Of Course It Goes Without Saying That Caring For One's Child Is One Of The Most Rewarding Things You Can Do

So absent a week's worth of anomalies whereby Mr. Baby just happens not to be able to fall asleep for his "first nap," I believe that at just under 16 months, we have seen him transition to one nap a day.

I should back up, at least for the Childfree among us. So there's this pattern that children fall into where they take two naps a day. The pattern we settled into, which worked well for us, was the 2-3-4 routine, which, if you read about it, mostly makes sense, at least until you get to the "4." In short, two hours after a child wakes up, it's time for his or her first nap. Then three hours after he or she wakes up from a nap is the second nap. Four hours later he or she goes to bed.

I should add that Jen found this bit of information. I didn't really look up stuff at the beginning, so she took the lead there. Which is to say, I heard about this method second-hand, so I may be misunderstanding it, but four hours before bed time makes a sleep schedule a little like a M.C. Escher timewarp. For example: Baby goes to bed at 9 p.m.; he wakes up at 9 a.m. (because he's a fucking stoner and goes to bed late and sleeps late); he "goes down" for a nap at 11 a.m.; he wakes at 12 noon; he "goes down" again three hours later at 3 p.m.; he wakes at 4 p.m.; four hours later is 8 p.m.; then he wakes at . . . 8 a.m.? Hey, wait a second . . .

So I think what they mean is that baby is meant to wake up at least four hours before bedtime, but who knows.

Anyway, however you do two naps, two naps happens until it doesn't, and then a child transitions to one nap (and eventually no naps, unless you work for a tech company, in which case you apparently need to nap again). The thing is, it's hard to figure out when exactly they don't nap.

All this week, Mr. Baby has been gleefully chattering away for the entirety of a morning nap, never quite sleeping. Today I began to wonder if he's down to one nap.

And that sucks.

It doesn't suck because it's uncool for a child to develop and grow. It sucks because now I just lost an hour in the morning to answer emails and do chores and fold laundry and do all the stuff one is unable to do when there's a child up in your grill.

I know what you're thinking. And I'm not going to dignify it with a response, except which to say, look, you try to do part-time work, cook, "clean" (such as it is), and pay attention to a child — while at the same time paying attention to the lead topics on "Around The Horn." It's not easy. That extra morning hour helps.

If I didn't have martyrdom then I'd have nothing at all.

Just kidding.

Seriously though, when I walked out of the house to take Mr. Baby on a walk after he cried through his first "nap," I had this heavy feeling that our two-nap lifestyle had come to an end. I'm sure I've mentioned that life is a series of compromises and adjustments. Actually, I've never mentioned that, because that's not something you're ever supposed to say. What I meant was, if you're the type of person who thrives in rhythms and routines, it's a challenge to keep up with a toddler.

We went to the park. He fumbled around on his knees, because he's still not walking but you're not supposed to say shit about your kid, so he's just doing stuff at his own pace. Most of all, he did not appear to be tired or cranky in the slightest. We returned home and ate lunch. He slept after lunch. While he slept I Googled "babies two naps one" or "children transitioning to one nap" or probably more likely "seriously, when is it that this kid will go down to one nap and my time will really no longer be my own."

The weird thing is that, for some reason, there is no good answer. You might think, "Of course! You can't just Google your way through parenting . . ." But actually, you can. People talk about every think in the world online. But for some reason you can get 694,000 results about "toilet slaves" but you can't learn a goddamn thing about when your kid sleeps. At a loss, I thought to Ask Dr. Sears. He said to breastfeed, or something like that. It's nuts.

What I did find was a bunch of moms — and let's face it, it's always moms — writing about their child's daytime schedule. Look, most of this stuff is boring — not even arcane, which bestows an elite quality, but just downright lame. At some point I looked up and realized I spent twenty minutes — twenty precious minutes — trying to figure out some other random kid's sleep schedule.

The funny thing is that everyone I've talked to is torn up about shifting to one nap. Sure, it makes it easier to "do stuff" — you have a bigger block of time to go to the zoo, have your child study a foreign language, make him or her practice piano — but your time is squeezed out even more, until all you can do is contribute immensely hilarious but ultimately worthless Tweets. Stuff like "Can't wait to get home to curl up with a glass of Merlot in one hand and BuzzFeed's '47 Worst Toronto Raptors Low-Lights' in the other". Or, "Best worst final lines of novels that weren't: 'And for the rest of his life, the Turk breathed'". Or, "Respectfully I say to thee, you smell like a hobo, but no one makes me feel like you do". Or, "When toddlers discover phones, the poor sap at 222-222-2222 ext. 222222222 gets barraged with calls". Or perhaps, "45 min into Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close; Al Qaeda's new goal should be to create 100000 Jonathan Safran Foers to bring US to its knees".

You get the idea: There's only so much uninterrupted time you have during the day; this is why Twitter was created; you have no choice as you watch your life slowly squeezed into 140 characters or fewer.

It's heartening and funny and real that the few people I've talked to about this feel the same way: They all want that nap back. Does that make us all bad parents? Of course. We're all terrible parents for wanting more time to do our work, complete our chores, weed the lawn, drink a beer or surf the internet without acceding to demands to look at ducks on Google Image Search.

I was fully intending on coming up with a snappy concluding paragraph but a) I forgot what I wanted to say and b) I'm too tired anyway.

Everybody's Gonna Move Their Feet, Everybody's Gonna Leave Their Seat

Of all the characters in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy, Detroit City Councilmember Monica Conyers is one of the best. LeDuff, who grew up in Detroit and returned to be a reporter for the Detroit News, features her throughout the book, as a sort of catch-all symbol of gross political negligence and tin-ear stupidity.

Conyers made a national name for herself after a verbal altercation with the city council president during a council meeting in which she called him "Shrek." I'm assuming it was based on his looks and not his character, because the character of Shrek actually seems like a pretty decent guy.

LeDuff then set up a meeting with Councilmember Monica Conyers and some eighth graders in a sort of public post-mortem about her calling the president of the Detroit city council "Shrek." The subtext is clear: When adults act like children, let's let children take the adults to task. It's funny, a stunt, and also something more at home on the Daily Show, which is kind of LeDuff's style, just minus the satire. Also, how does a newspaper get away with this? The video is here. You can see pertinent part of the video here. I can't embed it because they disabled the embedding feature. I'm not totally sure why.

One of the students does indeed take Conyers to task and Conyers, because she is apparently incapable of good political sense, proceeds to take the child to task. Suffice it to say, Conyers comes off like a huge moron. You can read about the event here, except that it's a Wall Street Journal link, so if you click it from here, you'll hit a paywall. If you Google the title, however, you should be able to access the story, which is titled "Detroit Politician Gets Lesson In Civility From a 13-Year-Old." I'm not totally sure I understand why it's somehow better for the Wall Street Journal to have people access stories behind a paywall via a search engine versus through, say, someone's email, but that's what they do.

Newspapers do a lot of stuff that is understandable only to people who work in newspapers. And with that, I just sort of effortlessly rolled out with the kind of knowing, faux-folksy aphorism that Charlie LeDuff likes to indulge in. I mean, I guess I understand the value of a soft paywall — maybe old people won't bother with Googling stuff and will just pay the subscription — but that kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other balance just gets in the way of a good story.

Which is kind of what I circle back to when I think about this particular incident: LeDuff agrees to meet Conyers at a cocktail lounge off of Eight Mile Road (you might remember "Eight Mile" from Eminem) because Conyers apparently can't prevent herself from repeating the negative. On the way he decides to stop off and visit the 13-year-old and her family. It's a great detail in a story, but it's too perfect. And it's too perfect in part because your gut tells you that he wanted to stop off on the way mostly because it's a detail that would make a good story. I can similarly see Aaron Sorkin "swinging by" the Lincoln Monument or, I don't know, Buzz Bissinger "happening upon" a high school football game: The detail flows seamlessly from head to steering wheel to eye to head to word processing program. And that's when writers become slightly sociopathic.

(As an aside, in the genre of non-fiction about dead or dying cities, Bissinger wrote his own about Philadelphia in the early 1990s, focusing on the achievements of Mayor Ed Rendell. This perspective makes Bissinger's A Prayer For the City seem much more hopeful. But there doesn't seem to be an Ed Rendell on the horizon for Detroit, and as Jen points out, Philadelphia always had advantages Detroit lacks: It's connected on the I-95 corridor with New York and DC, it has many universities, etc. Maybe it's the era — post-Iraq, post-whatever, people just think the world sucks shit — but Detroit — the book, not necessarily the city — is just a downer through and through.)

It's a small detail but it's something that for whatever reason I glommed onto. There's something about people who navigate their way through the world knowing that whatever they're doing would make for a good story. This of course happens all the time — if you're friendly with people who like to write, you'll hear them say it. And not just "this is good fodder" (look up the dictionary definition of "fodder" — it's illuminating), but making life decisions based on the output of said fodder (which, according to the definition would be the excrement of domesticated animals). I'm sure The Devil Wears Prada isn't the most egregious example of this but it feels like a watershed one that begat hundreds, if not thousands, of stupid fucking notions about what could become a book.

Which is all well and good (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a meaningless transition meant to soften the barb at the end of the last paragraph), but if you take a second to consider what these people are like in real life, they come off like zombies. If John Howard Griffin came into my store or if Gregory Peck sauntered into my country club, I'd be like, "fuck you." Because that stuff begat the asinine Quiñonesism we are left with today.

And, sure, are we all guilty of in some way wanting to convert personal reminisces to literary gold? If you write on the internet, of course. It's just people need to go back to being embarrassed and fucked up about it. Less Foer and more semen-slurping macaque.

So anyway, I digress (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a sorry-ass excuse for going wildly off topic).

I say all this in part because Detroit is good. The book, I mean, not the city. After reading the book, the conclusion you're left with is that Detroit (the city) should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past. Or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz. LeDuff was on Bill Maher just after the book came out and Maher asked him if Detroit could come back. He said yes. But after reading the book, I'm not sure why.

Indeed (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out the worst fucking conjunctive adverb in the history of conjunctive adverbs), some books are like that: Writers come up with a really provocative premise and then when they're interviewed about it, immediately back down. What I wanted Maher to follow up with — and he couldn't because part of the idiocy of interviewing anyone about a specific book is that the interview is (often by design) mostly unaware about what the book actually says — was, "Really? Because what other conclusion are you left with besides the city should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz?"

Look, Detroit is good because LeDuff is a gifted storyteller. But we use a phrase around here a lot with Jen, and that's "Irish It Up," as in, Meatball's default is to take a mostly correct story and make it much more entertaining. It's not just the Irish: Different ethnic groups do this, of course. On NPR they even have a term for it, which is "David Sedaris." The only thing about these stories is that in the back of your mind there's that nagging doubt that the lady on the subway actually yelled "Tequila! Cointreau!" to her unruly children (what, no "Triple Sec"? Let's make it happen!) (actually, I don't doubt this story — it's just all the other times she's Irished It Up that makes me second-guess it, even if just slightly).

And I'm not specifically second-guessing LeDuff, either. It's just that the consistent tone of Detroit is that of a guy sitting next to you at a bar; it's not that I don't believe you that the term "bullpen" comes from single women in Durham flirting with relief pitchers by throwing them Bull Durham Tobacco, it's just that I want to try to remember to Wikipedia it later. In a book it can be a little frustrating.

Sometimes the tone resembles a treatment for the show Hardcore Pawn. Like on page 78, after his meeting with Conyers: "Where the hell was I? . . . The sign outside said 'Detroit City Limits.'" I don't think I'm being a pretentious dickhead to note that it's not exceptional writing. What it is is a great ending to a story someone is telling you — because if LeDuff is sitting across from you, he delivers that line with whatever appropriate inflection, self-deprecation and whatever other tool a storyteller uses to deliver good line. When a reader reads that line, they might hear something different — Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, Leslie Nielsen, Kevin Bacon in JFK, The Fresh Prince, Garrison Keillor, their boring old Uncle Pete, whatever. I mean, I like that LeDuff writes like he talks. Sometimes it doesn't always translate though.

Ultimately (and with that I just effortlessly rolled out with another really lazy conjunctive adverb), I am in a position now where I must sum up my feelings about having read this book in the form of a conclusion, preferably a smartly written concise ending to what has stretched out for over a thousand words. Something along the lines of, Ultimately, Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy proves not only can you come home again but you can parley the sad fate of your hometown into a tidy 286-page memoir replete with gritty first-hand accounts of borderline journalistic impropriety, scrotum-caressing politicians, and subprime chicanery, not to mention flirtations with and near-apologies for spousal abuse amidst a backdrop of urban disaster porn where, amazingly, no one has yet quit smoking.

When Lladro Attacks

Thank god for the British obsession with class and socioeconomic status, because it's the one thing that keeps John Fowles' The Collector from being scarier than you really want it to be.

I mean — and it could just be me — but it can be a teensy-weensy bit difficult to gear yourself up to read a story about a butterfly-collecting pervo-weirdo named Frederick who kidnaps a young art student, Miranda, and imprisons her in his basement. Truth be told, I tend to prefer stories where precocious young girls get raped by men dressed as birds. But the premise of The Collector is a little creepy.

Thankfully, there's a handy indictment of middle class British values ca. the early 1960s that makes it easier to see this bitch get chloroformed. And by "bitch getting chloroformed" I mean "chloroformed bitch" in the sense that the character of Miranda functions as an allegorical stand-in for middle class artistic aspiration and generalized professional-managerial banality. (See, I, unlike some people, can differentiate between an actual human and a mere allegorical one; when allegories are outlawed, only outlaws will use allegories.) That's at least part of what made the story easier to stomach — over and over Fowles' characters dance around the topic of class and who has it and who can't buy it, even after winning the lottery, as Frederick the Collector does.

There's some Big Idea about art in Collector that also makes it easy to stomach the creepiness — Frederick collects butterflies and likes photography, pursuits Miranda believes suck the life out of their subjects (with entomology, literally sucking the life out of the subject) — unlike painting or whatever she does. So there's some kind of thing going on there with that. What all this stuff — the class stuff and the art stuff — really succeeds at is undercutting the aspects of the book that the back cover trumpets: Its utility as a "psychological thriller," a "horror story" or a "haunting" book.

That said, however, Fowles is really good at keeping a reader a little bit off balance and queasy. In my experience, kidnappings — especially ones involving crazy people — generally go badly. And until the story's end, you keep hoping that these generally sensible people can pull back from the brink and reintegrate themselves in polite society — which itself is kind of a ridiculous, funny premise — like you want these nice, upstanding, good British people to pull away from craven, hideous sin and return to a world of clotted cream and baps, or some other really cute sounding word for foodstuffs.

There's a moment that captures this idea perfectly — I can't find it quickly enough — where Miranda tries reasoning with her captor that everything could be cool, that everyone can pack up and go home, everything could return to normal and no one would be the wiser if he just let her go then. It's funny and very British sounding and yet when you're reading it, you really, really want Frederick to take her up on the offer and let her go. That part is done really well.

I am getting ready to spoil an ending, at least as far as the suspenseful part of this book is concerned, so be warned . . . anyway, another part I liked about The Collector is how snooty Miranda is written, and how at the end there's a snide little coda where Frederick discovers his next "guest," and she is just a shopgirl — which is to say, in my mind, that Frederick never appreciated Miranda's great talent and culture, perhaps because it was only there in Miranda's mind; we assume she's a real "la-di-la" lady (as Frederick sneered at one point) but we only think so because she tells us so in her journal entries. It's smart that way.

Spencer, who chose The Collector, says that he read it for ninth grade English class. I think I read Nectar in a Sieve in ninth grade English class. Which is to say, Who teaches this book in ninth grade? (Well, here's a plug for teaching it in high school).

Other than that, George Paston was the actual pen name of an actual writer but I have no idea what it all means.

Also — I suppose I should add that this next part deserves a spoiler alert — Jen was wondering if you could really die after a month of no light. I had no idea, but I definitely worried for Miranda while she was stuck in the basement. I Googled it and it seemed like a remote possibility. It's not good, that's for sure, allegory or no.