The Final Nine

More recent work: https://www.nais.org/learn/independent-ideas/february-2022/school-culture-when-parents-raise-concerns-over-academic-achievement/

I didn’t have many friends as a child. It wasn’t for lack of interest. Every day, I went to school and surveyed a playground of peers, many of whom seemed like they’d be fun to hang out with. As far as I can recall, that was my sole criterion. The fact that most of them didn’t think I would be fun to hang out with has perplexed me for 40+ years and is also the likely source of all my adult insecurities, but that’s another essay for another time. Point is, I didn’t think about who I wanted to be friends with in elementary school. We were friends or we weren’t. Liked each other or didn’t. As I aged, my friend selection process didn’t change very much. Into high school, college, and well into my 20s and 30s, people entered my life and we bonded deeply or connected briefly or ignored each other like people in line for a Cinnabon at McCarran Airport.  Around the time I hit my late 30s, something shifted. No longer did I meet peers on playgrounds, We didn’t mix in classrooms, dorms, qua...

A little something for my colleagues in education.

In case you didn't see it, I recently had a piece published at McSweeney's Internet Tendency . 

The dog is old. I am not sure how old, but dogs don’t really age in years anyway. When we first got her, she would run ahead of me on the trail, then race back as if to make sure I knew the way, then ahead again, before disappearing into the scrub for 10 minutes to chase deer, collect ticks, and coat herself in poison oak, only to emerge 100 yard behind me wondering how I’d had the temerity to get in front of her. If I walked three miles, she ran seven. Her off-trail sorties worried me. I wanted to be the kind of dog owner who let his animal roam. But I’d become attached. I didn’t want to lose her and I didn’t yet know her well enough to know that she would always come back. She was new to us then, a gaunt mongrel, rescued from the mean streets of Madera County, plucked from a high-kill shelter, complete with a right hip full of buckshot, an infected paw, and teats that scraped the ground. There was nothing remotely attractive about her. She barked at strangers, attacked bicyclists,...

E-bikes are actually pretty cool. Le Creuset cookware is definitely worth the price. Weed is just so strong nowadays. Would it be weird if I got Bar Mitzvahed as an adult? I forgot how good Van Morrison is! I wonder if there’s another variety of tomato hybrid that would be more productive in our microclimate. Why the fuck is “Broadcast News” not on Netflix? If George H. W. Bush were running in this election I would totally vote for him. Green tea is a lot better than I realized. How much do stand up paddle boards cost? Pizza just doesn’t sound good right now. Wait, if I’ve always secretly thought that most of my friends married the wrong person does that mean that most of my friends secretly think that I married the wrong person too? I don’t feel like having sex tonight. IPAs are all over-hopped at this point. I wish I had more of a relationship with my financial guy. That retaining wall looks like it’s leaning. The pro...

We hired our first nanny (a term that makes me deeply uncomfortable) when our daughter was 12 weeks old. There is a special place in heaven reserved that lovely woman.   Beautiful, bright-eyed, freckle-faced, and Salvadoran, she was preternaturally tender and loving. She had a deep wellspring of patience for our colicky nightmare of an infant who alternated almost exclusively between crying and screaming, with only occasional breaks for chest-to-chest naps in the Baby Bjorn. She rode the bus to our house four mornings a week, every week for nearly nine months. She was our daughter’s second mother, fourth grandmother, third aunt, and closest companion. We trusted her with keys to our home, access to petty cash, the code to our garage door, not to mention the daily watering and feeding of our most precious possession. She called Emma her “muñeca,” her doll. And 13 years later, I can almost remember her name. When she gave notice, my wife and I were devastated. You don...

I am about as progressive a parent and partner as you’re likely to meet. I believe that when it comes to gender roles, “traditional” is just code for “repressive and patriarcal”. I cook (well). I clean (poorly). I shop. I mend. I darn. I can take a child’s temperature without a thermometer. I also drill. I hammer. I change flat tires. I hang things on walls. I can assemble Ikea furniture without directions. I know that gender is not binary. So it is with full awareness my modern, limousine liberal, quinoa-eating ethos that I say that no man should ever wear a Baby Bjorn. A Baby Bjorn is a deeply emasculating device. It is a full-frontal vasectomy. A canvas chest vagina. Which makes it all the more remarkable that I gladly wore one almost daily for nearly two years. Such was the nature of my daughter’s neediness. From her earliest days, she needed to be held, begged to be bounced, demanded to be in physical contact, pleaded to be on the move. This is what we told...

My oldest daughter couldn’t stop crying the other day, which was surprising. She doesn’t cry nearly as much as she used to. Broadly speaking, this is a good thing. The sound of your child’s inconsolable sobs can cause physical pain; a sonic cocktail of fingernails on a chalkboard, an injured dog, and Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park.” As a young child she cried often. Rarely did I understand the reason. Even more rarely could I get her to stop. When she wailed, I would experience a gauntlet of emotions, from sad to befuddled to frustrated to enraged. Too often, I heard myself venting to an imaginary parenting coach, “She’s crying for no fucking reason!” Sometime during my parental maturation process, I realized that no one cries for no reason, least of all a child. The failure to understand your children is probably not a failure at all. And if it is, it certainly isn’t a failure on their part. A child’s job isn’t to make itself understood. In fact, I’m beginning to bel...