“PEANUT!” Ess exclaimed ecstatically from the back seat of the car.

Our confusion gave way to realization: Ess had chewed through to the middle her of apple and saw its seeds.

Some things we eat, some things we don’t.

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Robin Romm’s Double Bind sounds like a good book:

In her introduction, Romm, who is in her early forties, writes about her sense, as a young woman, that “striving and achieving had to be approached delicately or you risked the negative judgment of others.” She felt a pull between the hardness of her ambition and the softness of her socialization, and calls this “the double bind of the gender, success paired eternally with scrutiny and retreat.”

And Elisa Albert’s essay in it sounds like the best one:

Maybe my great ambition, such as it is, is to refrain from engagement with systems that purport to tell me what I’m worth compared to anyone else.

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When the music ends, since it is usually playing from a music library or a streaming radio station, Ess expects another piece to begin playing:

“‘nother hong coming!”

She says it to Mykala, she says it to me. It’s very sweet. I do not recall her once getting upset when we couldn’t make another song start playing. It might be the only thing Ess feels particularly patient about right now. Our very toddlery toddler.

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If you attempt to explain why you should vote to help others while exempting morality and selflessness (which can quickly veer into the tautological) from your argument, you’d be left with an argument from selfishness:

Why are you “owed” a police force, why are you owed a fire department, why are you owed clean water or electricity, why are you owed laws that protect your ideas through patents or copyrights, why are you owed anything you enjoy through a civil society that makes your life demonstrably better than a libertarian wet dream like Zimbabwe?

I’ll tell you why. Because as a civil society we’ve decided what’s a part of the commons, that which we can not individually afford but whose existence we recognize, serves us all. I have news for you: my life is better and more secure if you and your kids aren’t bankrupted by medical bills. My life is better if everyone has safe streets and food. My life is better when the next generation is well-educated to continue the prosperity of this great nation. No one is owed, but it is a gift we give to each other as citizens and the price we pay to enjoy the blessings of our forefathers. And it is the height of hubris to presume to take that gift of a civic society and act as if it never existed before you showed up.

I’ve no idea who wrote that, it is from some screenshot someone took and then posted to Twitter.

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“What does it mean when something is fragile, Ess?”
“You hold it very very gentle and close to your HEART.”

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That silicone green half-sphere is a soft-boiled egg maker. Ess uses it as a bed for people. Her Playmobil Friend is in there, and she’s telling me about the mama and the dada taking care of Friend.

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The most toddlery morning: find your almost year-old Easter dress in the closet, put it on over your clothes, then eat a banana on the couch in the sun.

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Ess, you are growing up so fast. I love you.

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