and so it begins

it's been a month and a half of reading so it's TIME

sam, what is this?

well first, hello it’s me!!!! second, really it’s something that i have been cooking up for some time, but let me start from the beginning:

this is a picture of me and my grandmother

oh, that’s so cute!

thanks! as you can see, nothing has changed about me. i am still a silly, bumbling baby just trying to get to my next meal. my grandmother though, was quite the legend. she was known for her big personality and her intoxicating energy. she could always find a friend wherever she went. i created a family shared album recently and found a photo of her with a man i didn’t recognize. after asking my dad, it ended up being a flight attendant that she had befriended within minutes of being on the plane. here’s a photo that encapsulates said energy:

similar to me, she was a woo girl

lol, yeah that tracks. so what’s the story?

well, a big part of her identity that has both shaped her experience and my family’s identity was where she was from. julia young, originally gumbleton, was from derry in northern ireland. she was born and raised there in an irish-catholic family. in a chance encounter at a dance hall, she met my grandfather and, after some steamy correspondence, moved to the united states and married.

omg that’s so sweet and Very Romcom™!

yes! now for the dark stuff lol. if you know anything about northern ireland or just watched the show derry girls, you have probably heard about the city of derry and the troubles. this was a time of political upheaval and violence between the catholics (aka the native irish people) and the protestants (aka the english aka the colonizers) starting in 1968. now, this is not the first conflict between the two because, as i mentioned in (parentheses), the irish peoples had been fighting for their liberation and re-unity with the rest of ireland for decades, if not centuries. my dad has told me first-hand accounts from visiting his cousins of the violence at the time. he remembers climbing on top of their roof and watching the bombs go off and listen to the violence that ensued.

wow, that sounds awful but also interesting???? what does this have to do with you? are you having a quarter-life crisis and need a project?

it’s funny you should ask! while i knew my grandmother as a young child, i missed out on going from the annoying adolescent who put more sugar than water in the tea i was given while consuming whatever obsession my cousins and i decided to cook up that year (ranging from fantasia the movie to puzzles) to annoying adult who asks 20,000 questions because he finally has a fully formed frontal cortex and wants to know what is going on. and that’s mostly because she passed before i could. my grandmother died when i was 21 after battling multiple diseases for years.

after her passing, it seems that i have been revolving around the idea of learning more about ireland because of said relation. a family pilgrimage has been proposed/shot down/re-proposed/shot down/etc. for the last 5 years. so, rather than try to get a motley crew of Youngs to go across the pond, i decided to bring the island to me.

and um HOW are you going to do that? you can’t just take a whole ISLAND and bring it over here? like i know you are having a crisis, but hasn’t the US and the UK already done enough??

SO true bestie! instead of bringing said ireLAND to me, i am going to READ!!!

ignore the ogre and look at the book!!

if you have spoken to me since march 12, 2020 (i love that i got a never-ending pandemic for my birthday :))))) ), then you know my new personality is reading books. lucas, my lovely partner and fiance (read: beyonce) suggested that, to feel more ~connected~ to my grandmother, i read books only by irish authors for an entire dang year.

what about the title of this substack? how is that related to this?

does no one else remember the iconic film from disney channel about the kid who has to save his family from these evil, irish-dancing goons by winning a game of basketball? or was this just another fever dream??

definitely fever dream, you hacked into IMDB and made that for your own comfort. anyway, this all DEFINITELY sounds like a covid-induced quarter-life crisis

NOT THE POINT!!!!! but anyway, this substack is going to be me documenting my silly little project on the silly little internet. i have always been a big fan of the internet, ever since i was 9 and was almost breaking the family computer through playing MMORPGs and making accounts on social media sites that i was probably definitely too young for.

—wait you played world of WARCRAFT????

literally no that had a monthly subscription you had to pay, and spending money was NOT the vibe! so i found free ones lol.

more to the point, i have always felt comfortable online. i have never really been a private person and something about creating your own pocket of the internet to scream into the void with has always felt intimate and right for me (can you tell that i’m a product of tumblr?). so i want to use this fun little newsletter to carve my own space and talk about these books i’m reading!

okay sam this has all been cute, but what’s in it for ME?

well, you can expect long-winded reviews of all the books i’m reading with sprinkles of my own life in it, continuous updates about where tf i am in ulysses which will take me the entire year to finish, and some other fun little extra things that i have found that maybe aren’t related but i still want somewhere to scream about it.

basically, i just want to start a mid-2000s confessional Wordpress blog that i never got to have! sue me!

i’m not going to sue you (yet), but this does sound like a spiral i definitely want to watch from afar

good enough for me! i am going to literally NOT stop talking if there’s no one reading or 500 people reading, so buckle up baby!!!!