The children are finally back in school, which I had assumed would usher in a season of peace, lower cortisol and perhaps the leisurely midmorning Pilates lifestyle that every wealthy-looking woman on the internet appears to enjoy after school drop-off. Instead, my blood pressure has gone up. I realize this is not the direction blood pressure is supposed to go once the children leave the house for six consecutive hours, but apparently my cardiovascular system has concerns about my current management structure. And before anyone sends me recommendations: yes, I know. Less salt. More exercise. More water. Please save the pamphlet; I was a nurse. I am aware that coffee does not count as water simply because someone poured water through beans to make it. I really am trying. I have started putting a little lemonade in my water because apparently I require the same hydration incentives as a child at summer camp, but plain water is competing against coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon and a properly constructed cocktail after 5 p.m., and frankly it arrived at this competition with no personality.

Held & Rooted, meanwhile, has become a full-fledged organization requiring an astonishing amount of actual work. This feels somewhat unfair because I distinctly remember starting a moms group, not applying to become the unpaid administrator of a small sovereign nation. We have a board now. There are budgets, policies, technology, fundraising, sponsorships, emails, events, governance and strategic planning, which are all very impressive words until you realize they translate mostly into me sitting in the same chair in my house for an alarming number of hours. Then I close the laptop and discover that the people who live here still expect dinner and clean clothing as though they have made absolutely no effort to understand that their mother is building community infrastructure. My laundry in particular has shown no respect whatsoever for my professional advancement. It behaved exactly the same when I became President & CEO as it did when I was simply the woman who knew where everybody’s socks were, and frankly I think we need to discuss hierarchy.

This is why I was initially delighted to learn about The Great Lock-In, an internet movement encouraging people to use the final months of the year to eliminate distractions, establish routines, work out, save money, study, drink water and emerge by December as almost suspiciously improved versions of themselves. I love this concept. I support these people. I hope everyone emerges hydrated, financially solvent and with visible abdominal muscles. I, however, will not be joining in the traditional sense. My Great Lock-In goals are considerably more tailored to my current socioeconomic position. I would like to remember that there are clothes in the washing machine before they develop the smell that requires me to wash them a second time. I would like to stop purchasing berries with the confidence of a family who consumes blueberries at a rate our actual household has never demonstrated. I would like to attend one Pilates class without first purchasing an outfit for Pilates. Financially, my primary fourth-quarter objective is to stop founding organizations. And physically, I have started parking slightly farther from the entrance at Trader Joe’s unless I am wearing inappropriate shoes. Transformation must be sustainable.

While everyone else is locking in, I have apparently chosen to use my limited free time investigating Oreogate, which began as precisely the sort of low-stakes suburban mother foolishness that gives me life. A mother in a school parent group chat supposedly asked the other parents to stop sending Oreos in their own children’s lunches because her daughter was not allowed to have sugar and became upset watching other children eat them. Now, as a mother and former administrator of a Facebook group containing more than a thousand mothers, I felt extraordinarily qualified to adjudicate this dispute. My ruling was immediate: Ma’am, manage your household. If I have awakened children, located socks, signed whatever piece of paper someone neglected to show me until 7:35 a.m., found two matching shoes, packed a snack and successfully delivered my offspring to school, I have fulfilled my obligations under both California law and the social contract. I will not also be accepting responsibility for your child’s emotional relationship with my child’s sandwich cookies. If Oreos are prohibited in your home, that is between you, your daughter and whatever family therapist eventually gets to unpack why everyone else’s lunchbox was apparently included in your nutritional policy.

I was fully prepared to die on this extremely unnecessary hill when I learned that none of these women existed. Oreogate was reportedly fictional branded content involving AI music company Suno, complete with fake parent-group-chat screenshots and artificial-intelligence-generated music dramatizing the imaginary dispute. This means I spent actual minutes of the one finite life God gave me assessing the parenting choices of fictional women while artificial intelligence sang about Oreos. There are people learning Mandarin. There are women training for marathons. Somewhere, somebody has finally organized the drawer beneath her oven. I was sitting in my house wondering why an imaginary mother named Ashley couldn’t simply tell her imaginary child no. This is what the internet has done to us, and I would like my time refunded. I will, however, need someone to send me the next installment immediately because I have already invested too much emotionally to leave before the series finale. Principles are important, but so is closure.

Of course, Oreogate suddenly looks like a documentary when compared with the man federal prosecutors allege spent years pretending to be a San Francisco 49ers wide receiver. Daejon Labrayae Love has been charged in an alleged romance and investment fraud scheme involving at least 26 women and roughly $1.3 million, and according to prosecutors, he presented himself as an active NFL player despite the relatively inconvenient fact that he was not an active NFL player. What fascinates me here and I want to be clear that fraud is serious, these are allegations, and actual women reportedly lost actual money, is the alleged operational infrastructure. There was 49ers gear. There was a helmet. There were luxury cars and fake financial accounts. There was reportedly even a contract-signing video. I have spent months incorporating an actual nonprofit and I am telling you right now: this man allegedly had better brand activation. I have a federal tax exemption, bylaws and a functioning app and still occasionally struggle to explain what I do at events. He allegedly acquired a helmet and convinced people he had been drafted.

But the detail that sent me completely over the edge was the reporting that he pointed to Google’s AI-generated information as evidence that he really played professional football after the internet had apparently absorbed enough nonsense to begin repeating the claim back as fact. This is extraordinary because I have spent the better part of a year worrying about artificial intelligence scraping community conversations, extracting information without context and confidently presenting things it doesn’t actually understand, while this gentleman allegedly encountered the same technological problem and thought, Finally, independent verification of my NFL career. Imagine arriving in federal court with Google AI as your alibi. “Your Honor, I understand the league says I never played there, but have you considered the little box at the top of the search results?” We have apparently entered an era where misinformation can ingest itself, cite itself and then return wearing a blazer as corroborating evidence.

The internet then moved from fictional mothers and alleged fictional football careers into the HBCU dress-code debate, and unfortunately this is where I discovered that I am 37 years old and rapidly approaching the developmental stage known as having auntie opinions. I have standards about public dress. I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of generational solidarity. I have opinions about pajamas at airports. I have been known to change clothes before going downstairs in a hotel because there are strangers in the lobby and apparently I believe the Ritz-Carlton concierge deserves the fully realized version of me. I don’t need everyone wearing a blazer to breakfast, but I do believe civilization benefits from maintaining at least a small distinction between I have retired for the evening and I am presently participating in society.

But the moment bonnets and durags enter the same moral category as bedroom slippers, I start adjusting my glasses. Because those are not simply fashion choices; they are tools Black people use to protect Black hair. And now the question becomes much more interesting than whether a college student should wear SpongeBob pajama pants to economics. Who decided what “professional” looks like? How much of preparing Black students for the professional world should involve teaching them to navigate standards that already exist, and how much responsibility do Black institutions have to challenge standards rooted in somebody else’s cultural norms? There is a real conversation here about class, culture, race, respectability, institutional expectations and whether preparation for the world sometimes becomes accommodation of the world’s biases. Naturally, the internet has responded to this nuanced multigenerational question exactly as one would expect: everyone picked a side within nine minutes and began yelling.

Which brings me to the Divine Nine hand-sign conversation, where I have considerably less intellectual conflict. I am not Greek, which is precisely why you will not find me throwing anybody’s hand sign in a photograph. The reasoning is uncomplicated: it isn’t mine. This is a concept adulthood used to teach rather efficiently. Some things belong to communities, traditions and relationships you are not part of, and appreciating them does not automatically entitle you to perform them. I appreciate Hermès enormously and yet, tragically, they have not given me a Birkin. We all survive disappointment. Yvette Nicole Brown having to gently explain that Divine Nine signs are not generic Black-girl-photo accessories feels like another symptom of the internet convincing us that access and appreciation are the same thing. Sometimes cultural literacy is simply knowing when to smile beautifully for the picture and keep your hands elegantly behind your back.

Then came the Tupac verdict, which genuinely stopped me because we are talking about something that happened thirty years ago. A jury convicted Duane “Keffe D” Davis in connection with Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder, and one of the extraordinary pieces of the story is how much Davis himself had publicly discussed over the years through interviews and his memoir. There is a lesson here that transcends criminal law and applies equally to podcasts, Instagram Lives, group chats and perhaps this very blog: we have lost our appreciation for the inside thought. Not every experience needs to become content. Not every story needs to be monetized. Not every recollection requires a microphone. There are things that should remain between you, God and an attorney with a retainer. I recognize the hypocrisy of delivering this message from a public blog where I have discussed my marriage, motherhood, breasts, cocktails, religion and the British royal family in considerable detail. I said boundaries were important; I did not claim to be an industry leader in them.

And perhaps that is why the conversation happening around Black media and giant streaming platforms caught my attention more than I expected. There is something fascinating about watching independently built Black platforms become culturally valuable enough that enormous corporations want access to the audience those creators spent years cultivating. The conversation around Netflix, Black podcasters, YouTube, distribution, ownership and whether a giant check strengthens an independent platform or slowly changes the thing that made people love it in the first place feels much bigger than entertainment to me. Because once you build community on somebody else’s platform, you eventually confront an uncomfortable question: who actually owns the relationship? The creator who earned the trust? The people who formed the community? Or the corporation that owns the infrastructure connecting them?

Somewhere between Oreogate, fake NFL players, Tupac and my increasingly strong opinions about what people should wear in public, I realized perhaps this is my Great Lock-In. The children are back in school, Held & Rooted is taking over considerably more of my life than anticipated, the laundry remains disrespectful, and my blood pressure would apparently like me to become a woman who carries a 40-ounce water bottle everywhere. I simply cannot understand why I have spent this much money on handbags with my initials on them if I am now expected to carry my beverage separately. So for now, I am drinking my lemonade-water, minding everybody else’s business on the internet and accepting that this may be as balanced as things are going to get.

And yes, In Good Company is October 4. I promised I wouldn’t spend this whole blog trying to sell you a ticket, and look at that, I mostly succeeded.

The Lord and the marketing algorithm will have to handle the rest.

~ Always Have, Always Will Kalie