grin and bare it
A blog by Matthew Dicks
Temper your parental and marital advice based upon the bell curve
My friend, Tom, watched this TED Talk and thought of me. The talk centers on what the Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman call “the four taboos of parenting.” One deals with the propensity of women…
Read MoreImperfect beauty
The photo is unfocused, grainy, poorly framed, and poorly lit, but I think that might make it better than if it had been done well. I love this photograph of my daughter. I see utter…
Read MoreTalk to your kids
There is a lot of fascinating information in this ten-minute TED Talk related to speech development and the way in which babies acquire language, but the piece that I thought was most compelling (and glossed…
Read MoreI was naked onstage
I am quite susceptible to hypnosis. This trait may run in the family. My mother, a smoker for more than twenty-five years, quit cold turkey after one hypnosis session. I discovered my susceptibility to hypnosis…
Read MoreNothing like an ominous hammer cock
I watch a lot of partial movies on AMC while I am working out. Depending on the elliptical machine, I often have closed captioning automatically turned on for the film. It turns out that the…
Read MoreDating in Stop & Shop
When I was in high school, I would take girls to the local Stop & Shop on a first date. When I told this to my wife, she asked what I would do on these…
Read MoreUS Weekly a mystery to me
This was the magazine cover that I was staring at yesterday while waiting in line at the supermarket. Here’s the good news: I did not recognize the woman on the front cover who was “obsessed…
Read MoreI can’t die at my desk unnoticed. Oh well.
Teaching isn’t the easiest or the best paying job, but I have always wanted to teach and am happy that I chose this profession. In addition to the daily joys that it brings, I have…
Read MoreWhen your country is one thousand years old, things can get quite complicated
With the sale of my new book to a British publisher, I felt it was time to finally understand one of the great mysteries of life: United Kingdom versus Great Britain versus England: What’s the…
Read MoreTechno-toddler
My two-year old daughter, who cannot pronounce the letter L in the word please and is not potty trained, picked up my wife’s iPhone and brought it over to the shower door. She held it…
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