I want to be upfront about something before I get into this: I have not been to every great pizza place in Chicago. The list of spots I keep meaning to get to is long, it keeps growing, and I have two young kids which means spontaneous restaurant decisions no longer exist in my life … Read more
Last Tuesday my kids had Tombstone pizza for dinner and I felt nothing. No guilt, no apology, no mental asterisk. I slid it out of the oven, cut it into rectangles, put it on their plates, and sat down to eat it myself, and it was fine. It was, in fact, good. It took eleven … Read more
Every Sunday around 8 PM, after the kids are down, my wife and I sit on the couch and have what I can only describe as a very mild business meeting about our lives. It started as an experiment. It’s been going long enough now that skipping it produces a noticeably worse week. This was … Read more
My oldest figured out that I don’t have a strong position on whether the hall light “counts” as a nightlight, and he has been exploiting this ambiguity for eight months. He’s five. He is operating with the strategic clarity of someone who has done a thorough threat assessment and identified the weakest point in the … Read more
There’s an appointment I forgot to schedule for six weeks. Not a big one. A routine thing — one of those items that lives on the “I should do that” list in my head, below “call back about the thing” and above “figure out what that smell is in the car.” It sat there for … Read more