One thing Joel Stein has never done? Hold an interview by Google IM. Until now. This is going to be amazing:

DadWagon: Hey Joel

Joel Stein: Are we chatting now?

Oh hell yes

Seriously, this is it? I’m disappointed. It feels like AOL.

Ok. We can call it off.

Are you wearing pants?

I am a classy freelancer. I have the Late Late Show [Joel's appearance with Craig Ferguson from late April] open in my other browser. You look nice.

I haven’t watched it yet. I figured I should wait for [my wife] Cassandra to watch it with later. And yes, I wore a tie. No one does that anymore. Wait… are you masturbating to me on your other browser screen???

That’s what a classy freelancer does… one browser for masturbating, one for interviewing

That way you never have to stop working. I’m learning so much.

So we’re gonna talk about your awesome book, but before that, let’s talk about me. Tell the readers how we know each other.

Okay, but I get confused here. We didn’t know each other at college, right? Because I’m too old for that to have happened. So I didn’t meet you until you showed up at Time. I’m guessing that was 2002? I knew you were Rome’s cool friend who went to international places.

Great. I just wanted to get the “cool” part across. K thx. Let’s move on.

Did I get all that right? Even the 2002 part?

No. But it’s like Mike Daisey. It was “true” even if it wasn’t true. Because of the “cool” thing.

The reader show know just how slowly you type. Do you use one finger? I’ve written three columns waiting for your responses.

The other browser, Joel, the other browser. OK: Professional question. You will write for anybody—you used to write for a cigarette magazine at one point, right?—and you are prolific. Why is this your first book?

I always thought books were different, since they’re not meant to be disposable. I’ve never thrown one away. It seemed like your permanent record. So I kept waiting for an idea. I had one in 2000, but all the editors I pitched it to didn’t like it. This maybe wasn’t the idea I was waiting for, but I liked it, and I got tired of waiting and I realized that we were getting to a point where books might not get made as easily anymore, so I had to do it soon. And it wasn’t just any cigarette magazine. It was Marlboro. I do have standards.

True flavor, no doubt. So at what point did you begin to see that Laszlo was not a mouth to feed, but a book to sell? (and are we even naming the kid?)

I just realized we both have photos of us holding guns as our Gmail photos. That is the move of Jews insecure about their masculinity.

Yeah, tho you may not remember that you actually shamed me into changing my Twitter profile pic, which was of the look-i’m-on-tv-ergo-important genre.

That’s right! You had one of those “I’m on TV” freeze frames! I saved your ass on that one. It’s such a blonde Fox commentator move.

Anyhow: Laszlo

I call him Laszlo throughout the book, and that is his name, so yes, he is going to hate me for the rest of his life since I might control his Google results for a long time. He’s actually not that huge a part of the book, since, after freaking out that I was having a boy, which, as you know, I am not at all equipped to raise, I went off on my own to do man stuff. It’s not like I brought Laszlo with me in the ring to fight Randy Couture. Though I did bring him to Vegas for that trip. But he stayed in the hotel while I got my ass kicked.

In rough outline: Army, firefighter, MMA… what else?

I did three days of boot camp at Ft. Knox with a troop. They let me fire a tank. In my first three hours, before doing any physical activity—mind you it was hot, and I had only gotten 3 hours of sleep, and I locked my knees—I fainted for the first time in my life. Into the arms of a soldier. Honestly, it was so much more stressful than I could have ever imagined. They scream at your face while you eat, while you piss, while you get dressed. There’s no break.

Other stuff I did: I got a day trader to give me $100,000 to trade with for a day. Hunted, fished, rebuilt a house, drank scotch. I start by trying to fix my first mistake by becoming a Boy Scout. I went camping with a troop and earned my first badge.

The day trading seems like it doesn’t fit with the rest, does it? Isn’t that something Jews can do naturally?

No. The rest was the traditional Scotch-Irish, Southern version of manhood that has come to mean manliness in our country. But there are other versions: The stiff-upper lip, drink-tea while the bombs are falling British one, for instance. So the day trading one was my attempt to try on a different version, but still one foreign to me. That taking-money-from-other-men, snort-coke-off-a-hooker, Boiler Room kind.

And yes, the Jewish kind. Though I kept meeting secret Jews on my manventures. The baseball player who taught me how to throw, catch, hit and coach was Shawn Green, a Stanford Jew. One of the sergeants in the Marines when I did some stuff in San Diego was Jewish. So was the CEO of Patron who races a car for their Le Mans team – and he had been a Navy Seal. And, of course, the day trader.

Secret Jews are the best kind. [Ed. note: see also Theodore's upcoming book: Am I a Jew?]

We are everywhere!

You mentioned coke ‘n’ hookers (metaphorically, no doubt), and it reminds me that I had a conversation with my wife about your book a couple days ago. I was describing it as a rather awesome premise for a book. She seemed mystified, and just wanted to know whether Cassandra thought it was dumb/dangerous to do all those things.

Yes. Cassandra thought it was stupid, that a person doesn’t change by doing stupid stunts. But she was wrong. I think we only change by doing things. I can fix stuff in my house now. Not much stuff, but some. My parents, oddly, were more worried about the UFC fight than Cassandra was. Though she tried to get me to back out the night before, when I was really messed up from the training. Dana White had a guy choke me out, twice. That plus the pre-fight jujitsu training messed me up.

Glad you got some DIY skills. One of these days Clooney is gonna get too busy to come over and fix things in your house.

It’s much cheaper than having Clooney come over and handyman. That guy can drink. And not the cheap stuff.

So are you still tweaked from the fight or training? Any lasting injuries?

No! I’m really glad. My throat hurt for about 10 days after the choking out, but it went away. In fact, I was feeling pretty great when I finished the manventures, since I was in really good shape from training for the Army and UFC and some other stuff. But then I slacked after.

That is also manly. Or at least mannish. Or manlike.

Slacking on working out? It actually doesn’t feel manly at all. The less we work out, especially as we get older, the more androgynous we look and act.

Anyhow, Julia will be glad to hear about Cassandra’s reservations. Though something tells me we weren’t talking about your book so much as my upcoming trip to Libya. Thanks for being that foil.

When [former TIME Managing Editor] Jim Kelly made a joke to me about embedding me, before anyone knew what embedding was, Cassandra said she’d divorce me if I went to Iraq. And she was serious. Libya is a little more dangerous than a fight with a UFC guy who knows you’re writing about him.
But have fun!

I will. It’s just a big hummus party over there right now.

It is a nice time of year there! Though it’s the height of tourist season, so that can get annoying.

ROFLibya. Let’s get back to the book. I gotta go, and my slow typing has kept us from talking about the awesomeness of this thing. So I’ll say this: It was always a poorly kept secret at TIME that you were a pretty amazing writer when you weren’t doing the funny stuff too. Tell me there is pathos in Man Made.

Pathos aplenty! We had the book printed, at dear cost, on specially treated paper that is salt-water resistant since the test audiences cried so much when they read it.

Still gonna fry the insides of the Kindle, though

They hadn’t thought of that! Book publishers are stuck in 1960. Honestly, I had to make my final changes in colored pencil and mail it back to them. Seriously.

We’re all fucked. Final question: what can you tell us about Man Made, the movie?

I’m having lunch with Jake Kasdan today, who I think is going to direct it. It’s being produced by Shawn Levy through a deal at Fox. Like all movies, I’m sure it will never get made. But I get to write it. I can’t believe they’re letting me do that. They also must know it will never get made.

That’s where the guaranteed money is. Charge them a ransom for the screenplay then it won’t matter. Final item that is not a question, but rather a statement: I see that you actually drove somewhere to have waffles with a blog called Girl to Mom as PR for this book. That means your time is not worth as much as I thought, and that you will definitely have time to come read at one of our DadWagon readings. I am psyched to have figured that out. See you there!

Google ads, by the way, really seized on the day trading part of our conversation. Good luck in Libya. It would be tragic if this were your last piece of journalism.

There’s the pathos. Congratulations, Joel. Thanks for gchatting.

Thank you.

The South Korean Customs Service said today that it had heightened its searches of suspicious packages being brought into the country by travellers from China in an attempt to stamp out the sickening trade.

According to customs agents, 35 smuggling attempts have been made since August last year involving more than 17,000 capsules disguised as ‘stamina boosters’.

Curious about the subject, I turned for insight to my friend Scott Carney, whose recent book, Red Market, explores in depth the international trade in human body parts (and human beings).

What do you know about these Chinese baby pills?

Only what I’ve read in that article. There have been stories out there for years that the Chinese use human body parts in their medicine, but not a lot of grounded facts. And the story raised more questions than it answered.

Such as?

First of all: how do we know the pills are human in origin? How do we know they were from babies? As far as I know there is no sceintific test that would affirm a child who was turned into a powder.

They border guards found something, but who is to know for sure what.

It reminds me of the Peruvian fat smugglers. There was a report that people were being killed for their fat and then the fat was being sold to a Russian beauty product company. The BBC reported on it, as did many other news sources.

It turned out to be a hoax. The police were trying to cover up corruption allegations with a fantastical smuggling story losely based on fight club.

That’s always been my strategy for avoiding trouble, too.

I think it was the plot for the last season of “The Wire” as well

Another question is this: there were 17,500 pills found. how many babies is that?

That was my next question.

One? Two at the max? It depends on what part of the baby you are using. I’m guessing that if you used the whole child then it would be not very many. So that raises the question of why bother smuggling in the first place? You can kidnap and kill a single child in china with much less risk than killing one abroad and smuggling it in. The whole story just doesn’t add up.

How about this: You know body-part smugglers as well as anyone. If you were going to turn babies into powder, how would you do it? Would you turn the whole kid into powder, or would it be better to have baby-kidney powder, baby-liver powder, baby-heart powder? “Better” meaning “more profitable.”

Well, if I were really savvy, I would use an inert substance. Or a dog. Who is to know if it was a real baby? Who is going to complain?

You mean there’s no trust among body-part smugglers?

The more I think about it the less the story actually makes sense. The markets that I’ve looked at the body parts were always discernable. IE: a kidney moving across borders, a human egg, a bone etc. When you actually grind something into powder it’s actual humanness seems to matter less.

That said, it is technically possible. And there are a lot of weirdos out there.

Isn’t that what they do with rhino horns, though?

Rhinos are harder to come by than babies.

Though, there are a lot of magical markets for human body parts. Think about the albinos in parts of africa that are killed to be eaten. There is a fairly robust trade in albino genitals as I understand it.

Oh really?

Yeah.

What do albino genitals cost?

Good question. How much do you have?

I’m a writer—not much.

We can talk once you get paid.

How about this: Is my child more valuable live and intact, divided into transplantable organs, or ground to a powder? She is 3 and a half years old, and weighs about 35 pounds, depending on whether she’s pooped recently.

About 16 million milligrams, or 16 kg.

What is 40% of 16 kg? That would be her dry weight.

6.4 kg

So that is the mass that you would have to make powder out of. Let’s say your pills were 500 mg each.

That’s 12,800 pills.

Ah, so the border guards got approximately 1.5 babies, if they were being legit.

Did they say what the street value of the pills was?

The article didn’t say. It also didn’t give mgs.

Well, 500mg is a good guess.

I bet you would make more selling her on the adoption market

What would she go for? Mixed white-Asian baby, great health, 3.5 yrs old.

At least $50,000.

Are some national baby markets better than others?

The US and Europe will get you the most cash. But also the most red tape.

What about if we sold her off organ by organ?

That would be difficult to do in America, since most doctors would not be into it unless she was brain dead. But in Brazil it happens. So the question is, what does a Brazilian organ transplant cost? Then figure you would get about 10% of that, at the very best.

It’s probably better to be in the kidnapping business there so you can fulfil bulk orders.

However, if you found a person in America whose child was dying of organ failure, and your kid was a match, then you would have some real bargaining power. Possibly millions.

Wow. So, in a perfect scenario, I’d find dying American kids who needed each and every one of Sasha’s organs.

The plan would be to fly you and the kid to another country and have the operation in, say, Sao Paolo. It would come down to a function of what the buyers were willing to pay. There is no set price for organs. The real question is what is that child’s life worth to their parents? If Sasha was dying of liver failure, how much would you pay to save her (assuming you weren’t troubled by the ethics)?

Pretty much everything, obviously. Historically, what have parents paid for such things?

Sadly they generally don’t report the buying price to me. I keep asking the organ brokers to file annual reports but they never comply.

I understand: paperwork. Yeesh.

Child organs are a niche market. And their value is a function of the parent’s willingness to pay and their means.

A niche market that is more lucrative than the adult one, or less?

Yeah, definitely. A child skeleton sells for 2 – 3 times an adult skeleton. For a great child skeleton, it might go for $10,000. Maybe $15,000.

Wow.

But that would be the top end. On the low end, maybe $4,500 on the current U.S. market. So you would be better to sell her whole than in powder.

My guess is that if the Korea story is legit that they procured the child for $0. By just taking a body from a morgue or killing one. Maybe a $100 bribe was paid somewhere.

Okay, so if I wanted to maximize Sasha’s value, I would:

Sell her piecemeal.

Start with her hair.

Then harvest some skin and her corneas.

Go for the internal organs.

Keep her alive as long as possible.

But first find buyers.

Finally reduce her to bones and sell those.

Her marrow might be valuable as well.

I wonder if it would be possible to make her start producing human eggs with the right hormones. It probably wouldn’t be good for her. But it might be possible.

And everything else we turn to powder? And turn the powder into pills?

Sure. But the powder is going to have low margins.

True, but we’re talking about the leftovers. What else are you going to do with that stuff?

Besides, you’ve sold almost everything else. I figure you’d want to get rid of the evidence somehow. So if you’re setup to make powder then go for it. But it would be a pain to sell it. You might have to travel to China. Or at least Chinatown.

Sasha’s language—the words and thoughts of an imaginative child—is the language that Maurice Sendak, who died today, never forgot. To read his books is to immerse yourself in the imagination not of an adult trying to guess what kids like, but of someone who speaks like them, writes like them, thinks like them.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is, of course, the one that everyone cites, because its narrative flow most closely mimics that of a kid’s story. When Max goes off in his boat “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year,” that’s a child’s sense of time. He cows the Wild Things by staring them in the eyes—a child’s trick that seems impossible. And while the Wild Rumpus seems like a kid’s fantasy comes true, it’s the sudden shift afterwards, when Max decides he needs to return home, that rings most true. Kids are moody, their unfathomable ecstasy followed by bottomless longing.

That said, “Where the Wild Things Are” was never a favorite of mine, or of Sasha’s. Lately, we’ve been reading the Nutshell Library, and in particular “Pierre,” whose beautiful refrain—”I don’t care!”—Sasha voices while I read the parents’ (and lion’s) lines. “They pulled the lion by the hair, they hit him with the folding chair. His mother asked, ‘Where is Pierre?’ The lion answered, ‘I don’t care!’ His father said, ‘Pierre’s in there!’” God, it’s brilliant—that driving rhythm, the specificity of the folding chair, the insistent rhyme. And it has chapters! To hear Sasha say, “Chapter 2,” as we turn that page is pretty neat. Her first chapter book, and she can hold it in the palm of her hand.

My other favorite is A Hole Is to Dig, which Sendak illustrated but did not write. In fact, its putative author, Ruth Krauss, didn’t exactly write it either. Rather, she got its lines from actual children, whom she asked for definitions of regular things: “A face,” they told her, “is so you can make faces.” More:

• A hand is to hold up when you want your turn
• Grass it to have on the ground with dirt under it and clover in it
• Mashed potatoes are to give everybody enough

And all around these lines—dancing, digging, making faces, and holding up their hands—are Sendak’s children, making sense of the world as best they can. Let’s hope the man himself is now in a place where there’s mashed potatoes a-plenty, and everyone understands how he thinks.

Most of the time, this is not a big problem. The TV, after all, is our blessed electronic baby-sitter, and while Sasha watches it, I’m often making dinner, reading the New Yorker, having a beer, or otherwise keeping my adult self entertained. Sometimes, though, I really want to know what she’s watching, not out of some supervisory parental obligation but because I want to share her cultural references and make sure she’s growing up with good taste. Or at least my tastes.

Unfortunately, for a while Sasha was obsessed with “Datou Erzi, Xiaotou Baba,” a monumentally stupid cartoon produced in mainland China in, I’m guessing, the late 1970s or early 1980s. It is, as its name suggests, about a child with a big head and his small-headed father. And as that name equally suggests, it’s incredibly stupid, and strange without being intriguingly weird. In the clip below, you’ll see what happens when normal-headed mom finally walks out on the idiotic men she’s been condemned to support. (It’s much more entertaining, I think, if you don’t speak Chinese.)

God, for months Sasha loved this show, which her preschool teachers had introduced her to. But I couldn’t stand it—couldn’t, wouldn’t try to follow it. Eventually, though, she outgrew it, and went on to other things: the Chinese version of “Winnie the Pooh and Tigger,” Bubble Guppies, and, bizarrely, Before Green Gables, an animated series about Anne’s rural life that happens to be in Japanese. (We still don’t know how much Sasha understands of it, but she loves it.) These were all improvements over “Big Head, Little Head,” but just the same I couldn’t get into them. They were shows for her, not me.

Until recently. One evening, flipping through the channels, we stumbled on Adventure Time, a half-hour Cartoon Network series about Finn, a kid in a hoodie, and his magical dog, Jake, who’s apparently modeled on Bill Murray’s character in Meatballs. The show is nutzo! And in the best way possible. In last night’s episode, for example, the lewd Ice King tries to seduce two “Breakfast Princesses,” whereupon Finn and Jake interrupt and ground him. In revenge, the Ice King hires a hitman, Scorcher, to off the heroes, and the whole thing ends with the Ice King freezing Finn and Jake in blocks of ice, sitting atop them, and gloating, “You’re grounded—under my butt!”

This is weird shit, the kind I love. As Sasha and I watched Scorcher trying to slay Finn and Jake, I thought back to the old Transformers and GI Joe series, in which no one ever died, and indeed the prospect of death never came into play. Even when I was a little kid, that struck me as strange, and I remember discovering Robotech, the Japanese series in which people—many, many people—actually died, with a kind of joy. The fact that Adventure Time would bring up this possibility so nonchalantly—and so joyously weirdly—was impressive.

Plus: butt jokes!

Anyway, Sasha likes it, and we’ve finally found a show to watch together. Even Jean giggled at the butt jokes. Now, if only we can find it in Chinese…

Pfffffft.

We at DadWagon write against the clock, knowing that one day—maybe a few years from now, maybe just a few months—our kids will realize what we’re doing and ask us to stop. Soon after that, they’ll probably learn how to Google their own names and ours, and then we’ll really be screwed.

This post is one of the ones that will get me in trouble.

So, yesterday morning Jean and I went in for her 20-week anatomy scan. You remember, the one where they do an in-depth ultrasound to examine all the parts of the baby, and reveal its sex? Well, actually, I didn’t remember this at all, and when I pointed out to Jean she reminded me that I wasn’t around for it—I was wandering around Europe that summer. Oh, right.

Anyway, the scan went fine—ten fingers, nose where it should be, heart thumping away—and so then we did (or Jean did) amniocentesis. This was definitely new. Last time around, we were under 35; now we’re over. But it took some deciding on whether to do it. Jean and I are both in good health, with no family histories of birth defects, and the tests so far have indicated no problems (or 90–95% chance of no problems). So there was no real reason to do it other than peace of mind—and the fact that everyone around us was encouraging us to take it.

So we did. At a certain point, we shrugged our shoulders and said, Eh, whatever. Which has pretty much been our approach to the pregnancy overall. This will surprise none of you who already have multiple children, but the hope, anxiety, thrills, and concern that rollercoastered us through the first round, four years ago, have flattened out. At worst, Jean’s being pregnant is an inconvenience. At best, we forget about it entirely.

Oh, the baby’s kicking? That’s neat, I guess. That’s our attitude now. Naming the kid, too, feels less urgent than the first time around—I’m sure whatever we come up with will be fine, since we’ll just end up giving her a nickname like Pinky-Poo anyway. And Jean, you will be horrified to learn, has not only eaten sushi and raw oysters but has also had the occasion to sip a microglass of wine now and then, or have a glug or two of beer. (In preparation, of course, for immigration to France.) Yeah, we know, the alarmists say you shouldn’t. But it’s just too hard to get worked up about these things. And besides, it’s not like Jean’s smoking meth.

None of this is to say we’re not looking forward to the new child. Au contraire! The September day that Sasha’s little sister bursts forth from Jean’s womb (like something out of “Prometheus”?) will be a joyful day indeed, whatever we decide to call the little critter. (Maybe just Critter?) But the point is, we cannot fucking wait for that day to arrive, at least so we can have a couple of gin-and-tonics to celebrate.

You’ve probably already heard the whole setup. If not, there’s a handy reference video below. At a Rangers game late last week, a foul ball was snagged on the field and then tossed into the expensive seats nearby (making this a one-percenter showdown). Either the ball was intentionally thrown in the direction of a tow-headed toddler, or the toddler—they are all such egotists!—imagined the ball being thrown to him. Either way, he didn’t get the ball—an older man with long arms and (presumably) full bladder control snared it, and didn’t notice his kid-competitor.

The kid, he cried. The man, there with his girlfriend/wife/secretary(?), exalted and cavorted. He and his girl took pictures with their phones, all while the kid was working up his best look of complete devastation and loss.

The television announcer, who should never ever be allowed to talk about anything besides the break on a curveball, immediately pronounced the couple The Worst People in the World for “taunting” this child that they clearly hadn’t even seen. Because I don’t get to use as many sports metaphors here as I would like, let’s just say that if this scenario was a 12 to 6 curveball, the announcer called it high heat. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The toddler’s parents (Crystal and Kyle Shores!) and the offenders have both done their time in front of the jury of national media arguing that this was all just a misunderstanding.

That is, however, beside the point. Regardless of intention, of taunting or not, there are some good lessons to be learned here. Jotting a few of them now:

1) Baseball announcers should be more quiet. Except for the guys who call my Giants games. They’re great. Really.

2) Toddler bawling-face means nothing to me or any other parent worth their salt. This starts from the earliest days of infancy, when you realize that tiny babies cry because of disappointment, angst, cynicism, or gas. Or all of the above. And neither you, nor they, will ever know the difference. It is no different as they age. My children cry out in terror/anger at least 500 times a day. I am beyond caring, except if some sort of new frequency is reached, something that intimates real, different pain. This kid’s bawl? Pure theater.

3) Someone else’s crying child is should not be this couple’s problem. This is important, and hard to understand, as a parent. But the fact is that parents shouldn’t even feel responsible for their own child’s happiness. Why should strangers? To argue otherwise is to buy into the bizarre concierge-reaction to children that we see all around us: we value these little people, so our impulse is to serve them, to please them, to feed their whims, buff their egos, and shield them from disappointment. DO NOT DO THIS. I have tried. In the end I have only learned that for all the advantages my children have that I did not, for every time I tried to craft a special experience or protect them from a hurtful thought, my children are still just themselves, little bags of rage and love and greed and beauty that will do what they are wont to do, unswayed by outside stimuli. The only thing they really seem to respond to is the sensation of being doted on, and rather than relaxing or feeling enveloped by love when they see that they are being doted on, they turn selfish: little Lohans under the klieg lights of attention. They rant and spit on their stage, they slug photographers and expose their genitals. They wear big sunglasses and smoke cigarettes. You get what I mean: the attention warps them. They turn gnarled and spiteful.

I’m not saying you can’t offer some sympathy for the kid. But that he should get your baseball? Screw that. Leave him disappointed. He’ll be better off for it.

One of my fondest memories from childhood was my father reading The Hobbit to me and my brother, Jason. As with my first marriage, my parents split when I was quite young. I lived with my mother and would see my father on weekends, when he would pick us up from my mother’s house in Jamaica, Queens, and take us into Manhattan to his apartment in the West Village. That’s where much of the reading would take place, on that lengthy subway ride, my father declaiming passages in a loud voice. Interestingly, the other passangers on the subway would get drawn in to the story, and soon, my father was telling a subway bedtime story to a carload of pissed-off, potentially homicidal, 1970s New Yorkers.

I doubt that JP will have the same experience, as I tend to do most of my reading to him at home. But I do have a decision to make: Do I try to recreate an experience from my childhood—The Hobbit—or do I accept reality and read him something he is familiar with and that he’d probably like better—Harry Potter?

Thoughts?

Eager ballerina

One of the things I most looked forward to, after our family’s return to Brooklyn from Taipei, was taking Sasha to her Saturday-morning ballet class, held in a church in Cobble Hill. This is not because Sasha is a Natalie Portman-in-the-making. I mean, she’s a fine dancer for a 3-year-old, but she’s more into the idea of being a ballerina than actually learning her positions and pliés.

No, I like ballet class because for roughly 45 minutes, I get to hang out with the other dads who’ve brought their daughters. There’s the guy who lives across the street from me, the guy who works in a Chelsea art gallery, the graphic designer who once, long ago, came to check out my office. We talk about, well, whatever: travel, kids, art—I can’t even really remember much.

All of this is, for me, a novelty. There’s this image I’ve always had of unacquainted guys just hanging around, talking easily, and it’s an image in which I never pictured myself. I’m just not the type—too slight, too nerdy, and utterly unable to discuss that most guy-like of topics: sports. When I imagined such situations, I felt like a little kid myself.

But at ballet, it kind of works. There’s something nice about seeing everyone each week, drinking my takeout coffee and talking about iPhone apps or motorcycle trips or pre-K applications. There’s moms around, too, and we talk to them—this ain’t junior high—but there’s always some gender-based grouping off, as if the other guys, like me, relished this chance for some low-stakes, low-key male bonding. And it’s all over in 45 minutes.

In this election season, I like to imagine that we somehow form a real political bloc to which candidates should start pandering, for surely there are other ballet dads in other cities and towns and states. But then I realize: This is Cobble Hill, and we’re all just wussy liberals who are going to vote for Obama anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, Karen Le Billon wrote in the Times Magazine about her first encounter with these well-bred enfants at a dinner party:

Other children were already gathered at a respectful distance. Their eyes were on the crackers, but no one dared touch them. Later, a French friend hinted at how this self-control is achieved. Starting at age 3, all the children at her maternelle (preschool) had to sit still with their hands on their knees while the lunchtime dessert was served. Only when the maîtresse gave permission could they begin to eat; anyone who gave into temptation had her dessert promptly removed.

But my girls hadn’t had the benefit of maternelle training. Before we could stop her, my toddler, Claire, grabbed a cracker from the table, stuffing it into her mouth. I chided her: “That’s the adults’ table! Don’t be rude!” “Mais non!” replied our host, Virginie, smiling. “That’s the children’s table!” I looked more closely and saw that the wineglasses were miniature versions of adult ones, as was the cutlery. I couldn’t have imagined that such a beautiful table was intended for children.

Then, the other day, Jennifer Anne Conlin (whom I know a little bit) wrote in the Sunday Review about how her life had become increasingly child-focused since her family moved back to the States from Europe:

Before, they always enjoyed a healthy extracurricular life of sports and school clubs, but never one that overtly conflicted with my career or social life — on the contrary, in Brussels I did some of my best networking at the local playground cafe, which served chilled bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and Stella Artois to half-watching parents. (Why push a swing when you could sip a drink?). … I now look back appreciatively at my daughter’s early morning field-hockey schedule in London. The team practiced three mornings a week from 8 to 8:30 a.m., with the odd game taking place from 4 to 5 p.m. every other week, weather permitting (it usually rained).

Now our entire adult life revolves around the children’s activities. The last two weekends alone, my daughter was in three performances of the school musical, had softball practice, a state solo ensemble competition (that ended at 12:30 p.m., a 40-minute drive from the musical, which started at 2 p.m.) and a forensics tournament. My son had the musical (he manned the spotlight), a baseball practice and a Science Olympiad contest (with a 6:30 a.m. bus departure).

Now, the Motherlode blog tried to rescue American parenting approaches from the gutter by trying to say our child-obsession is a good thing, but I’d like to go a different way. No, I’m not going to launch into a discussion of the economics of European vs American parenting, and how having widely available, free (or simply cheap?) state preschools is a huge advantage in the uniform socialization of young children.

Actually, all I want to say is this: as great as their native cuisine is, the French are terrible eaters. Yes, they are enthusiastic aesthetes when it comes to three-course meals, and they cherish the wines of their native villages with great affection, and they certainly know their breads, cheeses, and cured meats. And oh, the table manners!

But put them outside a French context, and they’re often at a loss, especially if the cuisine involves any kind of spice. Have you ever been to an Asian restaurant in Paris? They’re pathetic in terms of flavor, and the chaotic fun of the “bring it out when it’s ready” approach is often sacrificed to a stately French procession of dishes. They suck, and that’s because French people can’t handle anything but French food. And don’t get me started on fusion food. Whenever a cuisine gets Frenchified, it loses the oomph that makes it special.

Okay, that’s maybe an overly broad generalization. There are certainly French people who don’t fear foreign flavors, who understand that the French style of dinner (actually imported from Russia, I believe) is not the ne plus ultra of dining, who joyously eat with chopsticks or their fingers, cramming fat-dripping burgers in their baguette-accustomed mouths. But they are the minority.

So, next time you hear someone crowing about how well-behaved little French diners are, tell them to go fuck themselves. (But be polite—use vous.) And next time your kid demands nothing but hot dogs or white rice, give it to them, guilt-free. Kids can be as dismally timid as grown-up French people, and anyway, they’re just kids. I didn’t eat live, squirming octopus tentacles till my mid-thirties, you know.

Not Matt's work.

Most parents get very little proper training in the art of raising children. But you know what? We learn a lot of it along the way. Diapers are changed at first tentatively, then smoothly, so that eventually you can do it at 2 a.m., in the dark, naked, without your glasses—indeed, without remembering that you even got out of bed to do it.

Psychological techniques evolve, too: the bargaining, the manipulation, the sneaky tradeoffs. (“Okay, I’ll get you an ice cream cone, but you have to promise to be good for the rest of your life, okay?”) After a year or two of parenting, you even get to the point where you can visualize the other things you’re going to have to learn along the way. It all seems like it’s beginning to make sense.

Then comes something unexpected. In my case, it’s the ponytail. Now, for most of my life, I’ve had relatively little hair. I think in maybe 8th or 9th grade, I tried to grow my hair out long in hopes of replicating the Tony Hawk over-the-eye SoCal ‘do. It didn’t work, and so I’ve spent decades closely cropped, sometimes almost to the point of skinheadedness.

Which is to say: Until recently, I had never put a person’s hair in ponytails. My little sister never asked me to, nor did any of the cute girls in high school. And my wife, Jean, has always been able to take care of that task herself.

But now Sasha is into ponytails, and in a big way. She wears them almost every day, sometimes one in back, sometimes one on each side, and it’s a pretty smart idea—if not, her hair falls messily into her face. Yuck. Often, Jean is the one wrapping her hair up in colorful, fake-gem-accented bands. But almost as often, it’s me. And I invariably fuck it up.

I mean, I understand the basic principle: push through, twist, repeat. But somewhere along the way, it gets messed up, usually toward the end when the loops get tight and my fingers fat and clumsy. No, that’s not right: It gets messed up from the very beginning, because I don’t actually know how to arrange and separate and pull up the hair into a proper proto-ponytail shape before threading it through the elastic. And so, even if I do manage to produce some semblance of a ponytail, a closer look will usually reveal that it’s horrifically flawed, the work of a half-blind mental patient with hooks for hands.

Of course, I know that with practice I’ll improve. But what really gets me about this is how it took me by surprise—I never expected to have to do ponytails!—and has me worried about the future. What other skills will I suddenly be required to master?