About Sadie

Due to a request from one of my three readers, on a good day, I'm going to take a brief respite from my never ending quest to have David Wallace read by every man woman and child in American to talk about Sadie.

Listen, I haven't written about the little bundle of joy... Note: We don't always bundle here now, so sometimes she's just a many chinned round mound of joy. because the biggest secret that nobody tells you about raising kids is that it's easy. I mean, sure it takes up almost all of your time/energy on a daily basis, but it doesn't take more than that. What I mean to say is that, for the most part, barring the occasional fit, which I generally understand the origins of anyway, it's a pretty rewarding gig.

Not only are you spending time with probably the cutest human being on the face of the earth. And yes, I'm well aware that every parent thinks that about their own offspring, and that's probably a good thing anyhow because it would be weird to look at your child and think, "Huh, we could have done better than that couldn't we have hon?" Also, this extremely cute person, see above, has your blood coursing through their veins, which means you're genetically predetermined to be extremely interested in just about everything they do. The way that they interact with the world is a direct reflection on you, yes as a parent, but also just from a generic science stand point. As in, heh, my offspring should be smarter than to put a share knife in their mouth because that's certainly something I wouldn't do. I mean, the person that people find most interesting in the world is generally staring at them in the mirror each morning, and you're getting the next best thing only cuter and younger and therefore more full of potential, succeed or fail.

I'm probably making parenting sound a bit more selfish than it is. I'm just trying to get at that feeling that you get when you stare at your child and just feel so much intense love of the sort that generally comes from early romantic attachments, except, just a guess, I think the honeymoon period on this one is longer. I probably have a lot more to say about how to properly raise a child, or at the very least a girl who is roughly Sadie's age, though boy girl distinctions prove to be more important starting around age 1.

Anyhow, my advice, which I've related to S a number of times has to do with allowing a baby to queue you for nap time rather than you trying to force it on them. I'd say more, but I'm planning to write about putting your baby to bed properly and all the queues you should follow. I'm fairly certain that I can get at least 230 pages out of the idea as long as I'm free with diagrams and bullet points and the like. Anyone who has read Malcom Gladwell or virtually any book of non-fiction about an Idea, emphasis intended, can relate to the seeming interminable nature of the text after the first 125 pages or so when the point has been proven and the writing goes on and on illustrating that point again. This to me would be like laughing at every cat video on YouTube, I mean, at some point their just a bunch of f-ing animals, go give a homeless person a buck and stop wasting my time.



You have to admit the cat is pretty cute.

On an unrelated note in my never ending quest based on the movie The Never Ending story. Note: For years, literally until I watched it again in college, I thought the princess at the end of the movie was bald, and it turned out she just had her hair pulled tightly back. I think the point I'm trying to make here is that she probably should have been bald. The movie would definitely have been made more strangely creepy for children if that had been the case.

From Farther Away by Jonathan Franzen, a New Yorker essay oddly aimed at demythologizing the apparent hagiography of David Wallace that Franzen feels has been going on. Though his points seem well taken in some instances, he's also widely regarded as kind of jerk in the literary world.

From Father Away

David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them, I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark “scale 100%.” I once heard him enthusiastically describe, in the presence of a girl he was dating, someone else’s girlfriend as his “paragon of womanhood.” David’s girl did a wonderfully slow double take and said, “What?” Whereupon David, whose vocabulary was as large as anybody’s in the Western Hemisphere, took a deep breath and, letting it out, said, “I’m suddenly realizing that I’ve never actually known what the word ‘paragon’ means.”