The first question I asked myself was:

Am I a Writer who yaps, or a Yapper who writes?

If you know me in any capacity, you probably already have your answer 🫢

PAUSE: At this point in the email, my mom is looking down at her phone while on her break at work. She is scrunching up her nose, squinting her eyes, and making a face that’s a cross between looking like she smelled something terrible and being utterly flabbergasted with disgust at what she’s looking at. Throughout this, she’s asking herself, “What the heck is a Yapper?” 🤨

Tranki, mami, no tienes que buscar en Google que eso ya no funciona. I found some definitions so you don’t have to ⬇️

New York Times:

Yap (verb) — To yap, in modern parlance, is simply to talk… a lot, often about something of little importance.

“In the internet context, I would say somebody that’s a yapper is somebody that talks too much or is an over-sharer,” said Taylor-Nicole Limas, a 27-year-old influencer and self-proclaimed yapper in Chicago.

Okay, Nicole-with-the-hyphenated-first-name, props to you for being self-aware. You sound like you can yap with the best of them. Maybe we’ll get to yap 2gether one day.

AstroSafe:

A “yapper” is someone who speaks persistently, often at length, and sometimes to the point of overwhelming or annoying others.

Overwhelming???? Annoying????

Two words that can easily be used to describe my yapping. It cannot be denied.

I’ve made my peace with it 🧘

Let’s do one more definition to collect as much information as possible.

Urban Dictionary:

yapper (noun) — a marijuana blunt laced with crack cocaine.

😳

Hold up, wait, I— Mami, disregard that last definition. I don’t think Urban Dictionary contributor Realweedmane was talking about the same thing I’m talking about when he submitted that entry on June 17, 2005.

Please forget this ever happened.

Okay, mom, now that you know what yapping is, and you’re thinking to yourself, “Yeah, those two (and only two) definitions make perfect sense about my son whom I love more than anything,” We can keep going.

I’m definitely a Yapper.

I’ve always been a Yapper.

If the word yap didn’t exist before I was born—which it did—it would’ve spontaneously been added to the dictionary on the day I was brought into this world ✨

There are even times when I catch myself mid-yap, and I’m like “Holy shit, I’ve been yapping for a while. Maybe I should take a break?” But I still have so much to say that I keep going. Shoutout to all my friends and family who love me and have just conceded to letting me yap until I run of things to say or get tired.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been having a meal with my parents, my best friends, or my partner, and I realize I’ve been talking for several minutes without stopping. And they’re just sitting there smiling and nodding their heads thinking, “I'm not really concerned about a single thing he’s saying, I stopped listening a long time ago, but I’m glad he’s happy talking. He’s really enthusiastic about whatever this is. Good for him.”

You know what, I get it. I totally do. Thank you for listening to me 🫶

It’s all fun and games when you’re a kid who yaps. Most adults would call it being “argumentative” and then say dumb shit like, “You really like to argue, you should be a lawyer when you grow up.” But that’s where they’re wrong, lawyers can’t just yap away about anything they want. They have to obey the strict rules of the law. In court, the judge is the Master of Yapping. He decides which yaps are acceptable and which aren’t. Myself, on the other hand, I can yap about anything.

Throughout my life I yapped so much, eventually I started writing.

If you think about it, writing is yapping at such a high level that you decide to create a permanent account of your yaps for others to come back and reference. I got so good at it, I started getting paid to yap write.

That’s how I went from yapper, to Writer, to Copywriter. You could say I went pro for yapping when I became a “creative” who got paid to write things for a living. And I wrote about a dick-ton of different things. Sometimes I wrote about potato chips, sometimes I wrote about fake houseplants, sometimes I wrote about the Chinese economy, concerts, cruise ships, bakeries in New York City, garage door repair companies in Central Florida—once I even translated an entire washing machine manual from English to Spanish.

Throughout all that time, I had a few different titles, but deep down, I was still a Writer, and always a yapper 🗣️

My professional yapping was going so well that I had the opportunity to work for a global brand. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But after a few years, I left. I took my yapping to the freelance market, seeking new opportunities. I even began live-yapping in front of groups of people—leading them through precise physical movements while playing music in the background. This form of yapping was labeled “Yoga Instructor.”

I had a lot of fun yapping as my own boss and to groups of people. But somewhere along the way I realized I preferred to do that same yapping for a bigger company. One that provided me with benefits like HEALTH INSURANCE. So, after two years of being an entrepreneurial yapper, I took my talents back to the corporate market.

Except the corporate world wasn’t having it. They were like, “You think you can just yap yourself back into a job?” And I was like, “That’s precisely what I thought.”

“Guess again,” they responded.

It was during this job hunt that I began to question everything I’d ever known about being a professional writer. I even began to question being a yapper.

What was I now?

What should my title be on my resume?

Copywriter?

Freelance Writer?

Social Media Manager?

Community Manager?

Content Creator?

Content Curator?

Senior Copywriter?

Junior Copywriter? (NOPE)

Social Media Strategist?

Brand Strategist?

Digital Marketer?

Growth Marketer?

Storyteller?!!!?!?!¿?¡!¿¿!¡¡¿?!!!

I had reached a crossroads in my career, but also in life. Not only was I unsure of how to present myself to get a job, I began questioning what exactly I was good at.

Do I manage the social media without doing any of the creative?

Would I prefer to just work on the creative?

Does that include Community Management or not?

Can I even find another role in this industry?

I could be a Program Manager, right? (No offense to Program Managers, but I’ve been commissioner to multiple fantasy football leagues since 2008—you wouldn’t last an hour in that group chat or trying to collect the buy-in money.)

On one end, I’m happy that social media work is finally getting the recognition and respect it deserves for everything it entails. You can’t just say you need a “Social Media Manager” and hire someone to manage your profiles, write the captions, take pictures, edit and produce videos, and respond to all customer service inquiries by themselves. That’s like saying you want to hire a Chef but then expect them to simultaneously take orders, serve the plates, wash the dishes, and stand at the front of the restaurant greeting everyone as they walk in. Each of these things is its own separate position. While they all take different skills and levels of expertise, each of them is critical to the proper functioning of a business.

When you’re applying to jobs, businesses want you to know exactly what you do. So I began tailoring my resume to the different job titles I was applying for. I thought this would work. Then I remembered I’m probably 1 of 10,000 people applying for the same position. Chances are there’s someone who’s more qualified than me or wrote better keywords on their resume for the AI filtering tool to pick up. Actually, forget all that. Chances are there’s someone applying who knows someone who works at the company and will get an interview before they ever even look at my resume.

That’s how it works nowadays for the majority of positions. The only two interviews I’ve gotten this year were because I was referred to the business by someone who works on the team I was applying for or used to work on it.

As I was going through all of this, I couldn’t help but relate to the Rappers who reach a certain point in their careers and start trying to expand beyond just Hip-Hop. They do new things out of their own creative volition, but sometimes they also do these to impress people who previously paid them no attention. People who “don’t like rap.” When it comes time to try to impress those people, Rappers declare to the world, “I’m not a rapper, I’m an Artist.” They do this because they want to leave behind the persona of someone who rhymes over beats and embrace the idea of a creative who is capable of making any type of art.

This makes me sad.

Not because these Rappers can’t be considered artists, but because they already are. Rapping is a form of art. It’s one of the most complex, difficult, intricate, and highly admired forms of art in the entire world. If you disagree, I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems, but not admiring the beauty that is Hip-Hop and how it has influenced every single aspect of our modern culture ain’t one.

But the reason these Rappers decide to call themselves “Artists” is because they want recognition from a new group of people. A group of people who aren’t impressed by “Rap” but might be by other things.

That’s exactly how I’ve felt in my job hunt. I know what I can do, plenty of people know what I can do. I’ve been admired and recognized for what I can do. But now, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to simply be much better at one thing than the majority of other people.

No, you also need to constantly speak about how good you are at that thing.

You need to constantly share how you’ve been recognized for being so good at that thing.

You need to constantly remind people who already know you’re good at something how good you are at that thing, so they can hopefully tell other people they know who are looking for someone who is good at that thing. So then those people they told hopefully consider hiring you for that thing.

And when you’re not working on that thing, when you’re on your time off, you also have to be constantly writing and posting about that thing, even if you’re not getting paid to do it.

It’s fucking exhausting 🫠

More than that, it’s disheartening 😔

Because deep down inside, you know that you are capable. More capable than many others. Capable of doing not just what you’ve proven you’re already good at, but many other things that you haven’t done regularly. There are many other jobs I know I could do, but none of them are on my resume.

So, what should I do?

Should I rebrand myself as a Storyteller?

Someone who “creates content” for social media?

Should I write clickbaity headlines that “hook” people in, but don’t actually answer the question that piqued their interest in the first place?

Should I start making reels with enticing titles like FELLAS, HERE ARE 5 THINGS SHE’LL NEVER TELL YOU THAT DRIVE HER WILD and have the video be an attractive woman doing a quick dance and jiggling her body while telling you to read the caption for more info and then the caption tells you to follow the link in bio for the full story and then when you get there it’s a link to buy a course that tells you how to get rich drop-shipping low-quality knock-offs of popular items made in China sold via Amazon to unsuspecting suburban couples in Sacramento?

Should I track metrics of how many followers I have and compare platforms so I can focus on the one that provides more return in terms of engagement?

I thought about all of this and decided…

🇵🇷 NA PICHEA ESO

//

🇺🇸 F*CK ALL THAT

I’m never going to do all the “hacks” and “tricks” people have discovered to get more engagement on their content. I’m sorry, but if you need to trick people into taking the time to thoughtfully consume your work, maybe you need to reevaluate the “content” you’re creating. That’s not to neglect the fact that even though it’s easy to put your work out into the world, it’s also harder than ever to get people to focus on it. Every time you post you’re fighting for attention against millions of other posts, and every time you post you’re righting for attention against thousands of other profiles—many of which have more resources, longtime fans, or use shadier tactics than you. I totally understand how hard it is out there. Which means I understand you doing what you have to do to survive on the internet.

Me? I’d rather not focus on all that.

I want to live my life doing this.

Sharing with you.

Emailing.

Writing.

Unleashing everything inside my brain on a page and leaving it there for you to read. Maybe you open it the day the email comes out, maybe you come back to it a few years later. That’s okay. That’s your choice. I can’t decide how you choose to interact with what I write. All I can do is write it.

Because that’s what I am: a Writer.

A Writer who writes. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. But you already know that, or maybe you realized halfway through this email when you were like, “Holy shit, it’s the first email, and I’m not even halfway through. How many words has he written already? Is this what this 2UESDAY thing is about?”

Yes, Dear Reader, 2UESDAY is about writing (and reading).

I’m going to be writing a lot this season. Not that I haven’t done that before, but I want your expectations to be clear.

If you signed up for this newsletter thinking it would be some fun, short “content” or inspirational talk about how to make it in life or advice on marketing or even yoga—you’ve come to the wrong place.

2UESDAY is about whatever the f*ck I feel like writing about.

If you think about it, 2UESDAY could be anything!

I can’t tell you what that “anything” is right now because it changes from week to week and day to day and second to second. But here are some ideas I have for this season in case you want something to look forward to:

• Pootie Tang Email

• Hello, World!

• See You Tomorrow

• UVST AOTY

• Raised By Cable

• I Love Flowers

• The Death of LOL

• Snow Day vs Snow Day

• The Greatest Diss of All Time

• Everybody Poops

• BLANKET

• on a Twitter steamer

• TSA Pre-Check Realizations

• I’m allowed to be sad

• Your Home Is Always Your Home

And all of those things will be essays. That’s to say, “content with a lot of words you need to spend uninterrupted minutes paying attention to” and occasionally, there will be some pictures thrown in.

So, I hope you’re ready to read 🤓

And if you’re not, that’s totally cool. I get it. Does it make me sad? Of course, but no hard feelings. I can’t convince everybody.

If you want to support 2UESDAY, you can still open the emails to help my numbers and click on any ads you see. If you’d rather not do either of those things, just unsubscribe. That would probably be better. No hard feelings. I genuinely understand. There’s enough shit to worry about these days. I know it’s challenging to focus on a single thing when we’re reaching for our phones to check Instagram Stories every moment we have five seconds of downtime. Or because you never stop getting notifications from Slack or Teams or Google Chat (why does anyone still use Google Chat??? 😫).

But, if you decide to stay—and I hope you do—please do the reading. I, for one, think it would be highly beneficial. I think you’ll laugh, sometimes get sad, many times get angry, and many other times think about things you would’ve never thought of otherwise.

That’s what these emails are about.

I hope you’re about that, too.

Without further ado, welcome to 2UESDAY VOLUME 3.

See you next week 🫡

PS

It’s not a blog. Don’t call it a blog. It’s an email. I don’t care that the United States Patent and Trademark Office recognized it as a U.S. Class(es): 100, 101, 107—On-line journals, namely, BLOGS featuring humor, culture, lifestyle, fashion, politics, entertainment, new current events; etc…

It’s not a blog. And this isn’t “not a blog” in the sense that George RR Martin calls his blog “Not A Blog” and then concedes in the writing that it’s a blog.

Even if it looks like a blog, sounds like a blog, has the structure of a blog, a website that looks like a blog, and a platform that tells you it’s a great place to host your blog—even if it has all of those things,

it’s not a blog.

It’s so much more than that 💌