One trick is to tell stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville? I needed a new heel for m’shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. “Gimme five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh, yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

Well we write 12 like this: 10

It’s easy

Le Roman de la Rose, a mediaeval French poem that informed the tropes of western heterosexual media for the last thousand years.

And that day she learned the importance of punctuality

Yeah I don’t understand how a parent can not think deeply about their relationship with their kids. I don’t think there should be such a thing as “thinking too deep” about anything to do with how to raise a kid.

For me it would also be a matter of pride. If I dismissed all these things with the thought they’re identical, but I cannot even name them, how can I in good faith claim to know them well enough to make such judgements? I would think myself arrogant and shallow. I’m far too prideful to think myself arrogant, and so I’m too prideful to dismiss something from a place of ignorance. Surely if the kid actually knows the names of the things and I don’t, the kid’s opinion must hold more weight than mine. I would only attack my loved one’s interests from a place of certain understanding. I also can’t understand having so little pride as to think as you describe.

There is no amount of exhaustion that could persuade me not to learn the name of my loved one’s favourite toy for years on end.

If experiencing the world through fresh eyes isn’t one of the main points of having a kid, what are we even doing as a species? How can you not be infected by a little one’s curiosity about a changing world and learn along with them? I’m childfree and I still understand that much. How can someone choose to have kids and not want to share their kid’s eagerness to learn?

I didn’t understand that as a kid and I still don’t understand it. Why would you take so little interest in what your kids like? I don’t even have kids and I still know who Mr Beast is. I can’t imagine having people I love, living in my house, who are into this stuff and not knowing all about it. The only way this kind of parental apathy can possibly make sense to me is if those parents just don’t love their kids. It doesn’t make sense to me.

That link has your si in it. Your si is a tracking code Google uses to determine who clicked on links you shared. They want to know who your friends are for their social data models.