This is the longest I’ve ever left the blog without posting. For the past year or so, I’ve posted every day… and there’s been almost a week between this post and my last. I was sick, like very sick, with one of those 24-hour stomach bugs. What I realized during the thick of it was that the problems I was currently thinking about _before _ I got sick were now relatively meaningless.

Talk to anyone who has had a kid, or someone who is close to someone who has had a kid and you’ll hear this phrase: parenting is hard. It’s an understandable response. Especially for mothers who are learning how to breastfeed and pump, among so many other new skills. For fathers who are trying to figure out how to nurture in their own way. For support partners. For grandparents who are learning to navigate the dichotomy of unsolicited advice and teaching.

I’m lying under my covers and it’s warm. It’s snowing outside, lightly. Out of nowhere you’re crying, and I feel this sense of duty to get up, to go calm you, to feed you, to change you. I don’t always, because I’d like to give you space to figure out how to get back to sleep on your own. But there is an instinctual immediate feeling of duty (not obligation). Waking up will change.

A number of years ago, I released a video about tea and friendship. In the video, I filmed my friend Grant making tea with an overdubbed conversation about how tea is like friendship because you have to “re-steep” occasionally, bringing out deeper and more complex flavors. But another way that tea is like friendship is that different flavors can be brought out depending on the temperature of the water. In the same way that boiling water brings out the astringent qualities of a good green tea, a particularly aggressive friend might bring out my more astringent qualities.

+++ title = “01” date = 2020 +++ If I say that I like you, please know that I am saying we are alike. No, we’re not identical, and perhaps there’s only a tiny cross-section of personality that we share. But if I like you (and it’s mutual), we’ve found a little grassy area for a picnic. We’ve found our topic of conversation, a conversation that we will have to abandon when it’s time to leave, and pick back up again when we reunite.