Tag: Time

  • Cooking for My Family

    If you were to ask me what was the best part of being a stay-at-home dad, I would easily say it’s spending time with my kid. There will never be a moment in my life that I will regret all of the time I got to have with her.

    But number two on that list would be cooking for my family. It is an act that is more rewarding that I ever imigined.

    When I was in college my roommate/best friend bought me a wok for a birthday gift. (We would watch PBS cooking show on Sunday mornings, Simply Ming was my favorite, and he picked up on my desire to try my hand at cooking Chinese food.) I found a Martin Yan cookbook at a secondhand bookstore, and tried my hand at it. I wasn’t very good, but I was having fun. And it was college, so trying anything new was kind’a cool.

    I also got very luck because my girlfriend who became my wife is a trained chef, and when we moved in together, I got a very friendly education on how to be competent in the kitchen.

    Time moved on, and the wife found herself on a different career path which she excels at, and then that Pandemic thing, and I accepted the position of Stay-at-Home Dad. Besides the enormous amount of cleaning and moral support I give, I also had to take on the responsibility of cooking for the family.

    Now, I’m still not the best cook in the world, nor am I even the best cook in my family. Yes, there is the feeling of satisfaction of being able to delivery food to my wife and kid that makes them happy; that’s very rewarding. Another aspect that I have come to appreciate is now feeling competent and confident in the kitchen. Being able to eyeball measurements, and recognize when different techniques are needed. Knowing how much fat, salt, and acid are needed to balance out a dish. These are skills I have attended through repetition and practice, but using them daily has brought a new medium of creativity into my life that I didn’t know I needed.

    Gumbo pasta. I want to make that. I know I could look up a recipe online, but I also know that I could wing it, and it would be pretty good. And I know the wife and kid would love it.

  • Short Story Review: “Project” by Rachel Cusk

    (The short story “Project” by Rachel Cusk appeared in the September 1st & 8th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photo illustration by Stephen Doyle

    I am a big fan of Rachel Cusk; have been for some time now. There are a great number of reasons why I enjoy her work, and when I read anything by her, such as “Project” in this week’s New Yorker, my fandom evolves into admiration, and even a little jealously. I am not jealous of her talent as a writer, envious might be the better word for that, but when I read her work, I wish I was the type of writer that had time. Cusk’s fictional version of herself, though narrator might be a fairer description, possess the greatest gift of all; time. Time to observe and contemplate.

    In “Project,” the narrator contemplates how who we are gets created. This contemplation leads to a path that bends and turns and takes us to people in the narrator’s life. First we meet M, a movie star and model. The narrator is thinking of writing M’s autobiography, which M’s response is to “…just make it up.” In this first section of the story, the narrator intertwines her interactions with M, while also speaking of a book she is reading by a woman who details the horrid abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather. It is a strange comparison, if not a juxtaposition. In Cusk’s assured hands, we see how these woman took their situations, fought back and went forth to create better versions of themselves, yet both spoke of a moment where their childhoods were lost… But even as I try to describe this, I am not doing this story justice. The story moves on the narrator’s partner, and his bout with an aliment and the need to a brief stay in a hospital. Then there are questions of the time we have and how we share it. Why we live the way we live and where we live…. See, not doing this justice.

    This story falls into my favorite Cusk style of writing – It just flows. Maybe this type of writing is like stream-of-consciousness-lite. These thoughts and ideas have depth and weight to them, but they don’t get tangled up in minutia and tangents. All of these disparate ideas roll across the page, with observations of the life the narrator lives, but also how some of these truth and universal; Or at least there is a hope that they are. This is a story seems to be celebrating the existential gift of being able to create our self, and chose how to live out that creation. And to do all of this, to have a life that can be observed, we need time for reflection.

    And through all of it, the ins and outs of this story, Cusk has a wonderful melancholic final paragraph. Not so much an observation, or a contemplation, but a memory of raising her children; when trust was tangible and innocent. That taking the time, to remember and re-experience, is a continuous step in the project of self creation.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Lunch with Friends, TJ’s in Harlem, and Camp Letters

    (Yes I do, my bag is full…)

    The wife and I had a good friend come in from out of town yesterday, and we all went to lunch. I had this thought, more like an understanding, which was that this wouldn’t just be lunch – this would be a hang out. And I was correct. We grabbed lunch, and then headed back to our place, and hung out, catching up, for several hours. The wife made queso, and I made drinks. My wife had the foresight to get all of her work finished for the day before our friend came over; I held out hope that somehow I would find the time to get my stuff done after he left. A couple of drinks told me that I wouldn’t work yesterday. But… I’m not really upset by that. It had been years since we had seen our friend, and spending time with people you care about is never wasted time

    There is a Trader Joe’s in Harlem! It opened yesterday! Holy Shit! Everyone is going to the Trader Joe’s in Harlem! And it’s about time! I am a huge fan of quality items sold at affordable prices…

    The kid is away at camp, and yesterday, I got a letter in the mail from her. The letter was short, very cute, sweet, and made me almost bust out in tears and cry my little dad heart out. Even thinking about the letter makes me choked up. Fatherhood is an amazing adventure, showing me that I have more love and compassion than I thought I contained.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Recovery, Tottenham’s Next Season, and This Year

    (The future is in your lap…)

    Today is the first day that I feel 100% normal. Yesterday was like 95%, and I think that had to do with the side effects of the medication I was on. Yeah, Covid sucks, and I am glad that I had avoided it for four years. I am also aware that I had a very mild case, as I would say that it felt more like I had a bad cold than anything else. Also, the being exhausted all the time made me feel like I have lost a week of my life; I just couldn’t stop sleeping, which wasn’t as pleasurable as I had hoped. I just felt lazy. Now that I am back, I have the desire to exceptionally over exert myself to compensate for my “time off.”

    Tottenham Hotspur will not play in the Champions League next season, but they will qualify for the one of the two other European football tournaments. With Spurs final game against already relegated Sheffield, odds are that Tottenham are Europa League bound. This is an improvement over last season, but I can’t shake the feeling that the team choked during the second half of the season. Ah… next season. And there is a European Cup this Summer!

    Does it feel like this year has flown by for anyone else? Swear to God, it feels like we were just wrapping up New Years like a month ago. I know that I wrote a blog about how we had planned our Summer already, and just the other day, the kid’s school sent out the academic calendar for 24/25, and it’s like Fall is basically here already. I got an email last week about getting ready for the Great Pumpkin Blaze for Halloween. But with all of this, it dawned on me that kid will leave for college in 9 years, which means we are halfway through our time with her. Nine years of being a parent has flown by, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I wish it would slow down just a little bit. Perhaps I am to blame, as I forget that most of what I busy myself with really doesn’t matter.

  • Thoughts on Time and Settling (Unedited)

    The wife and I made a promise to each other for 2023. I don’t want to call it a resolution, because those are stupid, and doomed to fail. The promise we made was twofold:

    “No more wasting time, and no more settling.”

    This isn’t self-help garbage, like the “Hang in There” kitten poster. This is a pragmatic reminder.

    We do waste an enormous amount of time each day. Looking at our phones is the biggest culprit. But also, mindless eating while looking at the tv. Staying up late to stay up late (that one’s all me) and I have to go back and mention the phones again, because, you know, phones will eat up hours of your day. See, and this time wasting leads to us having to settle on things, because we haven’t given ourselves enough time to accomplish the things we want to do. It can be a vicious cycle, and we’d like to bust out of unhealthy cycles.

    And like all changes in life, no one really likes it, and it’s hard to follow though on.

    The wife is doing better than I. She is making it to yoga on the scheduled days, and going to bed on time. I can’t seem to get to the gym more than twice a week, and that should increase to at least three to four days a week. Like I said above, I’m still not making it to bed on time, which means I’m only getting like six hours of sleep.

    And as we start the game of setting goals and trying to achieve them as a family, I can’t shake the feeling that there is a clock, and I am running out of time. Maybe it has to do with being in my mid-forties, which I have been thinking about a lot of late, and that I might need to have to make some tough choices; I can’t do it all – something will have to fall to the wayside and be left behind.

    I have been with my wife for seventeen years, married for twelve, and they have been good years. We have a kid we love, and want to provide for, which is the real motivation for this. We will only have so much time with her, and then she will be out there in the world. We need to be parents that she can count on, and follow through when we say we are going to do something.