Spooky season is here! Wait, did I say “Spooky”? I meant, “Snoopy.”

Yup…. on this day in 1950, Snoopy showed up in Peanuts with no name and no owner. For 5 YEARS nobody knew WHOSE DOG HE WAS!!! Patty's? Shermy's? Nobody claimed him until 1955. That beagle (or dalmatian? IDK, I got notes to give to the creators…) was off the leash, sleeping on roofs, flying his doghouse into World War I, Braveheart with a food bowl, screaming FREEDOM at the sky. He was a revolutionary folk hero.

Then Charlie Brown, that whiny kid with a single strand of hair that makes it look like he got a belly button for a forehead, signed some paperwork and ruined everything. 

I have been paid to write professionally since 2013. I've written for brands you've heard of and 4 you haven't and at least 1 that no longer exists, partly because of the economy and partly, I suspect, because of me. I've got a title with the word Senior in it. I've got an em dash ration. I get put on the calls where somebody says "let's bring Sarah in, she's good with voice," and I show up and I am, in fact, TOO good with voice. (I do a great Kathy Griffin and Shakira lol) 

And I cannot use a preposition correctly. Not once. Not in 8 years.

Is it on the phone? In the phone? Over the phone?
F*ck it, I’m going with “via the phone,” that’s a safe bet. 

Oops! They're all wrong! Surprise! They're also all right! Everytime I have to write those pesky prepositions, Gordon Ramsay puts 2 slices of bread between my ears and says “pick one, coward!” And so, I pick, and then I sit with it for a full 20 seconds like I've defused my Ninja air fryer from combusting. 

Look, I don’t think you understand how SERIOUS my lack of prepositional understanding is… I've written 3 sentences today where I typed "among" and then "amongst" and then "among" again and then went, got a snack, and played a round of “Among Us.”

Why would I even admit this? Well, precisely because we shouldn’t be afraid to say: “I don’t know.” Even when it comes to our jobs. 

It gets lonely sometimes, because you scroll through the feed and it seems like everyone in this business walks around like their brain is hooked up to Grammarly’s servers (although I’m convinced that our copywriter/editor Caitlin Wolper Phillips is the brain powering Grammarly.)

But for those of us who aren’t Caitlin, we do not have English Grammar in Use pre-installed in our wrinkly noggins. We’re ALL just guessing. We have simply agreed, as an industry, to guess with confidence.

So here’s the full inventory of things I still struggle with as a PAID writer, and well, they’re embarrassing, unflattering, and current as of this morning.

What I've come to figure out is that every writer, marketer, and heck, every person, you're intimidated by still struggles with their craft. Every one. That person whose posts you screenshot is looking up "affect vs effect" in an incognito window so it doesn't show up in their history. We even got leaked emails from billionaires who terrify us all, revealing that even their Ivy-educated a*s can’t write a single coherent sentence. 

So if you're sitting there at 33 or 64 or 21 thinking everyone else got the handbook, they didn't. There's no handbook. There's just a bunch of people who learned which streets to avoid and decided to walk their own path.

Anyway, I have to go. I have to write a sentence with a phone in (on? over? within?) it.

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

Oh, before I forget: What's yours? The thing you still can't do that would embarrass you if it got out. Reply here. Let me be your confessional priest. I won't use your name, and I'll go first again if I have to.

ChatGPT wants to be your grandma's best friend. Grandma, run!

The new ChatGPT Voice ad opens on a grandma knitting and gabbing on the phone, and for 1 warm second I thought she was catching up with a friend. Nope! It's the chatbot. OpenAI looked at elderly loneliness and decided the fix was a server farm that says "mhmm."

Sam Altman’s really out here saying: let AI raise your kids, stick Nana in a home, and you can now feel great about it, because she's got a new pal, even though OpenAI is facing lawsuits alleging ChatGPT nudged people toward self-harm.

As a marketer, I have to give them some mad respect, begrudgingly though. They're working SO hard to make this thing feel human, and somehow the least human part is us, a whole society that watched this and let a chatbot decide it was cute.

Call your grandma. She's knitting you a sweater, and she's probably telling ChatGPT about it.

Alright, that’s my time. I'm in (on? at?) the doghouse with my copyeditor. See you next week.

— sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked?  Apparently, CFOs loves brand so much they just HAVE to slash their budget.  A new Tracksuit study found 94% of finance leaders call brand a real growth driver, and 60% of marketers say finance cut their brand budget within the last 2 years anyway. That's like when mom spanks you with a slipper while saying “this hurts me more than it hurts you,” then buying herself a Peloton with your allowance.