25 Theses 25

Cross-posted from Facebook: "Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you."

1. Parenting is the world’s longest and most engaging turn-based strategy game. There is high risk and high reward, a decision tree with endless branches, and fun for the whole family.

2. My favorite things are imperfect and problematic: London Calling, Lyndon Johnson, Hamlet, Groucho Marx, The Fortress of Solitude, our founding documents, The Muppet Show, Election Day.

3. Somewhere in the ancient mystic trinity, you get three as a magic number.

4. Within my dreams, Milwaukee and Boston become the same place. “What a wickid pissah,” says the Fonz.

5. If man is five, then the devil is six. If the devil is six, then God is seven.

6. I get the sense I’d like Nashville, though I’ve never been.

7. Good documentary films are like novels: shaped and edited, and revealing more than its makers or participants intend. Documentaries you should see include Vernon, Florida, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and Billy the Kid.

8. I forget what eight was for, but nine is my lost soul and ten is my everything, everything, everything.

9. I avoid talking on the telephone. I dislike having a piece of plastic pressed against my face. If I have a long phone conversation, I sometimes start to undress myself without knowing it, which is weird. (This does not happen at work.)

10. I did not believe in love at first sight until the day I met my children.

11. Another pet theory: true innovation comes from finding ways to work around limitations. Rene Magritte, it seems to me, was bad at painting faces, so he obscured them with apples. Punk musicians masked their lack of technical prowess with attitude and politics. I’ve yet to figure out how to turn an aversion to phones and motor vehicles into art.

12. I have a hard time seeing movies in the theatre, as I’m distracted and irritated by people eating popcorn too noisily. I really dislike crunching.

13. If I had any musical talent at all, I’d play mind-crazed banjo on the druggy-drag Ragtime U.S.A. I think it would be fun to create a jug band that played Old Timey versions of pop songs. I can totally hear the washboard version of “C’Mon Every Beatbox.”

14. The point of life is to investigate new ideas and pass them on. As a corollary, one should try each new flavor of ice cream as they emerge out of Vermont.

15. It would be great if we could, as a culture, dissociate our ideas about drama and suspense from our ideas about violence.

16. When I was single and childless, I listened to a lot more music and, for a time, bought a record per week. As awful as it could be at the time, I sometimes miss feeling lonely.

17. While in the early and shaky stages of adoption, I tried to guard my hopes and love against the prospect of loss, as I suppose I’d often done before. My wife taught me to recognize the futility and the cowardice in that.

18. I’m in the middle, the middle of life. I’m a boy and I’m a man. I’m eighteen and I like it.

19. What I have learned from Sam: Make your concerns known. Gather together the things you love and hold them tight in your tiny hands.

20. What I have learned from Caleb: Let the people know about it. Dance how you like. No one doesn’t like a sloppy kiss.

21. Once it’s daylight and you are sober, you will reconsider that gyro.

22. My wife, because she knows me well, asked if I had a celebrity crush on Zooey Deschanel and I answered her truthfully that I did not. Since then, I have come to feel differently.

23. Current other celebrity crush: Princeton University professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell.

24. The hardest thing about parenting is the lack of unstructured time. I would pay good money to sit in a café on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do but fill a notebook or read a chapter. I would pay even more money to sit in a bar on a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but finish the next Bloody Mary.

25. The last couple of years, as we move through hard times and cynicism and what let’s all hope is a rising light, it has been a blessing to have young children. Maybe this is mawkish, but it’s nice to be able to come home to kids who want only to eat, laugh, and be.