I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:

Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:

“Does Pete worry?”
“Goodness, no!”

And as long as she’s not distracted putting a stuffed animal to sleep, or wrapping one monkey’s arms around another so they can be hugged all night, Ess will pipe up: “Goodness, no!”

I think Dream Animals by Emily Winfield Martin might be the most beautifully illustrated book we have yet seen.

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It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.

There’s a speed bump before the fork in the road, but if I can maneuver to the alternate route, I end up in a mindset where I’m thinking about trying to participate with Ess. It isn’t obvious in the moment, but stepping back I realize the bill-paying and cleaning will be there long after Ess grows up. So the three of us have played Zingo (though at this age it devolves into Ess doing “let’s pitch all the pieces around”) and we read of course, but I’ve recently found something worth practicing. I was helping to get Ess out of the car the other day, and instead of thinking about getting her inside, so she could have a bath and get ready for bed, I tried to short-circuit my adult tasklist. I just stopped. And I looked at what Ess was doing. I mean, we are always looking at what Ess is doing (and Mykala is frequently cleaning up after what Ess was doing during the long days while I am at work), but this time I really tried to see.

Perhaps sensing this, Ess immediately began chattering away, narrating what she was imagining, what the two little play bugs she had were doing, going in and out of their house, where were they cold, where were they warm, can I hold this one, see how this one is clean and this one is dirty, and look how the antennae on this one are gone. (I’ve added a picture of what they look like when they’re new.)

Essie’s imagination, the world she’s in, has a richness that surpasses my own. Almost everything is new, and everything is interesting. Her excitement is contagious, her narration frequently hilarious, and her desire to share it all is easy for me, stumbling through the smokescreens of adulthood, to miss.

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At the library, Ess found a toy stethoscope. Listening to its heartbeat sounds, she asked me what it was called and I told her.

Later on she declared that she’s going to have to use the check-up-scope to make sure her stuffed penguin was OK.

Check-up-scope.

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“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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The Future of Not Working is about a few things, among them the test of universal basic income as viable social policy. It touches on the continuing and seismic shift in labor from humans to machine automation. But what it really helped me understand was how to help those in poverty:

One estimate, generated by Laurence Chandy and Brina Seidel of the Brookings Institution, recently calculated that the global poverty gap — meaning how much it would take to get everyone above the poverty line — was just $66 billion. That is roughly what Americans spend on lottery tickets every year, and it is about half of what the world spends on foreign aid.

People at the bottommost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder know exactly, like surgically-precisely what they need and the best way to get that to them is simple: cash.

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Eisenhower’s “Chance for Peace” speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

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