…and yet there’s a big green monster punching people in the taste hole, and this, like church, is supposed to be a joyous occasion. Let us turn to the book of Concussions, chapter 3, verses 6–9.

There was a nice little relationship build-up between Tony Stark and Bruce Banner that I vaguely got but didn’t consciously behold whose analysis John Hodgman preserved here on his excellent Tumblr, and if you are at all fond of superheroes, you should read it. Spoilers, if you have not seen the movie.

I’ve been mostly a DC Comics man for most of my life, because I have a fondness for the Gods and never quite let go of childhood power fantasies (there’s a post there, I think), but of course the more human heroes are more interesting. As Batman is the anti-Superman (and therefore more popular), so is Tony the anti-Hulk, but far more subtly.

Banner, in turn, is far more interesting than Clark Kent. He has the same near-godlike power and invulnerability, and yet he is so much more damaged, and his writers (unlike most who have handled Superman) understand that he probably should not be allowed to exist. But we can’t kill him.

Maybe Lex Luthor was right.

It’s a curious thing to cheer and laugh as throbbing, green, unbridled id unleashes biblical destruction in front of us. That’s Bruce’s appeal, of course: he, unlike we, can mostly control that raging bile duct of loathing and smallness and hate that we all have. Mostly. And then there is the smashing, which is glorious.

I’m going to be moving this blog over from the CMS it’s currently on to a static blog engine pretty soon. That way there’s no database to hack, very little maintenance, and when I inevitably make the front page of Reddit, they won’t crash the site.

Because word’s gonna get around, man. Word’s gonna get around.

I only bring it up in case you have me in your RSS feeds. There’s a non-trivial chance (which is to say pretty much guaranteed certainty) that this site’s feed is going to go all eeybita eeybita and smoke will pour out of your computer and then Kelly LeBrock will show up in panties and a cropped t-shirt and wreck your house. Or, even worse, you may have to re-subscribe.

So, sorry in advance, is what I’m saying. Because setting up stuff like this pretty much never goes smoothly.

With the new site will come an even simpler stylesheet (begone, sidebar) that’s waaaaaay more mobile-friendly. No more zoom-a-zoom-zoom in your boom boom.

Basically I have to do some IE testing, then some swearing, then some fixes and more testing, then it’ll be up and running. I’m hoping by the end of next week, but who knows.

Hasn’t been often I’ve had that feeling of a tectonic shift when discovering a musician. Clapton. Hendrix. John Lee Hooker. Muddy. Stevie Ray. Public Enemy. Tom Waits, after he chased me around a few times. A few others, not many for 37 years. They only come around once every few seasons for me. My wife and I had just started dating when the last one came around.

Another one just happened today, about ten minutes before I wrote this sentence. I found this MetaFilter post (via dooce, no idea how I missed it when it first went up) about an up-and-coming band called The Alabama Shakes. I watched the first video linked there.

I said god damn.

That thing went twang again, first time in about a decade. Maybe it was partly Levon Helm’s recent passing, maybe it was how long it had been since the last time–shit, maybe it was the Wellbutrin–but I even got a little choked up by the end.

I don’t want to oversell it. I got the album, and it’s damn good. Sources tell me it’s nothing compared to watching them live. My guess is you’ll be hearing a lot from them pretty soon. Because seriously, god damn.

I’ve started keeping an "I Hate" list. Stay with me, it’s more positive than it sounds. But I need to back up for a minute.

My job is to provide technical support to people who go into physician offices, look for things that aren’t working, and try to root those problems out. It’s about increasing efficiency, training doctors to take a broader view of their patient populations, and put in better processes for preventive and chronic disease care.

The process is a pretty straightforward one: First you identify something that’s not working the way it should. Once you’ve done that, you do what’s called a "root cause analysis", which is essentially reverse-engineering the problem to figure out why it’s happening in the first place. After that, it’s a matter of rapid-cycle testing: propose a fix for the problem, test it out immediately on a small scale, and watch what happens. If your change works, great, spread it out across the practice, and if not, analyze why not and work on a better plan. Rinse, repeat.

This is a stunningly simple thing that is often very difficult to do well. When you’re new to it, the hardest part of it (for me, anyway) is training your brain to catch the problems in the first place. It’s easy to get complacent about things being The Way They Are and acclimate yourself to annoyances and idiocies to the extent that you barely even notice them.

The job’s been worming its way into my brain. It’s slowly gotten me thinking about the things in my life that could stand an un-sucking. Like buying my iPad, for instance—I was stunned to discover that I usually prefer using it to my laptop, unless I need to do something it flat-out can’t handle. Why?

No power cords. Ten-hour battery. Lightweight. Easy to rest on the arm of my chair. It doesn’t gently roast my testicles while I use it. It doesn’t erect a partial barrier between me and the rest of the room. It’s as pleasant and easy to plop in your lap as a book.

In short, it made me aware of a half-dozen or so minor annoyances that come from using even something as portable and convenient as a laptop computer, annoyances I’d gotten so used to that they barely registered with me. Hello iPad, bye-bye frustrations, and my life gets a little more un-sucked.

Enter the "I Hate" list.

It’s a simple concept. You write down things that you hate. Not things like racism or Sean Hannity or the New York Yankees (things that are equally horrible), but things that you encounter in your daily life that you find to be at least moderately unpleasant. They may be things, but mostly they’ll be tasks you perform.

So, as an example this morning, I noted that I hate tracking email conversations in Outlook, because Outlook does not by default group messages by conversation the way GMail does. I thought on it some, then went looking for a hack.

Turns out I didn’t need one. Outlook 2010 allows you to turn this on as a setting. Even better, it gives you some surprisingly awesome tools for managing conversations that even GMail doesn’t have. My morning went from dull to nerd-giddy in five minutes, and I spread the word to my teammates about what I’d learned. From "I hate" to improving company efficiency in fifteen minutes or less. And now every day has a tiny little bit less friction.

So I’m applying this life-wide. I keep a little text file called iHate.txt in my Dropbox (that’s an affiliate link—if you sign up through it, we both get more storage for free), and any time I hit an annoyance, I whip out my phone and append a new line to it. It’s already growing at a good clip, and I’m doing root cause analyses to find what’s behind those lifeturds.

Turns out a lot of it has to do with clutter, of both the physical and metaphorical varieties. Which necessitates a plan. Which I am now working on, a tiny bit at a time.

Surprisingly positive experience, thinking about things that you hate. Every splinter identified is a splinter that can be tweezed away. And now is the season of the tweezening.

Speaking my mind, particularly in mixed company, has never been my strong suit. In person, I mean. I can hide behind text and say withering things with the best of them when online, but out there in meatspace, eye-to-eye, my internal censor is one very active little dude. I’m sure that’s a common phenomenon.

I do this sometimes out of concern for others’ feelings, sometimes to avoid conflict, often out of shyness, and often because no matter how hard I try not to, I start advertising myself in the conversation. That last is a part of my personality I’d like to drag into an alleyway and take a hammer to. Call it my inner Shadoe Stevens[1].

Awhile back I wrote a post on the nature of intelligence and the admittedly first-world problem of not being as smart as I used to think I was. I (Neil deGrasse Tyson, actually) contrasted true smarts with mere fact collection and regurgitation, usually done to either impress people or shut them down.

Then I did another one on Tim Kreider’s open letter to the Tea Party, in which he frankly laid out both the similarities between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street and the nature of their mutual antipathy.

Those things didn’t seem at all connected to me until I came across a MetaFilter post (yes, MeFi again, shaddup) about Charlie Kaufman’s recent lecture at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (PDF link). A touch long, but the first six pages are where the real meat is, and I’ll chunk out some quotes below.

It’s ostensibly a speech about screenwriting, but it really isn’t that at all. It’s a speech about fear and emptiness and uncertainty and selling yourself and being honest and kind. It’s about what separates us and prevents us from opening up to one another. All of which is at the core of good writing, mind, because writing is either about life or else it’s lies and masturbation. Which is to say, advertising.

I’ll try to restrain myself with the quotes, but it won’t be easy:

Here’s a recent quote that I found: ‘We do not talk, we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.’ That was actually written in 1945 by Henry Miller and I think it’s timely…. People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos and the internet. And it’s ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn’t alter our brains.

It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colourful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’

And they’re very good at their jobs. But that’s what it is you’re getting, because that’s what they’re making. They’re selling you something. And the world is built on this now. Politics and government are built on this, corporations are built on this.

Interpersonal relationships are built on this. And we’re starving, all of us, and we’re killing each other, and we’re hating each other, and we’re calling each other liars and evil because it’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning.

That’s pretty much the nut of it, and that’s when I made the connection at an embarrassingly late age: Served up at the root of all of this—the self-advertising, the spittle-flecked political division, the moralizing, all of it—is an American-sized portion of fear and emptiness. It’s a costume to conceal weakness: I am brave and I have a sword and you are either a knight or a dragon and I just dare you to be a dragon.

I’m not sneering. I’m as susceptible as the next guy. I embraced political drama too and only abandoned it after cable news turned it into a living reductio ad absurdum (the Latin is to impress you). In my short time among them, I positively goddamn wallowed in the Tim LaHaye-esque demonic conspiracy dramas and revenge porn so adored by the evangelical community. I get it, because it’s my malady too. I must make you love me or else take you to school:

It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me, and I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound, and paints it with bright colours. It’s a sleight of hand, a distraction, so to attempt to change the pattern let me expose the wound. I now step into this area blindly, I do not know what the wound is, I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least unable to be articulable.

I do believe you have a wound too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone. I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected, it is the thing that must be tap danced over five shows a day, it is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself. But it is the thing that wants to live.

I’m going to find a way to paraphrase that and turn it into a goddamn tattoo.

I have for years heard an inner voice urging me to open my heart wider[2], and it’s mostly gone unheeded, because of fear and being completely uncertain about how to start. One doesn’t just start a conversation with “I’m absolutely fucking terrified”.

But one can start an essay that way, and so I’m here and I’ll just go ahead and kick it off. Things I’m afraid of, in no particular order:

• That I am not the good man everyone believes me to be
• That I will fail my family
• That I will screw up my kids
• That I won’t leave a legacy, that I will die with the memories of those who have known me
• That I will never get good at making things with my hands, or even find an act of creation I can stick with
• That I will never get out of my own head, or find quiet there
• Of people, mostly that they will hurt me
• Of embarrassing myself
• That I will be found out
• That I am not much of a man
• That I will never find a way to set aside my pettiness and judgment
• That I am weak and will always be thus
• That I will never do anything worth a damn with myself

Why the list? Because I think I’m finally getting to the point where my exhaustion with painting over that wound is outweighing the fear. At the ripe old age of almost-thirty-seven, I might actually be growing up. And I’d rather we talked about stuff.

Also, five bucks says most of you share in at least one of those, and I’d like to explore that. I’d like you to be able to talk to me, or someone, about it. To wit:

What I’m trying to express – what I’d like to express – is the notion that, by being honest, thoughtful and aware of the existence of other living beings, a change can begin to happen in how we think of ourselves and the world, and ourselves in the world. We are not the passive audience for this big, messed up power play.

We don’t have to be. We can say who we are, we can assert our right to existence, we can say to the bullies and conmen, the people who try to shame us, embarrass us, flatter us, to the people who have no compunction about lying to us to get our money and our allegiance that we are thinking – really thinking – about who we are, and we’ll express ourselves and other people won’t feel so alone.

That’s at least a big chunk of what I want this place to be. Also doo-doo jokes and pictures of Christina Hendricks.

I dunno. I don’t have any more answers than Charlie Kaufman. I have all of his uncertainty. Perhaps counterintuitively, I find that uncertainty encouraging. The road forward is usually rocky, in my experience. Solid, even ground means you’re walking in a circle.

Seriously, go read the first half-dozen pages of that speech, even if you’re not a writer. Then write down your own fears. Then set the paper on fire. Then laugh and make something.

I’m still going to do this as a short-ish one, but it’s no longer the standalone one-off I first expected it to be. Don’t want to get into it too much yet, but I’d previously written a post about intelligence and then spent a couple of days writing a post about fear that I pretty much figured I’d never publish.

Well, then I read something yesterday that jabbed at my forebrain more than a little. It was a speech, a speech I’ll share with you soon, and it tied together that bumf on intelligence and this splorp on the culture war and that thing about fear that was never going to see the light of day, and my perspective shifted, just a little. Something clicked, there was what I’ll call a brief moment of ohhhhhh, and suddenly I discovered words for a few things that had been rattling around in the back of the cupboard for a while.

So I’m going to rewrite that next one, and while I figure out how to do that, I’ll link you to Tim Kreider’s[1] open letter to the Tea Party, something I found to be one of the few sane and honest appraisals of the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street divide I’ve come across. A few snippets:

The only consensus in this country, the one thing absolutely no one on any side will dispute, is that things are fucked up, and no one in power seems to be even trying to do anything to fix them. It seems to me the main difference between conservatives and liberals anymore is that you blame The Government and we blame Corporations. It’s past time we noticed that those two antagonists are literally the same people. They’re frat brothers and golf buddies and they go back and forth from corporate boards to government regulatory agencies and back. Wall Street donates money to political campaigns so that the government will use our tax money to bail them out when they cheat and make bad gambles and crash the economy. Meanwhile we’re distracted fighting among ourselves, having the political equivalent of the “Tastes great!/Less filling!” debate.

Look: I’m not pretending to like you, and I don’t expect you to pretend to like me…. We have radically different ideas about the kind of country we want this to be…. But we also have a lot in common, if you think about it; we’re both considered “extremists” for fighting for what seems to us like common sense and decency; and we both care passionately about what kind of country we want to live in….

So you can go on sneering at all those smelly, spoiled little trust-fund hippies whining for a handout, and we can go on shaking our heads at all you obese suburban rednecks who’re too dumb to know when you’ve been swindled, and in a few weeks it’ll get cold and the protests will dwindle or disperse, or the national media will just get distracted by some other, shinier story, and we’ll all forget this ever happened and go back to business as usual. If business as usual is what you want.

Fairly sobering take on things. The whole thing’s worth a full read.

Then I realized I was unconsciously attempting to rewrite this excellent post by Ben Hammersley, and immediately felt embarrassed, because his is far better than mine would have been.

So go read that one instead. It’s brilliant.

So I’ll lighten the mood a little and bore you instead by talking about writing workflows and software. Six of you will care, but this is where I spend most of my day, and I feel like talking about it.

Still around? Hokay.

I’m rapidly becoming convinced that John Gruber’s excellent Markdown syntax is one of the greatest things that ever happened to writing on computers. He developed it as an easier way of writing and reading HTML documents by stripping out all the tags and extra cruft and replacing them with simple symbols. Write up a simplified plain-text document, run it through a script to convert it to HTML, and blammo, web page made with considerably less work.

John’s a very smart guy, but I’m not sure he realized what he’d done there, not at first. By abstracting the details of writing HTML, he hadn’t just created a shorthand. He’d damn near created a meta-language, something that could be run through any number of different programs to create any number of different types of documents. With the right set of tools, you could easily turn a Markdown document into an RTF document, a PDF, theoretically anything.

Enter Fletcher Penney and MultiMarkdown, which has utterly changed the way I do business. It takes Gruber’s original syntax and adds very little (I believe Penney only added syntax for creating tables and footnotes), but allows you to process it into a number of formats: HTML, LaTeX (and thence to PDF), OPML, and Open Document Format (which from there can be converted to RTF, Word, or Pages formats).

Gruber’s creation kicked off a minor revolution in writing and developing for the web, and it’s now leaking into offices and writer’s workflows as well. An pornographic amount of software has sprung up around it, particularly for OS X, but really everywhere.

Why use it? Well, partly because you hate Microsoft Office. Yes, you do.

I’m what some might term a “power user” of Office, as I’ve gone so far as to create Excel spreadsheets embedded with hand-written VBA code that creates and emails Word documents on the fly. I’ll be the first to praise Office’s power, as it is indeed as powerful as Satan’s own broccoli farts, but actually using it is about as pleasant as inhaling said farts. It’s the word processing equivalent of going to Walmart.

So there’s that. There’s also the question of portability. I’m writing this right now in Markdown on an iPad, but I could open it on any computer from any decade since punch cards went out. You don’t have to worry about what happens if your favorite software dies out or starts sucking. You don’t have to worry about operating systems or versions.

So on. I’d be willing to bet a lot of you are nerdy enough to be familiar, so I won’t go on. But I love it. I take all my meeting and conference notes in Markdown. I write up reports and quality control plans in Markdown. I rub Markdown all over my chest before bedtime every night. It gets out of my way and lets me work.

But the most amusing effect of Markdown’s growing adoption is seeing a surge in popularity of that nerdiest of tools: the humble text editor.

No frills, no buttons (well, hopefully not), no “ribbon”, no bullshit. A window, a blinking cursor, and what you want to write. Like Markdown itself, a good text editor gets out of your way.

Me, I started with Emacs, the (almost literal) 800-pound gorilla of text editors. I got into it partly for efficiency, partly for nerd cred, but also partly for the glorious wonderment that is org-mode. I left org and Emacs only with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Why? Early signs of repetitive strain injury. Emacs relies on key combinations that require a certain amount of manual acrobatics, and they took their toll on my forearms. So I left for the dark side and learned Vim.

I quickly learned that I loved Vim’s commands, but loathed Vim itself. I began to despair. I found a way to use Emacs with vim’s keybindings, but that was starting to feel like a Rube Goldberg contraption, so I reached out to my fellow nerds. They introduced me to Sublime Text.

Hoo boy, is it aptly named. Runs on all three major operating systems, is easily configurable, and it can even be set up to use (some) vim keybindings. For a guy like me, this is like being given a bisexual Christina Hendricks covered in heroin and bearing a large bag of cash. And then learning that the Star Wars prequels never happened. Something something LEGO.

That’s where I’ve been ever since, Markdowning my happy ass away in Sublime (and Nebulous Notes on my iPad). I could probably count how many times I use Word each month without having to take my shoes off. And let me tell you, brethren and sisteren, that is when you can stop farting around and start building giant killer robots.

Is it for everyone? No. Converting to your preferred document format isn’t hard, but it was built for nerds. If you don’t get a product with built-in MultiMarkdown support, you either need to be able to use a command line without panicking or have a nerd on hand to simplify using it. So there’s a learning curve, but it’s worth it. The reward is the sheer simplicity of writing and formatting text.

So to Mr. Gruber and Mr. Penney, you have my eternal gratitude. You’ve made how I work so much better.

Apps with Markdown/MultiMarkdown Support

• MultiMarkdown Composer (OS X)
• Marked (OS X)
• NVAlt (OS X)
• Scrivener (OS X, Windows)
• Textmate (OS X)
• WriteMonkey (Windows)

(Side note for my non-nerd readers: If you’re not familiar with Dr. Tyson, he’s an astrophysicist and a popularizer of science with a podcast and a TV show and another TV show and, well, you can read about him here. I’m more than a little in love with the man.)

I’ve watched it twice now, once while brainstorming ideas for a new application I’ve been kicking around, once just the other day while flying out to a conference. I’ve made a permanent copy on my iPad so I can watch it on the rare occasions that I’m offline. Don’t sue me, anybody.

I did this partly for the entertainment value, but also because it reminds me of how stupid I am.

I am, according to the usually accepted definition, a very smart guy. Been told that ever since I was three years old, when I walked into my preschool and read a book to my class. Ever since then, my life has been one of gifted programs and honors classes and people telling me how smart I am. And I wish they hadn’t done that.

You’ll get about two-thirds of the way through that video before you hear Tyson speak about the nature of intelligence. Absorbing and collecting facts, he says, even having a rare facility for doing so, isn’t intelligence.

Intelligence is about curiosity and searching and asking questions and embracing, indeed loving your ignorance as you find ever more ways to whittle away at it. It’s about puzzling over things and picking them apart to see how they work and, maybe, make them better.

I don’t do that, not much. I’ve mostly been afraid to. Instead, I collect facts like a human vacuum. When I was small, I regurgitated all kinds of data to grownups about weather and the human body and physics and math. It was stuff I devoured from books, mostly because I found it fascinating, but I think also because impressing grownups was a hobby of mine. Is, rather.

When people slap labels like “gifted” on you, now you’ve got a role to play. You’ve got a title to live up to. And that scares you. When things don’t come easily to you, you worry that maybe everyone was wrong. You become terrified of displaying your own ignorance. And you stay in your comfort zone. I absorb facts like crazy, but I don’t do very much with them except talk about them on the internet and at parties. Dr. Tyson is right: I’m not intelligent, I’m a collector.

It appears that science backs me up on some of this. I’ve taken that article to heart, shared it with my wife, and told her my desire that we praise our children for their work, not their smarts. She agrees, so we try like hell to remember not to even utter the word “smart” in their presence. Indeed, it makes me uneasy to think that we should delineate between people who absorb facts and make connections easily and those who do not.

There’s a great quote from the man whose name is a synonym for genius: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

I know a man who couldn’t tell you a damn thing about Newtonian physics or poetry, but his skills as a knifemaker are earning him national recognition and may well immortalize him, if he keeps growing. I know another who couldn’t do differential calculus to save his life, but has skill as a pianist that humanity produces only a couple of times a generation. Still one more, this one extremely book-smart and on his way to becoming a university professor, who tossed it aside to pursue his passion of making the music of his home country.

These men found their intelligence and poured their guts into it. They are all driven by a curiosity and a need to create. All of my friends: the glassblower, the jeweler, the woodworker, the singer, the poet, all have a need to channel their genius into making or investigating something every day, and I have never in my life been able to find that. They take their skills and they use them, because of that need.

What I have instead is a sort of meta-need, a need to need to put my hand to something. A hunger to find that passion and pursue it. I’ve been searching for an object of obsession that I can put my alleged smarts to for a long time.

Now, I’ve dabbled, tried music and carpentry and stained glass (I haven’t fully given up on that one) and fiction. The only one that really ever took was cooking, which is about as instant-gratification as it gets—you don’t have to spend three days sanding food, if you’re doing it right. Not to mention that I still don’t have the patience for learning proper presentation or some of the more long-form methods.

So I look around, I surround myself with talented people every chance I get, and I collect more facts.

The Fibonacci sequence tends toward the golden ratio, which is found in innumerable places in nature, even in the standard flour-to-water ratio for making bread.

Electrons behave differently depending on whether their behavior is being directly observed. Because of this, we have quantum mechanics, and so you get to read this on your computer.

Objectivism is generally regarded as a self-defeating philosophy, as its ethical aims are weakened every time another person learns them.

Traditional 12-bar blues music tends to follow a I-IV-V chord progression. The Chinese have a far higher incidence of perfect pitch because they speak a tonal language.

These curiosities aggregate, and I enjoy them, and I enjoy sharing them, and I certainly enjoy looking smart when I share them. But I think I have a sliver of understanding for why most child prodigies never become anything of note. I behold the aggregation of trivia and antiques and God knows what else that is my mind, and I wonder what it is good for, what the hell I can do with it that will hold my anemic focus.

Really, the only project that I haven’t abandoned is myself, my desire to find what is lacking in me and excise it with either scalpel or hammer. It’s my focus on my lack of focus. Masturbatory? Narcissistic? Probably. But it’s something.

I’ll keep looking. I’ll keep surrounding myself with my betters, wherever I can find them. Something’s bound to rub off. I hope I’ll know it when I see it—or rather, that I won’t, that it will become so ingrained in me that I take it for granted. That’s when the good stuff happens. That’s when you’re a smarty-pants.

1. Set your lock screen wallpaper to be a picture of your family. Preferably not a portrait.
2. When you get home at the end of a workday, before you open the door, turn off whatever app is running, lock your phone, then bring up the lock screen again.
3. Look at it for a full 5–10 seconds and say these words: This is why I’m here.
4. Make sure your phone is ignored or turned off for at least the next two hours.
5. You may check it while taking a shit. A real shit.

If you are childless and able-bodied, most of the mundane tasks of the day come as easily as breathing. You don’t trip over six difficulties on your way to the car. You can go to work, bust ass all day, leave all of your energy behind, and check out when you get home. You’re allowed to be grumpy. You’re allowed to eat dinner in front of the Internet or the TV.

With kids, it could be that the hardest part of your day is just starting when you step through your doorway. Even if they’re being well-behaved angels, your kids will want you to play with them. They will want you to be on. And that takes energy, energy you’ll probably have to dig for, as does shepherding them through their nighttime rituals.

My son’s favorite game? Jumping off of things and having me catch him, often without informing me that we have begun a game. I mean, come on. But you don’t have a choice, you are required to show up and dig deep. You have to be positive and constructive and fun. You are emphatically not allowed to lose your shit.

So I’ve spent the day wading through the hundred skeeter bites of being allowed to be only half of a software developer, the endless frustrations of working on government contracts, the drama du jour on my team, whatever—and for my kids, now it must be as if it never happened.

So I kill my podcast. I lock my phone. I hit the lock button again.

My picture is nearly a year old now. It is the picture we used on our Christmas card in 2010. It is a series of eight grainy, black-and-white snapshots of my family, crammed into a photo booth. In them, you can see my daughter looking on with the wide-eyed fascination you expect from a one-year-old. You can see my son trying to hog the whole frame to make faces. You can see me restraining him and, in the last shot, pretending to eat his head. You can see my wife, more smirking and laughing than smiling, as captive to the chaos as I, and you would not know that she was probably thinking about her dying mother. None of us are looking at the camera.

People see this picture and say, “It looks like you have a lot of fun.”

I’ll admit that for about half a second after I hear this, I’m partly surprised. Yes, we have tons of fun, but I have a full-time job and two children under the age of five. A lot of the time, what I am is tired. For my wife? It’s even harder.

So I look at that picture, and I remember. I realize it’s a better summary of What My Family Is than I could ever write. There is mess, there is noise, there is struggling, and we are laughing the whole way. I see that, and most days I can lay my burden down.

This is why you’re here, I think, and it’s just a long enough walk to the back door for me to hope that maybe today I’ll be a better husband and father than I am.