My wife and I plan to homeschool our older daughter. I guess technically we do this with both though I think calling it schooling for our baby doesn’t really make sense. Anyway. Some people in our lives think this is weird. We have doubts too, but then, parenting for me has involved a ton of doubt (and fear and guilt). Here’s the cool part of homeschooling for us: it’s fun. The way we’re approaching it so far, we learn about stuff and talk about it and do things together. It’s basically the same as an adult intellectual life driven by intellectual curiusity, except set in an appropriate way for our daughter’s age. Here’s a concrete example.

My wife and my daughter are reading a book together at bed time, a book set in the north of England (she and I are reading a different one when it’s my night to do bedtime stories). This has made my daughter interested in that region. We showed here...

Get back in the ring, champ, just swish your mouth out and spit. That’s how I always thought of the people in a boxer’s corner back when I was into boxing.

That’s the beginning I had planned for this, and as you can see, I’ve kept it, but as I started that opening metaphor I wondered about why I was reaching for boxing in particular as a metaphor for writing. Writing is really unlike boxing. It doesn’t involve any serious athletic effort (though I know it can have physical consequences, I’ve known people with tendonitis, carpal tunnel, pinched nerves, etc), and there’s no real combat component. I wonder if it’s partly cultural testosterone thing: boxers are tough, manly men. If I liken writing to boxing then I’m like one of them. That is among my impulses. I was raised in what I’d call a pretty macho household and I work the least athletic job of anyone in the family. As I am sometimes...

“Oh it’s just a rubberstamp process.” The woman at the work-abroad program office said that repeatedly. “When your visa runs out, just tell them you want to go tour around and spend some of your money, they’ll extend your visa, no worries at all!” So we didn’t worry.

Just short of six months later, a week before our visas ran out, I called the immigration office at Edinburgh airport. “We’ve been here almost six months, we’ve not traveled the countryside and we’d like to, can we get a two week extension?”

“No bother, just come out to the airport.”

“How do I find your office?”

“Oh, not our office, the office at Glasgow airport.”

“What’s their number?”

“You don’t need it, just go in and explain the situation.”

So we did. On the day our visas expired. We waited because wanted a few more work days, for the money. It was a Monday. We took the bus over. It took longer than we...

My bus was twenty minutes late again. My toes hurt so bad. This makes me so angry, and worried - is this going to be the rest of the winter? Am I going to lose a toe? Totally ridiculous. I need to make a new arrangement, just plan to call and find out the actual time of the actual bus, and plan to wait for the delay from the transit hotline, instead of trusting the schedule. It’s hard to live up to my buswriting habit like this too, because all I can really think about is the physical discomfort I’m in. Ugh.

In general I hate situations like this. I get nervous about dealing with landlords and airport security, for the same reason - these are situations where someone is basically indifferent to me and my well-being and has control over something important to me. I sometimes think of it like these people are malicious, trying to create problems for others, but the reality is that they...

I started my morning reciting insightful declarations like ‘fuck this bullshit,’ shouted down the street while I waited for the bus. Another cold snap fell and of course the buses run later the lower the temp dips. As I type this, my fingers ache after twenty minutes standing in the subzero, and the feeling has just started to come back to my toes. (Twenty below with windchill. Again.) I stood and stared in the direction the bus was supposed to come from, the seconds crawling by, and tried to remind myself that it’s not the driver’s fault. Lacking someone to blame generalized my irritation. I don’t know whose fault it is that the bus on my route is frequently fifteen to twenty minutes late, especially on the worst winter days, and not knowing who to be mad at makes me mad at everything. The sun’s too bright. The wind’s too biting. The ground’s too hungry as it sucks the warmth from the...

I hate myself until the fourth draft. That’s how a friend summarized some article he read about writing process. When he said it, my writing feelings suddenly made sense. In the first draft, I drop ideas far and wide. Part of that feels fun, but it feels like it will never be anything organized or coherent. Most of what I need to say is in the first draft somewhere. Sometimes my sprawling shapeless drafts don’t have most of what I need to say. That makes them notes, or what my wife calls a zero-draft. Mistaking a zero draft for a first draft is painful, as is any mistake where I think a draft is farther along than it is. In writing the second draft, I develop a dense of what I’m talking about and why, I give the thing a less blob-like shape, and I find some new ideas. When the writing becomes an actual second draft, it has a structure and a flow, however imperfect. In the third draft, I...

I bought several CDs recently by bands I’ve liked for years. I haven’t had time to listen to any of these CDs much at all, because of work and family. This is a huge change from my formative years as a music listener. I used to get new music and hole up in my room, sitting and listening, while reading the liner notes and lyrics. I miss that, and I look forward to doing that again some day on a regular basis.

Having kids changed my relationship to music. For one thing, I don’t listen to as much dark and aggressive music as often because I’m around my kids so much. That’s not the kind of tone I want for my kids. Even more than that, I’m not in that kind of mood nearly as much. I’m often tense and angry and sad, but when I’m with my kids I feel that way a lot less, and I feel other much happier feelings. My kids have also narrowed the scope of my bad feelings. I’m unhappy about specific...

“Look, it’s the lizard of Oz!” I threw down the stuffed animal lizard. We were pretending to be Dorothy and the scarecrow. My daughter cracked up laughing. Her laughing made me laugh, and that made her laugh, for a few minutes.

I had a conversation with a friend recently about how parenting is really satisfying but often not that fun. That’s true a lot of the time. The positive results appear in the long run, so to speak - we have good weeks, made up of difficult days and sleepless nights. But there are some really fun moments too, like laughing together. I have a lot more of a particular silly kind of fun since I became a parent, laughing at wordplay, making up nonsense rhymes, dancing in funny ways. That’s a lot of fun. It’s a kind of break from adult expectations and I appreciate it a lot.

My kids were born at the right time of my life, generally speaking. I was kind of over a lot...

“Where you from? Canada? Midwest?”

“Midwest,” said Liz as the waiter refilled our coffees.

“Right. First time in Scotland?”

“Yeah.”

He pulled a chair from another table in the empty diner and sat down.
“How you like it?”

“It’s great,” Liz said. He smiled wide.

“Where all you going?”

“Tomorrow morning we go back south to catch a ferry, then taking the train north, we want to go to Oban.”

“No mate why not just catch the ferry right here?”

“What?”

“There’s a ferry right in our village.”

“Would you mind looking at the map with us?” I asked.

“No bother at all!”

I got the map out of my backpack. He pointed to the northern tip of the island. A dotted line connected to the main land. “See? You go south, then you have to go east, then north, then back west, then up north to Oban. You take the ferry here, save you time. ”

“What about the train?”

“There’s a bus. It’s only about...

Learning sucks. I hate it.

That thought struck me after reading this blog post by Kristin King, about creative writing programs. My formal creative writing education consisted of about a year of attending a group hosted by a professor in college. I struggled in that group, writing a lot of very bleak beginnings of stories. Some of the imagery worked, and some of the ideas were interesting in the sort of way that might seem deep if it was late at night and you were stoned. But they failed as stories. The writing professor compare the tone of my drafts to work by Carson McCullers. “Your good at pulling off an atmosphere of sadness, it reminds me of her writing.” (I was flattered just to have a word like “atmosphere” used about something I wrote. The best part of that compliment was that I started reading McCullers.) With a technique I now recognize, he followed that compliment with some...