OK maybe only two habits stuck. I would like to add two more. They have a fighting chance because they continue to hover in my mind without prompting, and initial adoption has been promising.

The first one I call the Eminem rule. After one too many views of the rapper’s “8 Mile” battles, the Youtube algorithm served me a clip of Akon talking about Eminem’s regimented work schedule. He showed up at 9 a.m., took a lunch break at 1, and left the studio at 5 sharp. He could be in the middle of writing a verse — once 5 o’clock hit, he was out.

My Eminem rule is go to bed at 10. That means brushed, flossed, retainer snug and ready to drop whatever I’m doing. If intercourse is legitimately planned and not fickle innuendo, ideally it starts before (yes with the retainer, limiting oral activity to avoid contamination). Otherwise the first move must be promptly at 10 and we can engage only in what my wife and I call “transactional,” which means I drop any pretenses of trying to dazzle anyone and basically try to come as fast as possible like she’s a pricey pay-by-the-minute trick in the Red Light District. Truthfully that lurid thought and the efficiency of it all turn me on in ways romanticism never could.

The second habit is harder to describe and follow, but it’s been working for me. Parents lament how fast the years go by as their kids grow up. To me a year still feels like a year. There’s just not that many years. It’s a short time when they are small and cute.

I am still milking my 4-year-old pronouncing “Obi-Wan Ke-nobody” without a hint of irony. This has gone on for at least a year, but some of the phases last only days. Last week he was fixated on announcing the time from his brother’s Spiderman watch. And then he stopped.

This is the root of the new habit, roughly named the First Response rule. Whenever I have a decision or reaction regarding my kids, my first thought without even thinking should be to remember how short this time is. The cheesy but true two-second framing sets up my high-strung mind better. It doesn’t mean I never get pissed off or have to give in every time. But I am less pissed off and give in more.

I stopped writing this like nine times to hang with my clingy little one. He will be this obsessed with me for about 5 percent of our lives. When I give in or simmer down after applying the First Response rule, I find myself taking a few seconds to just watch them and soak in their rapidly changing faces.

Often I sneak into their bedroom to see what creative sleeping position they’re in. The other night I was deciding whether to walk the extra 20 steps for a quick look, remembered the rule, and was rewarded by this gem capturing the height of his time-telling phase.

Tangentially I wanted to share another time-heavy experience difficult to appreciate in the moment. My best childhood friend, a stand-up comedian, performed in front of a full house at Radio City Music Hall in New York City this month. You can look up the names who’ve headlined there over 93 years. In industry parlance, he “sold that b out” despite competing with the Knicks playoff opener a mile down 7th Avenue.

It was surreal to process in real time, a fantastical dream of many realized by an Indian kid from Plano, Texas. The whole thing felt like a dream… “AKAASH SINGH SOLD OUT” on an old-style marquee that looked the same as it probably did when it said “SINATRA SOLD OUT”… the mahogany-paneled halls and rooms backstage… faceless people spilling in and out of every entrance and aisle in the building… wandering around Times Square at 1 a.m. in a maze of trippy lighting, scouring a map like any other Asian tourist, and then my other buddy saying “Oh there he is,” the same corner real estate that was rotating Netflix and Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ads.

I’ve seen him perform just a handful of times over 20 years, kind of like the inverse of incessant parenting over a short period. These time-lapse memories added to the dreamlike state, not to mention the shrooms at the after-party. There was him performing in front of an empty restaurant in Ventura County, Calif., haggling over stage time at a random dive bar, the packed comedy club in suburban Irvine, Calif., five sold-out shows in Denver almost exactly three years ago, filming the special in Houston, and now here we were at Radio Effing City.

I was almost desperate trying to take it all in. After he crushed the show and the exits were overflowing, I insisted to my buddy we stay in our seats and be in the moment. I don’t know if I was expecting some kind of epiphany, but it took all of a few minutes for the crew to start dismantling the stage and the ushers to kick us out.

The rule of all rules, the one all habits including these two must observe: Time runs independently of how you feel.

No Internet Booked

I like how internet was not included. You have to buy it, and that added step should trigger a little self-awareness of what you would use it for instead of being present during a trip that already costs quite a bit per minute. If it were included, it would be used. There are too many opportunities to reach for the phone when trapped on a boat designed for children and adults who can’t objectively separate entertainment from nostalgia.

So instead I spent my micro-breaks on King’s book. There was a beautiful anecdote I’ll never forget. I read it to my wife and her eyes welled with tears, which also seemed to happen one out of every five times she saw a Disney character or a picture of her kids with one.

King and his brother were raised by a real MVP single mother. When he was 6, he started copying comics and adding his own descriptions. He showed one to his mom, and she had this amazed look on her face that lit him up. But the feeling drained when she asked him if he made up the story himself. She told him he could do better and to write one of his own.

It was a poor, abandoned mother in the 1950s no less — getting evicted, hopping cities, working jobs like pressing sheets at a laundry where the foreman handed out salt pills so they wouldn’t pass out in 110-degree heat — who got young Stephen King going. He wrote his first story about four magic animals who rode around in an old car helping out little kids.

King wrote four more stories about the magic animals. His mom bought them for a quarter each to give to her sisters, and that was the first dollar made by one of the bestselling authors ever. Book defeats internet.

+1 = 101

Disney Premium/Extortion

Walt’s little family business knows how to do intellectual property. Disney likes to grab you by the balls and shove your own credit card up your anus with gusto while reveling in your gasps of exhilaration as if this were the first dip on the Space Mountain ride.

A five-day lap in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the 28-year-old Disney Magic, the oldest ship in the fleet, for two adults and two kids in a Deck 2 cabin cost a little over 7 grand. Tack on automatic and optional gratuities, a hotel night in Houston, parking in Galveston, excursion in Cozumel, on-board purchases — my kids had twice as many matching Disney outfits as days on the boat — and we’re climbing toward the $9K range.

I tend to think of money in terms of opportunity cost rather than absolute value. You could say depositing $9,000 this month in my children’s paltry 529 accounts would have been a better payoff than a boat ride with adults dressed as mice. But that hypothetical would make it tough to justify the price of any vacation, and there is ambiguity around what higher education will look like and cost in 15 years anyway.

Then again, if we had stayed at home and let the kids eat pizza and ice cream every meal and spend $9,000 at Target, they might have filed those core memories in the epic section.

-10 = 91

Daytona Dad

Spring break is too early. MTV misled us back in the day with hot chicks dancing in bikinis. In college I drove through the night with my suitemates to Daytona, Fla., and arrived at a cold, empty beach. Our single fake ID got confiscated, and we must have been the four saddest humans on the coastline that week. All I remember is eating Subway multiple times, two guys per bed, and sneaking into a club for like two minutes and managing to grind with a hot chick indeed despite wearing, coincidentally, a Winnie the Pooh Disney shirt. She might have thought I was special needs.

Here’s that shirt during spring break two years later when I made a better decision to build houses by the Mexican border:

It’s too cold in mid-March. We had to coax the kids to play for short stretches outside. The lifeguards on the cruise wore jackets at times. I had carefully packed a telescope in my carry-on after hyping my boys about seeing the moon and stars at sea. Nighttime was overcast with Chicago-level winds. The best we could do was set up the telescope by our window barely above sea level, with my little one insisting he could see Jupiter even with the cap still on the lens.

-5 = 86

Bodies in Water

The pools were heated, as they had to be. They were terrible though. There was one for small kiddies, one for big kiddies, and one for 18-and-over. All of them were narrow rectangles hosting low-energy diversion. The big kiddie pool was a peculiar sight, a bunch of motionless heads watching the big screen towering over it. My wife made me get in to supervise, and I got caught up in “Beauty and the Beast.”

At one point I realized a ton more kids had entered the pool, and it felt like a scene from a King horror novel. Everywhere I turned for space to avoid hyperventilating, there was another nasty undersized human. I would have felt more comfortable at a morgue.

Then these three freaks with goggles started sneaking along the floor and tickling complete strangers’s feet. I swear those little bony fingers crawling on my skin were more repulsive than that of a corpse. I climbed out furious and thinking I’d rather jump overboard than back in there.

-10 = 76

Pool Addendum

My 4-year-old asked me in the pool if it was OK to pee. Without analysis I pulled him out and my wife hustled him to a bathroom, where he sat with nothing coming out. Afterwards she educated me. When this question is asked, it’s too late.

I would call this retaliation against the gross kids fingering my feet, but we were swimming in it too and likely a blend of urines.

-1 = 75

Kids Detention

The poor weather and pools left a bases-loaded-no-outs jam for the indoor kids club. This was advertised as free childcare, which would dramatically change the cruise’s price-value discussion. Drop them off, party or relax with freedom from a faraway time, pick them up for ice cream, put them to bed early and exhausted.

In practice the club was run great, but it was basically sedentary activity stations and a small “Toy Story” slide. I was envisioning a padded Sky Zone-like area where they would go nuts burning energy. My kids asked to be picked up immediately and dreaded going there more than school. Really the value of kids club ended up being as a threatened punishment if they were misbehaving.

-10 = 65

Food Waste

Life revolving around meals probably applies to most cruises, but especially one where you’re trying to occupy grandparents and children. The food was fantastic. I was wondering how my children’s bodies were disposing of it when they finally announced they needed to poop seconds apart while I was brushing my teeth. I had to rush one of them to my parents’s room and block out their cacophonous Mandarin about when to give gratuities while trying to finish brushing without gagging.

Every parent can relate to those moments of singular focus on making sure your child poops. The toilet flush pressure in the cabins was as strong as the selection of proteins in the buffet line. Thus I looked fairly jacked in our family beach photo, just not summer shredded yet.

+10 = 75

Universal Marvel

There were Disney characters everywhere and accessibility to them you wouldn’t get at a theme park. Black Panther had what sounded like an authentic accent and was so sweet to every kid waiting in the picture line. My little one clammed up, but it seemed like most kids were shy. The endearing thought is some of them are still at least a bit confused about reality and can let their burgeoning imaginations win that fight. Kind of like how I wasn’t sure whether WWF wrestling was real until like age 25.

Hey if I believed Thor was real, I would be nervous meeting him too. I would be nervous meeting Chris Hemsworth.

My wife is in denial about this, but our kids have no interest in the OG Disney characters. They barely know their names and never watch their shows or movies. Otherwise it would have been pretty cool to nearly get clotheslined by Pluto at a dance party.

The best moment was when a small child dressed as Thor walked by our table, and my son casually high-fived him, which he accepted without breaking stride. I didn’t know kids this young operated like that.

+5 = 80

Big Showboat

The burden of parenting is you don’t know which imprints on the growing brain will last forever. Anyone from my generation has a Pavlovian recognition when the opening notes of “Under the Sea” or “A Whole New World” start playing. The final live theater show of the cruise reached through pre-Netflix childhoods and brought back the bangers with stunning costumes and sets.

When the opening cry of “Circle of Life” pierced the air, I’m pretty sure some millennials actually cried. For sure my wife. My kids slept through the entire performance.

In the win column, my 6-year-old made it through the fireworks on Pirate Night with happy smiles. He is super sensitive to loud sounds. After a meltdown during his first Disneyland fireworks show, he had always been quick to usher us home early from any event with pyrotechnics on the schedule, often when it was still daylight.

Disney is the only cruise line that offers fireworks at sea, and it felt like the right scene for a breakthrough.

Also in the win column, I really liked how the magician Zak Mirz set up his final trick. He talked about how it became his favorite because it’s his young daughter’s favorite, how everything changed when he became a parent, how he’s always cleaning floors amid chaos but one day the floors will be clean and the house will quiet.

Everyone knows and forgets to appreciate the fleeting moments, and it helps to hear reminders in different ways.

+10 = 90

We could keep going but this score feels about right, an A-minus that can flex as high as the temperature and interest in Disney characters go.

That is what I needed you to know and remember. It was embarrassing, I didn’t expect it. It’s not like I was flexing as hard as possible. I told my wife and rather than acknowledge being impressed, she kept repeating it in a mocking tone. I thought that was a flippant way to regard a professional medical opinion and didn’t know I married into the Kennedy family.

The NP’s honest observation picked me up from a fog of fragmented thoughts after finding out from my boss about a project already in process to replace our CRM software with an AI-built internal system. This won’t be completed tomorrow, and there could be a place for me in this future state while I continue to be hounded with work from all sides in current state. But getting rid of Salesforce drums up some existential questions for a Salesforce administrator.

We’ll leave it at that for now. I have some fluid opinions on the implications of vibe coding a system of record, but I should gather more insights from tech influencers to plagiarize at a later time.

Last July I really wanted to go deeper into the health lessons from this book “Outlive”, but I got distracted by being fired in the lobby at the cardiologist. Now, just when I want to revisit and try to give you something useful, the book’s author Peter Attia makes 1,700 Control-F appearances in the Epstein files. So I feel like I should address that before somewhat promoting his content. I might have to bump the health stuff to next month because I only have a few hours left in February to get this one out. But then I’ll probably want to chronicle our Disney cruise. I’m never going to get there.

Right or not — just being honest — I have minimal interest in the Epstein eternal after-party. If someone committed a crime, I love the idea of pursuing aggressive civil damages for the victims. Otherwise, eh. The ringleader hanged himself in jail and the ring died with him. That’s a pretty solid outcome.

The rabid attention and resources seven years later would be more productive applied to stopping current sex trafficking. Every iteration of these news-light news stories feels less about justice and more about wrist-slapping rich old white men, which certainly has more entertainment value than “Love Is Blind” but about the same junk-food nutritional value added to your mind and soul.

I’ll borrow a version of the standard Epstein defense and say the only interaction I had with Attia was casual while reading his book. Our relationship felt static and one-sided. He has no idea I exist. I am not a fan boy defending him. I vaguely know of a whole “longevity bro” culture which seems like a good fit for me, but my YouTube algorithm is dominated by three categories:

• My stand-up comedian best friend who insanely will realize a childhood dream when he headlines Radio City Music Hall in April!

• Tennis greats, but not just them playing tennis. I don’t know why I keep watching Djokovic interviews. The best clip though is of his rivals. It is physiologically impossible to make it through this gem without giggling.

• Action movie scenes including a phase of all Denzel massacring bad guys in the “The Equalizers”, always creatively without a gun

I’ve never listened to Attia’s podcast or even knew what he looked like until the news broke. He released a statement saying he never witnessed anything illegal, attended a sex party or visited the properties. He claims naivete but asked Epstein about a police investigation and cracked jokes like “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.” My judgment on that is muted and biased having made countless remarks in the same genre to my douchey bros and disapproving wife, although none of them are registered sex offenders.

So there is my analysis without a conclusion. You can play the cancel game all day long with any product. Don’t watch Penn State football while you’re at it. Maybe an acceptable compromise is don’t buy “Outlive”, and I can try to give you the takeaways piecemeal. I’ll leave you with one this month before punting.

Exercise is the closest thing to a magic potion, far more effective than cycling through variations of the latest diets and supplements. The New York Times has the worst way of repackaging clickbait breaking health news that you should exercise and eat vegetables.

What I found illuminating from the book is the link between grip strength and stability to health span, the amount of time you get to enjoy on earth before that last alive-but-not-living phase of basically just existing mentally and/or physically. The dream for everyone — especially for those like me who had kids later in life and want to extend our overlap — is to push that health span out until a hopefully steep decline:

I see our parents struggle unbuckling car seats and putting on shoes like it’s a Crossfit workout. Grip strength and stability seem like a sound investment to make now. Offices designed to hold humans sitting for unnatural lengths of time should include pull-up bars in every corner. People taking a minute to work on their dead hangs between meetings should be a normal sight in modern society.

Lately I’ve been putting on my shoes in a way that increases both stability and OCD compliance. This seems intuitive yet uncommonly practiced to me: You should put on a sock and a shoe rather than both socks first to minimize the amount of time the sock can be exposed to dirty elements. A sock getting dirty is perfectly fine given it will be hot washed. The problem is if you then put it in a shoe, which is not washed at all.

So now my method is to balance on one foot while putting the sock and shoe on the other without touching the ground until that shoe is on. The wobbling and flailing feel like functional stability training.

Meanwhile my bloodwork from the physical came back fantastic after months of being on rosuvastatin. I am hesitant to take it forever though. I need to reread the dense chapter on heart disease, the No. 1 killer in America and my formidable genetic obstacle. For now, with future vocation and health span in flux, I can only go off the prominent indicators noted by medical experts and their fingertips.

I would have liked to stay at that company for many more years, but the new gig is better in some ways. At age 41, my career identity has come into clearer focus. I have some smarts and work ethic, likely ensuring a decent baseline of salary and stimulation depending on how the A.I. hype materializes. But I won’t be climbing any ladders, starting companies or crushing beyond what’s in my assigned corner.

The limiting factor as far as I can tell is an introversion deep to the core. I do not enjoy being around people and take my sweet time to recharge afterwards. I don’t like bumping into parents at pickup, double dates, being asked questions when I’m just trying to be, listening to people talk as if they’ve just emerged from solitary confinement, really even leaving the house and putting on clothes other than elastic shorts on top of Fruit of the Loom boxer briefs (workout day), J.Crew boxers (rest day) or Calvin Klein boxer briefs (sexy day or more likely, laundry day).

The thought of managing people and a calendar full of 1-on-1’s and stakeholder meetings feels like painful work, while building and learning in software without human distraction can be satisfying exercise for my aging brain. Hopefully A.I. comes with the proper manners to replace this exercise it has already started to take away. In the interim, I seem to be on a predisposed path as an individual contributor that provides a nice living but doesn’t reach remarkable heights.

Perhaps because of this — or more likely causation flows the other way — I’ve realized my life pie has pretty even distribution. To feel good about how things are going, I need a diversity of purpose.

If a disclaimer is needed, this pie chart is the only thing on the entire blog generated by A.I. so far. The abs below were aided by overhead lighting and enough distance to show definition, but this should be excused given the pic was taken mid-holiday bingeing season after my little neighborhood gym was closed for six weeks for repairs.

I feel like a fraud because as I type this my midsection is a bit Jiggly Puff. I will be shredded in 2026, and the hot chicas will flock and spend three hours chatting online with me every day.

Putting work into body and mind monopolizes typical New Year’s resolutions, but I encourage a meta resolution of examining resolutions. (Is that how you use the word? “Inception” was hard for me to follow.)

This requires an honest assessment of who you are and what you want. You might be an entrepreneur or C-suiter hardwired to be at 95 percent career, or you might be one who would benefit from taking it down to 80 percent and getting high blood pressure under control. You might be a stay-at-home mom who joyfully lives for the kids at 100 percent, or you might be one with some room to play with diminishing returns and reallocate 20 percent to find a new outlet.

For me, 40 percent family might seem shamefully low. It’s worth noting the pie is proportional to how you want to spend your time and drive rather than how much you value these things, although the cynic might say we’re splitting hairs here. I certainly love my kids a lot more than 33 percent more than my job. I also certainly would rather spend 40 hours a week in an office than 50-plus hours raising them.

I don’t have the stamina to win Dad of the Year, although I can contend for shorter time segments. My strength is to dial in and go really hard playing, nurturing, bonding, teaching life lessons like defense wins championships:

And let a parent intervene when a stranger makes you feel special and extends an invitation to his inner thigh:

My weakness is the same introversion that enforces a career ceiling. Obviously hanging with my family doesn’t require turning up like in the outside world, but I still need quite a bit of Me time. Whereas I can be around the wifey all day, the children are a double uppercut to the face of both taking away Me time and creating more inherent need for it. Quicker than most, I reach a point of exhaustion or saturation where each passing minute becomes more insufferable.

It’s possible I can be a better father by knowing my limits rather than blindly pushing against them, and also possible this is just a way to rationalize a shortcoming. There is something to be said this time of the new year though for thinking about how you should slice your pie before getting after it.

The adage often applies to traffic in Frisco, Texas, where the worst drivers in any developed nation struggle to navigate a simple grid of wide paved roads. This is not a knock on the heavy concentration of South and East Asians, although I would say we are responsible for the most stunning transgressions.

Offenders are equal opportunity. I was making a right turn on green and a white guy with left turn yield honked aggressively when I correctly didn’t yield. I turned past him shaking my head and trying to lock eyes in an effort to telepathically communicate you can be nice and wrong, or mean and right, but careful when mixing the two lest you end up in the one quadrant categorically unacceptable. I don’t think he got the message.

Anyway, I also say no good deed goes unpunished whenever I extend myself with social interaction in an effort to be a connected human, only to beget more social interaction. Mostly this comes up on the parenting circuit, where the operative question is whether you need to be friends with nice people just because your kids are friends, and what if the kids are only classmates or former classmates, and you don’t even have time for your real, pre-children friends.

My wife and I generally sack up and turn up with our performative social butterfly alter egos, complaining in private before and after. Maybe it’s just me complaining. I really did not want to go to a Thanksgiving pot luck at my 3-year-old’s school in the middle of a Friday afternoon, but I did want to be a good dad and support him.

The end result this time was not punishment, but disproportionately high reward. Is this what they mean by it’s better to give than receive, an outsized ROI? One of the baller parents couldn’t use their Mavericks season tickets the following night and gave them to us.

Section 105, Row A are not numbers and letters that go together in my income bracket. I could see Klay Thompson’s beautiful face and physique so clearly. I felt like I could touch him. I wanted to touch him. I loved him on Golden State, always a threat to hang 35 in 35 minutes while guarding the opponent’s best player. I love him now, age 35, post-ACL and Achilles, grinding off the bench for a 5-14 team that was supposed to give him open looks off Luka and Kyrie double teams.

Klay scored 22, missed the game-tying 3, and got in three shouting matches with Grizzlies players, the NBA equivalent of throwing punches. I love him so much. He is so fine, this perfect swirl of Black and white that shows what racial harmony can produce. Back in his heyday with the Warriors, I heard he would roll up to the club and take his pick of groupies lined up. My wife likes to joke how I would be waving my hand frantically, “Me me pick me Klay!”

Barely half Klay’s age, No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg has been hyped like no American since LeBron. If he lives up to it, my kids can say they were there his rookie season, completely ignoring him running out of the tunnel next to them.

Those noise-canceling headphones were a buzzer-beating Amazon Prime assist. My wife saved the experience with what I initially thought was a frivolous purchase. Our 6-year-old would not have made it to the first timeout with all the blaring sound effects in the arena. He already had the headphones on walking through the metal detector, which set it off. The security staff handed them back afterwards with gentle intention, giving my wife Warren vibes from “There’s Something About Mary.”

Yeah he might be autistic. Super sensitive to sounds, has to watch the progress bar when listening to songs in the car, obsessed with counting, trouble connecting abstract concepts and grasping emotion and social norms.

The thing is, all those things apply to me except the progress bar and that’s probably because I grew up with radios and CD players that didn’t have them. I never got a diagnosis or noise-canceling headphones. I know there is a tendency for older generations to lionize their childhood and how tough they had it, as if millennials were the ones who stormed Normandy.

Truly though, these kids had no idea how good they had it with their courtside seats and headphones. There was a little bit of charm to it. Warren of course was fixated on the numbers changing on the scoreboard rather than 7-foot-3 giants (Zach Edey) doing amazing things directly in front of him. Every time the Mavs scored, I got to relive it a second later by toggling my line of vision to his face, which lit up into broad smiles accompanied by the cutest fist pumps and index finger points.

His little brother took a liking to the “Go Mavs Go” chant, which was cute, but the cutest was after the game in the car when he was blabbering about a lion and Black Panther. I thought he meant one of his favorite superheroes until he referenced the winning score, and I realized he was interpreting the logo on the scoreboard and didn’t know what an effing Grizzly was.

It capped a memorable night and kickoff to the holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving to all, may you be the beneficiary of good deeds in good company.

• Got my only C in a class ever in 311 Macroeconomics, which comes with an asterisk because it was taught by a heavily Chinese professor, like super Chinese, who would be run off by our current president in the interest of national security and therefore this blemish should be removed from my academic record

• Hawked a program for a micro-investing fintech that was great for consumers but offered dubious value for marketers concerned with incremental sales before being fired after a year and a half

• Flawlessly timed the mortgage market at two peaks to the tune of 7.99 and 6.624 percent, so people no longer track the 10-year treasury yield but simply wait for me to refinance as a signal rates will drop within 30 days

Credibility established, let me guide you with an actionable money tip to secure the life you want. Groupon is or at least was offering a $100-off-$200 digital order coupon when purchasing a new Costco membership. If this is now expired or you’re already a member, I cannot help you. You are not my target audience.

Getting your own Costco card, especially in the new era of more stringent identification practices by store employees, is a personal finance milestone. At 41 years old, we could no longer handle the cognitive dissonance from teaching our children about responsibility and then going to my parents to get toilet paper. This was a big step for us.

I am not ready to get my own tolltag account though. It just feels too magical rolling up to the DFW booths and garages and the parking gates rise like I’m the messiah while having no conception of time limits and costs.

You need to keep some of that childlike wonder to enjoy adulthood, which is why my first purchase with that black Costco Executive Member card — not to be confused with the black AmEx card used by executives — was a Disney cruise. That clever little Burbank, Calif., corporation must have consulted the Frisco, Texas ISD school calendar because the price during our spring break was jacked up well past the hefty Disney premium. All in, this narrow lap across the gulf will set us back about $10K, minus a $540 shopping card and 2% back from Costco, the enticement for me to upgrade to Executive level.

I am a sucker for deals that bait you to spend more than needed, so it’s a wonder why I took so long to join volume discount king Costco. Penny wise, pound foolish is a solid financial approach because it allows you to live well while maintaining an identity of austere, efficient minimalist. Like a Communist dictator or fraudulent clergyman without having to steal from constituents.

My wife was headed to HEB yesterday, and I spent a solid 10 minutes of online research before texting her to buy a 260-piece bag of Halloween candy with a $5-off coupon. Cost per piece rather than ounce was my metric because the savage children can’t aggregate weight or volume in their underdeveloped iPad brains and will gauge their haul and short-term happiness by the variety of colorful wrappers mashed in their nasty hands. Glad I could save us $2.50.

In the same week I ACH transferred $13,573.15 to a company that fired me in July (different one, healthcare not fintech) to purchase vested stock. Compared to the candy, I did not spend a commensurate amount of time researching its prospects for going public, future performance and IPO market conditions. I saw no taxes were due now and went for it.

FOMO and YOLO are important to balance the HSAs and IRAs in your acronym portfolio. Exercising those stock options was a hedge against the pain of being on the sidelines. The Disney cruise was a chance to capture a point in the dreadfully finite master timeline where all four grandparents are in solid health and the kids can still watch Pixar movies without a strict comprehension of fiction. Good deals are in the eye of the holder of the Groupon and extend beyond the fine print.

The screw wasn’t going anywhere, my father-in-law said, and he proved correct. Perhaps he meant it as a coaching metaphor, the crafty Stanford graduate. They teach you about the law of diminishing marginal returns in Econ 101 but leave you to intuition to figure out practical applications and how marginal is too marginal in real life.

Some people are great at it. They just know — when to leave a party, stop eating, choose a product, concede to the insurance company, give up on squeezing out the last bit of toothpaste or sunscreen, avoid a rabbit hole at work that leads to no business impact.

I tend to overdo and overthink. While trying to scrub out discoloration on a bathtub, I couldn’t gauge reasonable intensity or duration and ended up scratching through the surface. I have to set arbitrary page limits when researching Amazon purchases; thus infinite scroll has not been a friend.

During my first two weeks since Covid as a commuter, my routine has been to refresh Google Maps no fewer than five times in the first 2.3 miles, toggling the Avoid Tolls feature until deciding just before the point of no return whether to get on the tollway for 4.9 miles. And then keeping a Piper-worthy side-eye on the road not taken to see if the grass is greener.

Deciding to accept this hybrid office position over another offer and pending interviews should have been straightforward. My brother, who started his new job the same day as me this month, is an example of nature trumping nurture. He is simply wired differently. He got his offer and gleefully canceled his other interviews. He later received an interview request from Dr. Pepper, a legendary brand in our hometown, that caused momentary F.O.M.O. And then he let it go.

I, on the other hand, kept a few interviews as backups and opportunities to make connections. (They didn’t need to know my mind was made up. Undoubtedly I’ve interviewed with employers that had already decided on other candidates.) I was even tempted by interview invitations that came in after I already started, reasoning it couldn’t hurt to learn, practice, network and have a contingency plan after hearing a comment from a colleague the other day about the importance of firing quickly.

It’s hard for me to know when to stop just about anything because of my unshakeable feeling that a) moderation takes away from closure and b) I can influence and optimize outcomes. The latter generally is considered a good trait. Having an internal locus of control tends to be coupled with better mental health. But as I remember from an exercise called “balcony-basement” at a new-hire orientation seven years and four jobs ago, every strength can be a weakness.

I got fired from that job, which most would consider a hard stop, and then emailed the C.E.O. asking to rejoin as an intern on a different career path. I just always feel like there is a way out, a way to salvage or improve or streamline. Charitably you could call this growth mindset, and my interpretation of it has come up in many arguments with my wife, some of which were shared on this blog.

Here’s a hard pivot to the sappy but true. You would guess big decisions command so much analysis and second-guessing from me that I can’t even make them. Well there is arguably no bigger decision in life than whom you want to spend it with.

I don’t even know how to describe how easy it was to decide to propose to my wife 10 years ago. No consulting with anyone, weighing opportunity costs, trying to predict the future or time the life markets. It was less of a decision than a recognition of what was happening.

If you know my wife, you understand how this was and will be my best decision ever. She is my ultimate outlier in what feels like a spotty record around traditionally important choices, from college majors and careers, to jobs and companies within those careers, to stock picks and housing market navigation. The one I didn’t think about pays off every day in the form of a partner who admittedly indulges my idiosyncrasies a bit much, but out of love and acceptance. That helps keep a few screws loose in my head.

There was a fascinating case of assisted suicide with Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on decision-making. The guy created a whole branch of economics studying the intricacies and fallacies of arriving at decisions. All that research presumably informed his pretty high-stakes decision to end his life at a relatively happy and healthy age 90, like Jordan offensive fouling Bryon Russell and hitting his final shot except with no option to change his mind and come back a Wizard.

Wow that was a dark tangent considering what I really wanted to highlight this month was my first child starting kindergarten the same day as our ninth wedding anniversary. Yay! It was a joyful milestone, and not in the aforementioned pre-suicidal framework.

Another paradox regarding kids came to me during unemployment, more favorable than the one about loving them so much yet not wanting to hang out for more than 20 minutes at a time. Kids complicate and make everything harder, from the trivial like going to a restaurant to the bigger like financial planning to the intensely philosophical like how to raise a human and what makes a good life.

We surely agree on the difficulties. Now, you would think kids make unemployment a lot harder with the pressure of providing and caring for them. But — with a huge asterisk of being fortunate to have a long financial runway a.k.a. savings and severance — I found my children to be a calming, sweeping simplification during the job search in an uncertain market.

They kind of functioned like a poor man’s F-U money. They matter so much more than everything else, noise becomes exposed for what it is: status, ego, arbitrary expectations.

Fired from a great job? F’em. Didn’t get an interview? F’em. Got unofficially rejected after a technical assessment with technically unsound verbal questions by being inadvertently cc’ed on a one-line internal email giving no reason let alone evaluation criteria? F’em.

It’s almost laughable how insignificant things are that seem significant in the moment when juxtaposed with your kids. The effect is useful, almost like a selective nihilism that doesn’t make you try less hard but picks you up when you fall. Kids add both motivation and support through blunt calibration of perspective.

I tried to explain to mine during our daily profound car seat conversations how my interviews were going, the need for a job and money, societal exchange of goods and services. Truly, just no f’s were given. It was like talking to dogs strapped in the back.

My kindergartener can engage in spirited discussions, but only about whatever his pre-autistic mind has fixated on at that moment, which is invariably independent of other people’s questions and topics. He got that from me. I’m hoping his mom can fix it as a genuine, empathetic listener herself.

I am very much 80-20 rule when talking to people, paying just enough attention to comprehend the gist of what they’re blabbering about and then using my remaining processing power to think of what to say next, daydream or contemplate something more important. It’s why I am very good at interviews and punch above my weight in experience and knowledge.

But look at my big baby in his car seat on the way back from his second day:

He turned 6 a few weeks before kindergarten and likely will be the oldest in every class, every year. The other kids will speculate he had to repeat a grade and call him “Dummy Dumbo” before graduating to racist irony like “Confucius Sr.” and “Mao the Ding-dong.” Parents will judge us for holding him back at a formative stage.

Our line of thinking was a) he’s been in a Mandarin immersion program and could use the extra year to acclimate because his English has the accent of a Beijing cab driver b) we had free tuition c) girls develop faster d) it will be easier to make sports teams, à la Malcolm Gladwell’s cherry-picked arguments in “Outliers” e) I also have a mid-July birthday and was a late bloomer who could have benefited from being one of the oldest rather than youngest f) my oversized Hermosa Beach bros call me “Small Frame” even though I have more abs than they can do pull-ups.

I don’t need to defend our parenting choices. They are none of your business unless you want to ask honest questions to guide your own.

But look at my little baby in his car seat at age 2. He looks so white I should have asked for a paternity test to go with the vaccine paperwork.

I didn’t feel this sharp of nostalgia until I went digging for pictures and should probably backtrack on rolling my eyes during my wife’s three-week emotional ramp-up to the first day of kindergarten. This is why I encourage everyone to blog or journal. You don’t really know what you want to say until you try to write it down.

You know he still loves garbage trucks? His interests progressed to violence, weapons, bullying, aging and death thanks to mature themes packaged as Disney Plus movies. But he still plays with toy garbage trucks, drives his electric recycling truck on its second battery down the sidewalk, aggressively calls out every truck on the road and demands a response even if I’m making a blind left turn during rush hour.

And every Tuesday, my boy who loves his sleep sets his internal alarm clock to wake up early and chase our neighborhood sanitation trucks. I used to have to carry him and support his big bobblehead while jogging to keep up. Then he grew up and could run and skip himself. Now he bikes in the blind spot of the very understanding Mr. Mohammed (garbage truck, Peterbilt model with the ladder that raises the bin) and Mr. Brian (recycling truck, Mack model with the claw that raises the bin).

School started on a Wednesday, so my son had one last morning before kindergarten to either sleep in or see the trucks. This kind of thing might sound insufferably banal, and I know my 27-year-old self is so ashamed of me right now. But I feel compelled to write down and share because it’s the stuff I hope to remember.

I will try to remember that when I start the new gig. I am excited about it and excited to come home from it.

Although this all must be super clear, let’s go chronologically. I got a physical eight days before turning 41, just beating the buzzer on a milestone year resolution. I’ve never had a doctor and don’t recall getting blood drawn outside of donating once or twice.

It was time. My dad should have died on a random street in 2018 and had an insane quintuple-bypass heart surgery 15 months ago. Presumably because of this history, the physician assistant did an EKG with those little wired patches stuck on my chest. She saw something abnormal and referred me to a cardiologist.

So for 15 days I played a pleasant mind game trying to detect symptoms in my breathing, with the primary opponent being imagination. Meanwhile the blood lab results came back fine except my A1C is 0.1 percent away from prediabetic.

Hopefully I’ve posted enough ab pics for this to surprise you. Here’s a recent one to refresh the memory in your brain and loins:

Everyone I talk to has trouble comprehending how I could be unhealthy. To put it scientifically, it has to do with genetics and how my body processes stuff. To put it in Texan now that the Ten Commandments will be displayed in my children’s classrooms, it’s how God made me. You see this commonly in Asians, thin on the outside but simmering on the inside with high blood pressure, cholesterol and academic expectations.

A week before the cardiologist appointment, we headed to LA to celebrate my son’s sixth birthday. On the way down to Legoland, I caught a group Slack notification from my technical lead saying her 1-on-1 meeting invite just came through and it was nice working with everyone. I called her and several others as the bloodbath unfolded: my manager, both technical leads and most of our department axed.

I was devastated. Relative to season of life, this job possibly was the best I’ve had, mostly because of our diverse super team. I also suspected my PTO was only delaying a quick reunion with my comrades in the unemployment line. But a couple of people who met with the firing manager said they were told this was the extent of the layoffs and I had been mentioned in future plans. I was also being inundated with new team meeting invites for the following week.

As vacation continued, I hyped myself up more and more to accept what could not be changed and approach the vastly different situation with an open mind and heart, albeit a malfunctioning one. Speaking of which, the cardiologist appointment was the morning of my first day back.

The handsome Indian man walked in and gave the same reaction I get from doughy dads at pool parties. “What are you doing here? You’re young, you’re fit.”

I don’t know bro, you guys called me.

He didn’t have any concerns with the EKG and fielded my questions sourced from the book “Outlive” almost dismissively. Apparently an artery calcium scan is not a predictor of blockage, and you only need to do it once if at all. He ordered that, a heart ultrasound, and a follow-up appointment with the RN in a month.

Before he had arrived, I noticed a 1-on-1 meeting invite with the firing manager that initially appeared on my calendar the previous night only to be quietly removed. I had my laptop with me planning to dial into daily stand-up from the lobby. Instead I hopped on this one still naively not expecting to be fired after making my peace during the emotional whirlwind in California.

She took a few minutes to join, and I recall a fleeting thought that maybe she was coordinating with HR. She appeared on the screen alone and asked how I was doing. I said it was a tough week and was half-expecting HR to be on this call. Perfectly timed on the next breath, HR joined.

With health insurance ending in eight days, I scheduled the calcium scan and ultrasound immediately. The latter came through showing no issues, so I felt like the initial wave of hypochondria passed. Then I got a call to schedule a CTA coronary scan at a cost of my $3,000 out-of-pocket maximum to cover $13,844 total.

It would have been nice to get some context as I had to do the legwork to confirm this was due to my calcium score. 0 to 10 is good. A buddy of mine fit enough to play any sport but also with heart disease in the family clocked in at 18. This is the 85th percentile, meaning only 15 percent of males our age have more plaque in their arteries. He made our other friend get tested, and his score was 6.

Mine was 207. If we grabbed 100 dudes in their early 40s, only one, if that, would more likely have coronary artery disease. This was a karmic revelation as lately I’ve been thinking and saying my physique is uncommonly sharp for my age. I thought I was in the top 1 percent the other way. The plaque has been growing even faster than my hubris.

You know what my dad’s score was at age 54, same height and weight as me? 1507. I would like to have a word with whoever calibrates these scales. Do we need to be that granular and extend the range that far? They could just as easily put everything over 100 in the “You’re on your way out” category. If you were measuring weight in a population to determine who’s obese, would it be nice to use grams? This is not compassionate care.

I will have many more thoughts after this CTA procedure in 12 hours helps diagnose how much my arteries have narrowed. The same person who obstinately refuses to take Tylenol, cough medicine or even caffeine in favor of letting the body naturally do its thing now has to ingest plaque-stabilizing statin medication to avoid the body naturally doing its thing.

It’s as hard for me to process as cholesterol apparently. You could say the genetics were bad luck, but I would counter it was good luck to have a six-pack midsection for the last two decades while never passing up a pizza or nachos binge. It was good luck how I landed at that company (although I did turn down a promising opportunity with a pre-IPO fintech that has since gone public and seen its stock price 7X). It was bad luck how it ended.

There are things you can only control at the margins while change is constant, even if you have to look twice to realize it.

Yes I am willing to look like I just wrapped up a super degrading gangbang to protect the long-term health of my skin. I also wear a shirt in the neighborhood pool, forgoing the momentary satisfaction of creating cognitive dissonance when people see a dad bod that is not a dad bod. This sacrifice is but one of a steady stream of decisions we make daily based on the tradeoff between present and future.

When you get married and especially when you have kids, it becomes clearer where you operate on this continuum relative to others, namely your partner. I lean heavily toward taking on discomfort and work in the short term for a presumably larger payoff later. My wife gravitates toward the other end — nothing crazy and probably around the average in our First World bubble — but myopic in my loving, not condescending eyes.

You know those nebulous studies lazy editors love to dress up as news stories. Studies show people are happier in Finland. Please ponder that conclusion and not the methodology of the studies. Well, studies have shown my way of focusing on the long run is better. I read it somewhere, I swear.

Examples of the asymmetric pain and gain are obvious: pushing through the painful first few minutes after the alarm clock to exercise, saving and investing, meal prep versus fast food, procrastination ending with a suboptimal outcome, organizing rather than hiding messes in Monica closets, succumbing to dumb addictive Instagram hits instead of doing anything better (which is to say, anything).

One morning this week I felt the difference acutely. The 3-year-old prematurely opened a new Spidey version of Yahtzee Jr. and was placing the stickers on random pieces instead of the dice. Losing those stickers would render the game unplayable. I was born 23 years before the first iPhone and remain an instruction manual guy. I read them to maximize the utility derived from a product.

Spidey Yahtzee was about to be reduced to a 30-second sticker activity and then have its pieces scattered into the abyss of orphaned, mismatched and forgotten toys. I don’t like toys. They are a mini venture capital predicament that entails buying a hundred in hopes one of them will take off. And usually that singular success is a stick found by a public garbage can.

So I forced a Yahtzee reset, salvaging the stickers and making the children reapply all 30 properly to the five dice and sit quietly while I deciphered the confusing rules. Then they had a good time playing the game, even showing flashes of understanding. We could potentially enjoy this many more times if I didn’t find it as dreadfully boring as watching paint — not even watching paint dry, watching paint in a static state.

You could argue now I’m the one being shortsighted because that boredom is a down payment for more stimulating games, cognitive development and a stronger bond with my kids in the future. Those are lame goals though.

In the middle of the Yahtzee crisis, I had to tend to another one at the kitchen counter. I hardboiled 10 pasture-raised eggs the night before, and my wife was peeling two. It wasn’t my finest work in terms of peel-ability, which allegedly has to do with boiling duration and cold water plunge but seems entirely random to me. My wife was struggling, separation anxiety between shell and egg white leaving a deformed breakfast protein and wasteful scraps.

This is where a little patience and tedium endurance are needed for a superior result. You have to take the time upfront to nestle underneath the translucent membrane and press up on enough entry points to keep the shell together while removing it. Otherwise more time will be spent performing minor surgery to save the egg.

There are less trivial decisions to be made in every parent’s quest not to f up their kids or at least only to a degree that is plausibly reversible. Discipline is a big one. By that I mean strategically deploying consequences and fear of reproach to build muscle memory of good behavior well before children fully comprehend the reasoning.

My wife and I are yin and yang on this topic, so you could call us productive complements like Jordan and Pippen or a case of the Chinese authoritarian battling the white liberal in a zero-sum conflict. I readily conceded there would be no spanking, and I don’t even yell so much as scold with exasperation. But the children do fear me in a way they don’t their mother.

Her default response to bad behavior is to talk about kindness and good choices. After about five more transgressions in 10 minutes, she is prone to snapping and rightfully so. I am all for explaining the why behind the what, but some kids need more pushback and edge too. Not everyone should be coached the same way.

My older one is tenderhearted yet a narcissistic a-hole whose quick wit hides being a slow learner. He inherited this from me, so I am better equipped to deal with him. There has to be more push and pull, sometimes nurturing, sometimes being hard on him, a blend of carrot and stick.

Or else he will grow into a monster. He has that first-child-main-character energy. He still randomly brings up completely out of context how he scored two goals two months ago. Here was the first one:

You can hear how cheesy overjoyed I am in the background and see how I wrote a thousand words just to trick you into watching this video. I can be a warm, safe place for my kids and also do the unpleasant work of calling them out and disciplining. It will improve what they get out of life over time, like any other kind of training.

I was the willing enforcer of sleep training because it’s probably harder for mothers to endure their babies crying it out. It was hard for me too, but they adapted quickly and the returns of better sleep for everyone compounded.

We are not doing as well investing effort in other areas including independence, schoolwork, chores and self-reliant play. I am actually more to blame for this than my wife despite my preaching. Nowhere is the gap between aspirational me and me bigger than in parenting. Hey I’m happy to follow her lead and apply an extra layer.

I always expect a dismissive laugh, but every time they make a mock crying face and lament, “I know!” Clearly it’s on their mind and, it might surprise you, mine too. Yes I am a prolific complainer about what kids do to your life and personality, and I can’t stand having to engage with any of them not related to me.

But due to neurosis and FOMO, I am also a walking model of loss aversion in most walks of life. According to this behavioral economics concept, the pain of a loss is worse than the satisfaction of a gain of the same magnitude, e.g. you’re more sad to lose $100 than happy to win $100.

In so many ways I can’t wait for the child-rearing season to end, and I would rather die than try for a third. Yet I also don’t necessarily want to let go so easily. We received a boilerplate email for my older boy’s kindergarten orientation this month, and my eyes were misty talking logistics with my wife. I get teary watching stupid (awesome) Pixar movies and believe the first five minutes of “Up” should be rated R.

Basically I am a fraud cracking jokes about sentimental moms, like the homophobe who of course can only be a closet homosexual. Under the cover of no other adults in the household being able to understand Chinese, I unabashedly say the corniest, cringiest things to my sons. A common one is “You know when you grow up and go to college, we can still be best friends and hang out.” Or “Because I love you, I can hold you whenever I want.” It’s effing pathetic; I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

I don’t even like hanging out with them after the initial surge of dopamine. All they want to do is beat me with light sabers and then make me read books about light sabers. They are beautiful creatures though.

As I learned from Homer via Brad Pitt in “Troy”, they are beautiful because they are fleeting. The most painfully wonderful lesson children teach their parents is the impermanence of it all. Everyone knows the antidote is to stay in the moment and be grateful for it, but I feel like you have to be a Jedi master to do it all the time.

Lately the phrase I keep repeating to myself is to dial into the moments. Not dial into the moment, which is too open-ended and unrealistically implies being present all the time. But dial into the moment-s, plural, amassing as many as I can, volume over perfection.

I still have the 5-year-old sit in my lap while I put on his shoes. The excuse before was to make sure the gray part of the sock is squarely over his toes for comfort, but he’s got that down now. We look like Dumb and Dumber with his body being too big for my lap and legs too long to extend as much as he does, but somehow my disproportionately long arms make it work. Lady Lysa from “Game of Thrones” called and said my parenting is on point and on schedule.

No doubt I am setting up my sons for severe codependency issues later in life, but I don’t consider the challenges they face in adulthood to be my problem. I want to focus on the now and how to squeeze these last moments before the last remnants of those baby faces disappear.

I can imagine these feelings are magnified for a mom, the real-time nostalgia of deeply missing things even before they’re completely gone. I get it. I think laughing at them is my way of crying with them.

Take the vaunted northern lights.

I won’t lie to the inexperienced. That electric green is a camera trick for the sheep. At moderate levels of solar activity with moderate visibility, it all just looks like some misty discoloration in the sky to the naked eye, more gray than green. You might not even notice walking down the street.

Yet according to an iPhone 12 mini camera on Night mode, we were at an EDM club. Hypocritically, I was probably the giddiest of observers along with my wife because we caught the elusive light show on the very night of her 40th birthday and it was so exciting and novel coming from suburban Texas. But I did try to poop on the rooftop party by openly questioning, “So how is this materially different than taking a picture anywhere and adding a Snapchat filter?”

This is my fraudulent existence, trying to be cooly rational and logical yet routinely swept by emotion. At the intersection was the realization we don’t need to take any more bucket list trips without our kids. By no means would they have enhanced the adventure. We brought them to a wedding last weekend for the first and last time, and they absorbed all our fun.

I was supposed to be on that chair with my shirt off. He tore up the dance floor like a maniac all night while I cradled the needy 3-year-old in the lobby. People were saying the party animal reminded them of his father, as if I were dead already. Never have I gone to a wedding and people not noticed whether I was there. The next one I am going harder than ever, and everyone is going to have hell to pay.

No, the reason why I don’t want to travel with my wife and without the kids is the risk of us both dying. I suppose that’s insanely morbid to prefer the kids die with us than be orphans. I don’t know. I just don’t like it.

I don’t even like driving at high speeds with my wife in the car. One of us has to survive. They are so young and need us so badly. On the way back from sick ice caves and the dangerous black sand beach visited by “Game of Thrones”:

Our tour guide drove in absurd conditions. Otherworldly winds from the side swayed the van on the icy highway. We passed another from the same tour company stuck off the shoulder. The overpass through the mountains was shut down. The view out of the windshield was hard to believe, a snow-globe wall of white. Driver, what road are you seeing that I’m not?

Back at the hotel, we heard about the plane crash in the Potomac. Our flight was delayed 55 hours because Iceland was expecting a monster storm. Meanwhile, both kids back home had fevers and probably the flu. Three of the four septuagenarian grandparents were knocked out as well.

Ten years ago, an extra weekend in Reykjavík with the love of my life would have been cause to sneak some of that Icelandic gin into the Blue Lagoon for some more glamor shots in 100-degree water surrounded by lava rock and 30-degree air.

Or an encore trip to The Icelandic Phallological Museum because it’s difficult to reach the upper limit of cock you want as a consumer.

Instead we were absolutely desperate to leave an idyllic land of natural wonders for Frisco, Texas. My wife was in tears. Kids change everything and in the case of travel, drastically. Our dominant concern on the way home, besides getting home, was transporting intact a couple of oversized plastic Viking axes. Partly due to questionable parenting, our kids are obsessed with weapons. They sleep with plastic swords I bought at a tourist trap near the Tower of London, which breezed through security at Heathrow Airport without resistance.

The axes were the opposite ordeal, not because they stuck out of my backpack like Leonardo’s swords, but because, we were told, they looked too realistic. Stopped by airport security in Iceland, Amsterdam and even Second Amendment-reverent Houston, we had to put our hearts on the line negotiating, pleading, strategizing, escalating to supervisors.

At Keflavík Airport we dumped out the dry cleaning bag holding my dirty clothes and wrapped the axes in it before checking them in at the “odd-size” baggage counter. In Amsterdam and Houston, the bosses miraculously let us carry them on after some lengthy discussion as if this were a real problem requiring multiple adults to analyze. The Texan was visibly annoyed and initially rejected us before a reluctant dismissive wave and saying, “Don’t bring this stuff again. That is ridiculous.”

Miss, I am a pre-911 O.G. who remembers walking through security in shoes and picking up people at the gate. My buddy was telling me back in the day he carried on an actual sword from England and stowed that mother effer in the overhead bin.

Anyway, the axes made it home to join my heart.

P.S. — The heads of the axes broke off after a week, but the handles are still used for battle and result in crying every three days or so.

Our fights are never mean or ugly and sometimes even marginally productive. The thing is I will always instinctively rationalize my behavior and words, but it doesn’t make me right. That might be my most mature statement ever. I’m a man, I’m 40!

In our root cause analysis of this one, we agreed we shouldn’t overlook both of us being really effing tired, the type of tired that compounds over days and weeks. We were so close to getting the kids to bed on a Saturday night. Any delay would be met with an incommensurate amount of irritation.

The 5-year-old in an abrupt fit chucked a square Magna-Tile at my wife, hitting her on the shoulder with a good amount of force. We were both shocked but not entirely out of our state of fatigue. She reacted sharply to him and said something like, “And what are you going to say?” In my haze I thought she was talking to the person who threw it. She repeated and when I realized she was talking to me, the Magna-Tile continued its trajectory and struck my nerve with a corner.

I was furious. However mad she was at me, I raised on a poker hand neither of us might have cared to play had we been well-rested. I couldn’t find the clip, but my wife once showed me Michelle Obama speaking a truth about how as parents you can’t get mad at the children so you get mad at each other. We were both mostly mad at our son acting out and channeled it toward the only eligible recipient.

That said, we do have tension between differing parenting philosophies on a low simmer at all times. She’s a former Montessori teacher who knows all the progressive techniques. I am not tied to any principles and will try anything to see what works.

I think in terms of direct outcomes, enticement and enforcement, liberal use of carrot and stick to build muscle memory. She thinks in terms of big picture, how to help developing brains and identities and set them up for success. It’s a bit of a role reversal; in all other facets of life, I’m the one willing to put in work or tolerate discomfort in the short term for a bigger payoff in the future.

With kids though, I am OK with picking battles and often take the path of least resistance. Then I will backfill the teachings when they’re older. For example, I bribe my children with dessert every day to get them to eat protein and vegetables. Something feels intuitively wrong about this method, but I am confident they can adopt a better way as adults. I ate fast food and pre-RFK Jr. school lunches every day growing up, and now we chop our vegetables on my abs.

We don’t even use a knife; we press the vegetable against the edges of my obliques.

My wife conceded on the dessert bribery. Apparently there is a school of thought that suggests you place dessert on the same plate as the rest of dinner, so the child doesn’t attach any significance to it. I thought this was a joke the first time my wife mentioned it. Our kids wouldn’t even need to sit down before inhaling the cookie and leaving.

I suppose the same-plate menu could work for some kids, just not mine. I also think my sons need some of the stick to supplement the carrot. Don’t worry, it was brought to my attention spanking is no longer in fashion and I will comply. But I believe if they do something bad, there can be punishment. And more important, that punishment will be a deterrent so good behavior is practiced even if they don’t understand the reasons or have the right motivations just yet.

Of course the ideal would be to meet every transgression with a patient explanation of patience, or kindness, empathy, stoicism, self-esteem, fairness, respect, the golden rule, property rights, cause and effect. According to my wife, a punishment such as taking away TV or sending them to their room isn’t productive because the consequence doesn’t relate to the behavior. Yelling or scolding only serves to make them feel unsafe and cause issues down the road.

I conceded on this and follow my wife’s lead on discipline, if that’s what you call it. Her approach makes sense on a conceptual high level, but on a pragmatic day-to-day level, our sons need some pushback and confrontation mixed in there.

Without challenging them at least occasionally with more intensity, they simply go too far too often, and both parents end up snapping anyway. A little fear of consequence shouldn’t damage them in the long run, right? It’s also a lesson in how the outside world works.

Getting called out after the Magna-Tile projectile pissed me off because I felt my wife was trying to have her cake and eat it too. We can be soft on them and deal with their propensity to be a-holes, or we can instill discipline and expect a better standard of behavior. We chose the former, and I bite my tongue all the time.

The times I don’t, I see immediate results and don’t believe this compromises their ability to learn the important values when older. Plus I still put in the effort to explain why a choice is good or bad, so if they happen to be smarter than they act, they can get ahead of the curve.

I don’t want to be made to feel inadequate as a father. That basically takes over as the No. 1 insecurity the instant the giant slimy head pops out. Arguably the most important responsibility of a father to son is to show and tell him how not to be an a-hole.

And I can’t do it the way I want. To receive her anger while I’m deferring and doing it her way made me angry. An hour later, in an attempt to let some air out, I sat down with the 5-year-old and gently explained although we knew he didn’t mean harm, throwing an object with a hard edge is dangerous and he should go hug his mom.

Frankly it seemed to resolve the issue well and likely had a better effect than going ballistic or grounding him. So yeah, my way would have been wrong in this case. We’ll see how it goes with two teenage boys in another 12 years of change as dramatic as it’s sneaky.

I am curious where Trump voters fall:

• Like him, don’t care for/about his policies. In other words, if he were the Democratic nominee they’d vote for him.

• Don’t like him, like his policies.

• Like both.

No idea how the pie chart breaks down, but I do know it’s a huge freakin’ Costco-sized American pie. Seventy-something million people will vote for him in 11 days. It’s enough to declare a border — call it a figurative wall that Mexico figuratively will pay for — between a person’s voting preference and character. They are independent things when confronted with a decision between two parties that can’t agree on anything, yet paradoxically are indistinguishable in practice.

If a magic wand rendered you unable to consume news and media that don’t directly affect you starting Nov. 5, and you just lived your life, how long would it take for you to know definitively, based on the quality of your day-to-day, who won the election? You might not figure it out before the next one, especially with a split Congress.

The magic wand isn’t entirely quixotic. You can opt out of the unnatural must-be-within-arms-reach-of-the-internet-at-all-times state of being. Like, no one said politics has to be digested this way, waiting for the next scrap of non-news or whatever picayune gaffe or oddity the algorithms send viral. You can go exercise instead and look like this no matter who wins the election:

I told you I would shape up. In the 40-and-over fitness club, Tom Brady is president and I am vice president. LeBron will bump me down to speaker when he joins in December.

This Trumpian narcissistic digression continues with a story of triumph. My professor buddy got me into the main University of Texas recreation center, and we played full-court basketball with undergraduates half our age. I made some layups, missed some layups, and missed every jumper. So basically I’m still in my prime.

Despite a blister from aggressive lateral movement in running shoes and a cardiovascular deficit bordering on nausea, I felt euphoric. There is a last time for everything, and I didn’t know if mine had already happened in this category. I had my doubts after the first sprint up the court and discovering the kids play to 30 these days. However, they count by twos and threes, presumably so the latter isn’t overweighted like it was when we played by ones and twos to 15. Brilliant. The future of America is bright.

Future and present here are bright, certainly relative to any other developed country if you look at their numbers and struggles. Sucks to be them, respectfully. My surest prediction for November is life will go on. There will be no civil war or anarchy because polarization on the internet is a long distance from the type of conviction needed to risk families in real life.

The election will not radically change anything for the aggregate. This confidence comes from our government’s checks and balances and freedoms we take for granted. It makes progress slow, often imperceptibly incremental, but it also has a way of self-correction.

Trump ran on repealing Obamacare, tried, failed, and maybe inadvertently made it more popular — which the Democrats leveraged during midterms when they took back the House. Illegal migrant crossings at the southern border were high during President Biden’s administration, and then they plummeted. Roe v. Wade was overturned, and abortions have gone up.

I’m not encouraging apathy. I am discouraging being a blow-hard when there’s only hot air in the room. Vote for whichever party makes you happy, and then be happy.

To borrow one of Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite words, we have agency in America. That’s one of the many reasons I love it so much. However inequitable the playing field, the baseline level of opportunity and quality of life are so high you don’t have to worry about who wins an election. People hyperbolize these days like we’re in Venezuela.

The effects on your life every four years are in the margins and close to zero relative to the impact of what’s actually in your control: how you treat your body, mind and other people, relationships you invest in, career paths you choose, places you live and see, important decisions and bets you make, in short — what you spend your time doing. If fretting about national politics under the guise of civic duty is your thing, consider the more direct efficacy of speaking up at a school board meeting or volunteering at a women’s clinic.

Life has been great for me during Biden’s term: new baby, new career, new house, new oblique abs appearing on any given day. All of it would have happened under Trump too. In fact midway through we moved from California — where in major cities if you dare mention Trump’s name you’re allotted two seconds to say something negative before being canceled from things you didn’t even sign up for — to Texas, where a Republican has held every statewide office for 30 years.

Of course insulation from politics requires privilege and good fortune, and some folks don’t have it easy. But it’s not like they’re being offered dramatically different universes either. If the assumption is Republicans are only for the rich, well, Democrats have been in the White House for 12 of the last 16 years. Rich people have gotten richer, and poor people probably still feel pretty poor.

Oh and by the way, I only add this as a footnote to avoid being dodgy in such an intimate setting as a public blog. Harris will be my nominal vote in a red state, but I truly don’t care if you go for Trump. I’ll see you on the other side, which will look familiar.

It’s easier to blurt out the negativities and sarcasm, and I will continue to do so because I must stay true to myself. Plus complaining and ranting don’t require as much effort as something more loving, and they’re more popular (see: President Trump). People who don’t have kids probably like to hear what they’re not missing, while parents want to relate with a bit of misery-loves-company.

Here’s a break from the easy way. I’m starting to see and feel the big picture with kids. Like the stock market, the day-to-day can seem meaninglessly up and down and sometimes just down-right painful. Zoom out of the fluctuations to a long time horizon, however, and it’s unmistakably moving up and to the right. 

The little people relentlessly, exhaustingly, excruciatingly… have made this a wonderful life. They’ve gone from unwelcome alarm clock to ultimately the best reason to get out of bed.

I used to liken children to a drug addiction or toxic relationship. They dangle fleeting dopamine bursts with hugs or cute mannerisms, just enough to keep you from leaving while systematically destroying your life. 

But really, they’re more like exercise. You don’t always feel like it, yet you never regret it. Those highs are fleeting because endorphins aren’t supposed to last forever. What’s meaningful is the work, love and commitment toward nurturing someone you’ve known their whole life. And over time, you realize the pain resulted in outsized gains.

What changed for me? Certainly they got older and I got older, which of course makes a difference. But it’s not just a matter of being out of diapers. Teleporting to this stage wouldn’t have had the same effect. The years to get here counted for something.

To stick with the money analogy, investing in kids yields increasingly larger returns over time. Einstein is said to have called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world, and it really does seem magical when looking back.

For example, I’ve invested many short spurts of furious energy into reading to my kids. My goal is to inspire a love for books before they discover TikTok. So I fire myself up for every performance in hopes of getting them fired up. 

I go for Morgan Freeman enunciation with Jim Carrey animation, sometimes wearing my retainer and trying not to spit everywhere while also translating in real time to Chinese, even though I don’t speak Chinese well, and desperately laboring to get to the next sentence before being interrupted by another challenging urgent question from the audience like why a particular snake is green. 

My 5-year-old has an intense way of rapid-fire interrogation, as if our collective well-being depended on an immediate answer. His favorite time to start one up is during superhero stories or when I’m trying to make a left turn on Hillcrest during rush hour. His tone gets more demanding with each successive question, or repeat question if more than two seconds elapse while I try to figure out how to answer. 

The ritual shortens my breath, and I notice anxiety tightening my chest. Sometimes I feel at risk of an aneurysm while simultaneously trying to explain why Bowser pulled Luigi’s mustache and not get in a car wreck.

All of this seems like nonsense in the moment, but it adds up in the long run to greater than the sum. Because when I hear them tell their own stories — vocabulary stretching to keep up with racing imagination, putting together sentences they haven’t before, applying same concepts to different scenarios — I feel like time lurches to a brief standstill in my little corner of reality and it’s so beautiful and marvelous. 

I don’t care to dig up all the times I ridiculed parents who over-celebrate unremarkable developments in their children such as speaking, but I acknowledge my flip-flop. I am so proud of my kids, and I will always be proud of them as long as they don’t dip too far below average.

My younger one can’t possibly grasp the concept of a calendar, but every time he announces in Mandarin the new “Jurassic Park” season comes out Oct. 17, I want to submit his early application to Northwestern. 

My older one lobbed a couple of left-handed forehands over a miniature net, and I almost collapsed on the ground with outstretched arms like a Wimbledon victor. My boy is going to be the next Nadal, or top out as manager of the Liberty High tennis team, or somewhere in between.

Vaaaaaamooooss!

The best payoff over time, even better than watching their minds and bodies grow, is legs on the lap. I got this from Scott Galloway’s wide-ranging podcast “The Prof G Pod.” He’s a millionaire many times over who’s had an amazing life, yet frequently muses in a non-cheesy way how the best part is simply his kids. I think he estimated 70-80 percent of his fulfillment comes from them. It’s a weird thing to measure, but upon reflection the ratio seems right to me.

Galloway described his feeling of contentment whenever one of his teenaged boys slings his legs onto his lap while watching TV on the couch just because he can. It was like a 15-second digression in the episode that stuck in my mind forever. 

My kids do the same thing. They even do it to their mother at the dinner table. It’s partially a power move showing they own you, but also rooted in a kind of sweetness because they want to connect and feel so secure and close. You get 80-ish years in this life and a short list of people whose legs can go in your lap and vice versa without so much as a thought. 

I love it. I love my kids, I love the life they’ve given me, and I love being their dad.

This A.I.-free image is a little blurry because I jumped into a pool for a few minutes with my phone in a fanny pack, which could have happened to anyone but feels like more of an Asian problem, kind of like how U.S. president might be one of those Black jobs. I put the iPhone 12 mini in a bag of easily accessible rice, decidedly an Asian solution, and escaped with just a broken Face ID.

I can’t blame the subpar definition entirely on cloudy camera lenses. If you’re interested enough to pinch and zoom, you can see the midsection has gotten doughier in midlife, particularly the lower abs where linearity is so directly proportional to discipline.

Although I’m way above average in and outside my age group, this is actually my Before pic and I will update you with an After. I’ve been binge-eating multiple times a week, as well as finishing my family’s nasty scraps even when I’d rather not but don’t have the agency to quell my no-waste O.C.D. I also keep getting to bed late instead of accepting the reality that young children compress your day into something unrecognizable from the previous life.

During a Disneyland trip next month, I am prioritizing a pilgrimage to the 24th Street hill in Hermosa Beach, Calif. There I will run 20 sprints to press the reset button for hopefully the last time. I need those 40 minutes of painful purification before I can begin my new life of legumes and salmon, moderation and savoring, meditation and 10 p.m. bedtime.

My wife says I have an eating disorder, but I put down a ton of calories and never consider not keeping them down. I do eat when stressed, feel guilty after each binge, and hate myself after they become routine. The emotions are a little unhinged, but demanding expectations for body and mind are still a net positive.

Your life is what you spend time and attention on, and there are worse things. I think this could be a way to contribute to those around me. Not as a personal trainer type, but more like a buddy with tidbits for the layman. 

For example, I’m happy to share Target sells a pound of dry lentils for $1.99. Cooking takes almost no prep time. If you add them to meals throughout the week, the protein and fiber will make it easier to replace or at least reduce portions of garbage food.

On the exercise end, I found this Men’s Health program that requires only 20-40 minutes three times a week and a set of dumbbells. It’s doable for everyone. Just pick a light weight if needed. I’m on Week 13 and keep going lighter and lighter. I’ve been doing lots of push-ups on my knees because they’re hard and I’m not very strong.

This photo from 2016 definitely was not generated by A.I. I was joking for the camera. Bicep curls in a squat rack are done only in maximum-security prisons by death row inmates who have no reason to give an F. But I don’t recall the 2.5-pound weights on each side being part of the joke.

I’ve never been strong. My arms are too long. Every time I try to pick up my wife, I scream like Jim during his ultimate sacrifice in a “A Quiet Place.”

We watched the breathtaking “Skywalkers” documentary on Netflix this weekend, featuring a hot Russian couple who breaks into skyscrapers and takes insanely dangerous pictures. The grand finale was atop the world’s second-tallest building, the Merdeka 118 tower in my birthplace Malaysia. They balanced on a plank and did the “Dirty Dancing” move.

No self-respecting Malaysian wouldn’t at least give it a try on carpet. I convinced my wife to participate. She said she weighs 105 pounds, which might be true in outer space. I said I could easily snatch that weight, which might not be the right exercise and in any case is not true.

She jumped, I grabbed, and we immediately crumpled to the ground. There was a loud pop we suspect came from my lower back, and — I truly kid you not — her left tit somehow popped out of the sports bra underneath her shirt. 

We were dying laughing but it was emasculating too, especially since the ensuing documentary on the Redeem Team talked about how Kobe and LeBron were alpha dogs. I am so weak relative to my physique. The gun and abs show is indeed mostly for show. But I will keep at it. When you’re 40, you take what you can get and fight for the rest.