Driving with Graham

Once more I am driving Graham to chess camp in the mornings. This year he is a junior counselor, which is awesome. With Natalie leaving the house so soon I am very focused on spending as much time with the kids in as many ways as possible.

Again -- and I may have written about this before -- I have decided to always put him in the front seat and to programmatically leave the radio off. No NPR. We get plenty of information.

Today we discussed the Strzok hearings, which Graham had watched clips of and then Colbert's commentary or skit or whatever. Graham said the most striking thing was the amount of cursing that he heard. At which point in time I launched into a long disquisition on the attitudes towards foul language over time, how it has increasingly permeated higher registers of discourse where once it was anathema -- for example TV news and also politicians' speech -- and how generally the erosion of norms of discursive behavior had evolved into a problem that makes it difficult to have productive dialog. Which is different from how it seemed to me as a kid-teenager-young person.

I realized that I was sort of dadsplaining.

We talked about other stuff too, boredom, attention issues when reading on the internet, optimizing gas mileage in a Prius, how people sometimes get irked at Prius drivers for doing so. Blah blah blah.

It was awesome. At lunch today I will take him to a new dumpling place in Apex. Psyched for that.

For now, back to the coal mine.