The sink stinks. I wish the dishes washed themselves instead of further filthing up the sink. I pick out each plate, cup, fork, knife, saucer, spoon, my lips curled, nostrils flared. I rinse them in the hottest water I can, scrub, rinse, dry. Repeat. Again and again and again until all the dishes are clean. At the bottom sits a muck of old oatmeal, shriveled noodles, and an oily brown syrup that looks like mud. Old molasses? I don’t know. The smell is terrible.

Both kids caught colds so sleep’s been scarce, and we’ve been too enervated to have the energy for housework beyond the most basics of providing food and replacing the largest clumps of toys that clutter our floors inviting falls and stubbed toes.

I pick out the drain plugs glopped with chunks of several days’ plate scraping, bang them in the garbage, then replace them to rinse more slurry into them. My face hurts now from...

God damn it I don’t want to go anymore, why do we ever even try to go places? That’s how it feels on pretty much every family outing by the time we get out the stupid door in the first place. Especially in the winter. Winter ups the annoyance of leaving the house, and this winter in particular, because it’s so painfully cold. It also makes the process so much more of a pain in the ass. Winter coat. Winter hat. Mittens. Make sure everyone’s got socks on. Boots. This means keeping track of everything, which means when we get home everything has to go back where it belongs. And of course my kid has taste and likes variation in what she wears - not THAT hat THIS time, I want a DIFFERENT hat THIS time. Of course. What hat do you want? Oh, the one we can’t find? Of course. And we can’t find it because it didn’t get put away last time, because we piled in the house took all our stuff off and...

I’ve gotten high a handful of times very occasionally and can’t remember the last time but I remember the first. I visited friends in England. I was closer to the guy in the couple; he was ten years older than me and she was another five or ten older than that. She was in a pretty famous band, and a band I’m a big fan of. I tried not to act star struck but I totally was. And the two of them were so smart and well read. Totally the kinds of people I looked at and thought “I hope I end up something like them someday, I wish I was something like them now, why do they even like me?” We had a great time, lots of drinking and talking and eating and talking and walking and talking. I felt well-liked and quite mature for my age. I was, I don’t know, 23? 25? I don’t remember exactly but it was around ten or twelve years ago. I also felt quite cosmopolitan. No one else in my family had ever been...

I hated that job. Canvassing for the for-profit company the Democrats hired to fundraise to elect John Kerry. We got paid seven dollars an hour. That’s the Democrat difference. Long hours standing all day in the sun, pretending to be excited about something so empty and uninspiring, sort of like getting hired to cheerlead for Elmer’s Glue. No one felt excited about Kerry; all the excitement was about Bush. That was our standard rap, never Kerry, but “Hi, do you want to help stop George Bush?” Lots of people stopped. The job was to take the dissatisfaction that made people stop and talk with you and turn it into a check or credit card payment. At the tip of the pyramid, things are fucked, what’s the best to deal with that? Get out your wallet. This job sucked. I was in Chicago though which was a generally pro-Democrat place, and I was broke, so I hustled for the money, smiling as wide as...

The hardest part of writing is writing. I don’t mean that in a technical sense, like a puzzle you have to be smart enough to figure out, I mean that in an emotional sense, like a test of will and endurance and courage. Writing is hard to make myself do. I want to do anything else.

This is on my mind a lot and I’m pleased to find this talked about in a book I’m reading - Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. I saw it recommended in an article in the Guardian, a list of short rules for writers. (There was a rule by Will Self that I liked as well, I’m paraphrasing, it was something like “you know that feeling of vulnerability and inadequacy you have when you read your own writing? It will never go away.”) The recommender said basically that Brande’s book is as good as any other on writing and better than most. It said “actually do the exercises too.” I’m not yet, but I will. Step by step...

My grandmother died this year. She raised me off and on, she was as much a parent as a grandparent. The last few times I saw her… my mom brought her to visit after my older daughter was born, when my daughter was still a baby. I have pictures of my grandma holding my baby daughter, they make me smile, to see my grandma looking happy and holding the baby, and to see my big girl as a little bald baby, with that toothless bird look to the shape of her face, smiling her baby smile. Another time, when my wife was pregnant with our older daughter, a cousin brought my grandma up to visit. She stayed at our small apartment. We made a bed on the floor for us to sleep in, gave her our bed. We tried to, I mean. She refused. “I’ll sleep on the floor, I don’t want your bed.” “No grandma it’s fine, you take the bed.” “I don’t want the bed, I want to sleep on the floor.” This went back and forth for a...

I was going to get to work early today to get ahead on some stuff. My older daughter wanted to read some more of this book we’re reading. We had two chapters left. I read one of them. I’ll read the last one when I get home tonight. Reading to her was a nice way to spend part of my morning. The worst parenting moments are the ones where it feels like a conflict over scarce resources, where my priorities are fixed and my time and energy are limited and I have to choose (and I’m not talking hobby priorities, I’m talking about stuff like whether or not I put in extra time to job hunting). The best moments are when I can just turn off the other demands on my time and enjoy being with my kids.

My older daughter is a precocious book listener. She’s a beginning reader, and her reading interests massively outstrip her reading ability. That’s going to be difficult for a while, until those catch...

If I finish this I can have some ice cream! That’s one way to get myself to write. Except… who wants ice cream? You know what’s better than ice cream? Lazing. Lazing rules. This is my general attitude. Most rewards are not as good as the reward of not working at all, and so I don’t find rewards particularly motivating. I’m just not particularly incentive driven. I’m driven by personal achievement, to some extent, but this has limits. I find it satisfying to pull off things I didn’t know I could do - pursuing excellence matters to me - but sometimes I need a boost, and rewards just don’t provide that boost. What’s much more effective for me is punishment. I’m an avoider more than a seeker. The two biggest things I want to avoid are embarrassing myself in front of others, and disappointing others. And so in order to get things done, I sometimes make commitments to other people, and...

I had three pints too quick and the next thing I knew my phone alarm was going off. “Oh shit I gotta go feed the meter.” “Cool, see you soon.” I kissed her on the cheek and headed for the door. On my way out I ran into that guy from the homecare union. “Hey!” I could never remember his name. “Dude!” He high-fived me, “hey man good to see you! I figured you’d be here, what with the Methadones and all.” “Yeah I fucking love that band.” “You going out to smoke?” “Nah I don’t smoke. I gotta feed the meter. Couldn’t find anywhere else and I don’t want to get a ticket.” “That’s some bullshit.” “Yeah.” “Well hey fuck it I’ll walk with you, I haven’t seen you in a hot minute.” “Alright, cool, so what’s going in?” We walk down Belmont. He tells me about some changes to home health care legislation and about how his co-workers want to form a union of union employees and we come up on Clark. “Fuck...

Sometimes my job sets me up to fail and does so in ways that mean failing people who need me to do my job well. The consequences aren’t huge, but they’re real, and that really sucks. This always feels like it’s my fault when it happens, and I have to remind myself that it’s not. I’m in an institution I don’t control. The people in charge arranged it so I can’t do my job well. That’s their fault. The thing is, I have some latitude on what I do, and so I get to make choices about how the failure will come about. It’s sort of like I’m told “choose who you will let down, part of your job is to let someone down.” Except if I was told that it would be clearer that it’s not my fault. The degree of decision-making power I have helps make it feel like it’s my fault. I also can choose to put in more work, to cut even more corners on getting sleep and exercise, or on my family responsibilities. I...