. I’m like, HELLO I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. When I explained it to my dad he was like, “how do you know its me? It could be someone else.” And I was like, “ha! I doubt anyone types as badly as you.” My dad can surf youtube and google to his hearts content. He even uses StumbleUpon. But somehow IM floors him. I actually quit talking to my Aunt in IM because she took 5 min to type one sentence. I just email her now.

  38. My god this is hilarious. I am dying. I was totally freaked out when my mom started using Gchat, because I’d suddenly get surprised by her popping up and being like “Hello? Are you there?! Did you get the package I sent?” Seriously, like a cross between a bad sitcom and a horror movie.

    Most of my gchat conversations with my mom go something like this:

    my mom: Hi I am just writing to see how you are doing today.
    my mom: Are you there? Holly?
    me: Yeah mom, I’m here — I’m at work and I don’t look at this window that much. I’m fine!
    my mom: Oh OK. this is very funny, i’m talking to your sister at the same time.
    me: Yeah, you can talk to as many people as you want!
    my mom: Ok well, we shouldn’t talk on this too much, it’s not like the phone where you can just chat. I will contact you again if I have something that I need to discuss with you.
    me: Okay mom, yeah… feel free, anytime. Bye!

    Actually the real-life discussions with my mom are more hilarious, like when my sister and I tried to teach her how to tell jokes. She really has no idea how to tell a joke in the first place, and her attempt at a joke was something like, “Why trees… why leaves?” Somewhere there a surrealist performance artist / comedian / Noh dance choreographer who would greatly appreciate that.

  40. I’m afraid I’m the mom in that exchange. (((embarrassed))))

    Haha… no, don’t worry, it’s cute! Your kids love it, I promise 🙂

  41. “LOL, g od my dad and my adopted Aunt both do the “Love Dad” or “Love Wendy” when they sign off. I’m like, HELLO I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”

    I’m really intrigued as to why this is funny. If you were to write a letter on paper and mail it to someone, they would know before opening it that it was from you, yet it is still good form to sign off, “Love Beth”. It would be weird if it weren’t there. Similarly with email.

    I don’t think I’m going to activate IM any time soon. If people want to talk to me, they can call or write.

  42. “LOL, g od my dad and my adopted Aunt both do the “Love Dad” or “Love Wendy” when they sign off. I’m like, HELLO I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.”

    I’m really intrigued as to why this is funny. If you were to write a letter on paper and mail it to someone, they would know before opening it that it was from you, yet it is still good form to sign off, “Love Beth”. It would be weird if it weren’t there. Similarly with email.

    Because chatting online is more like a phone conversation, I think. When I’m talking to someone on the phone, I don’t finish by going “sincerely, Nomie.” I’d probably get laughed at if I did.

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  44. Raoul_j_Raoul, people aren’t referring to salutations in an email, but over instant message. It’s funny because moms treat IM just like email or a letter.

  45. oh, i love it! it reminds me of my mom, of course. the other day we were hanging out and she goes “i’ve become a stereotypical paranoid old hippie, im afraid the feds are going to bust in and take me away” and im like “WHATTT???!!!! why?” and she goes “becos i read alternet every morning”

    looooove her.

  46. I’m actually sceptical. I read the website and came to this e-mail with the mother telling her daughter about how she didn’t need to worry about finances and how she (the mother) had had a tough time but would always try to look after her daughter. And I thought it was pretty callous of the daughter to submit it to the website, as it was actually a pretty serious communication. And I didn’t really understand why the website printed it.

    Also, some mothers don’t really contact their children so much – I think that those of us who do have that forget that other people have really different family relationships.

    Finally, is it fair to mock? I think we don’t give enough respect to the women in our parents generation.

    All that said, I found the GChat thing above hilarious. I just wonder sometimes, with publishing e-mails people have sent to you, if it gets a bit out of hand.

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