I’m taking a break.

It’s time for me to scroll off your screen and into the sunset to wherever fate takes me next.

Looking back on the 200 weeks since I started, it’s amazing how much my life has changed.

For starters, I’ve conceived and fathered two kids, quit my job to be a stay-at-home dad, survived the first several waves of a global pandemic, bought a “new” house while selling my old house, and got a remote control from my cable company that lets me talk to it (even though it hears me wrong half the time).

200 weeks is a long time; 3.84 years.

It’s significantly longer than other transformative experiences in my life.

I’ve only been a dad for 134 weeks, though it feels like SO MUCH longer.

It took me 194 weeks to graduate from college but only 140 to graduate from law school.

I also lived in Austin, Texas for 145 weeks, which is just the right amount of time to still get out with your soul (and liver) intact.

I performed stand up comedy throughout that time in Austin. It was an amazing creative outlet but also an incredible time suck.

In 2011, I spent my 31st birthday on 6th Street outside The Velveeta Room explaining to family and friends who called me why spending the evening alone waiting to go up around midnight at an open mic was how I wanted to celebrate.

Exactly one year later I was the paid month-long host of that same open mic and it felt like a major accomplishment, though it was not.

I’ve leaned on those experiences heavily while writing this column to justify the countless hours I poured into the work.

There is an intangible but deeply satisfying meaning I get from bringing happiness into other people’s lives, even if just for a fleeting moment.

Back then I thought nothing about waiting for two or three hours to perform five minutes of material for a dozen disinterested people.

Other times, I’d host or open for paying audiences on actual shows. And on a few rare occasions I performed on big stages in front of big audiences primed to cheer.

All of those crowds were dwarfed by the number of people I could reach here with just a little cross-promotion to subject-matter-friendly places on the Internet.

My most popular column, I Can’t Stop Comparing My Newborn Baby to a Cat, still gets appreciative comments in parenting forums every time it comes up, though I haven’t had much time for cross-promotion lately.

Since publishing my first column, I’ve been honored to be republished on places like the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop, Scary Mommy, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists blog, every Hearst newspaper in Connecticut, and many other subject-specific blogs, Facebook groups, and Reddit threads.

I wrote a very silly column about being uncomfortable using a teenage boy’s shower and a Pulitzer Prize winner had to hand me an award for it. That will always be a source of immense pride for me.

It also brings me great pleasure that this website is a leading Google search return for some pretty awesome (though offbeat) queries like “Buddy the Beefalo,” “best harmonica players,” and “toddler Olympics.”

And I absolutely love that the most consistent Google click-throughs this site gets is for the search, “beer snobs are the worst.”

But it hasn’t only been silly. Some of my more sentimental pieces gained traction too.

Readers of every Hearst newspaper in Connecticut may have opened their Thanksgiving newspapers last year seeking Black Friday coupons, but they also found my column, When the Holidays Don’t Feel Right, as one of three featured in the opinion section that day.

It was extremely validating to finally answer the age-old question: what do Connecticut’s Governor, a Catholic Bishop, and Chris Gaffney all have in common.

Writing is how I process things.

Whether it’s formulating hopes for the future, articulating my love for my family, processing grief, or pondering the meaning of life and whether my life has provided enough value – writing provides the clarity I need to make sense of it all.

Ruminating isn’t enough on its own.

My fickle thoughts flitter between emotions and get swept away in flash floods of cognition spinning after every intuition and perception until they wash ashore like Gilligan and bumble somewhat humorously about looking for the Professor and Mary Ann.

Writing anchors my thoughts providing the framework to flesh out my thoughts and pursue my own truths. Having found this safe harbor I cannot imagine ever again riding through a storm unmoored.

Coupling that with my lifelong need for public affirmation, I have no doubt that I’ll be back. Somehow, in some way, though it won’t be very soon.

In the meantime, please feel free to pursue the archives of 200 humor columns.

You can sort in the sidebar menu by topic or by date. The categories are: family, holiday, home & garden, musings, parenting, pop culture, and society.

Stay subscribed if you want to hear from me. I’ll send periodic updates when the time feels right.

Finally, thank you to everyone who’s spent some time with me over the past 200 weeks, especially those who emailed or commented with encouraging words and shared their views.

And, of course, the biggest thanks go to my wife and kids who’ve had to deal with my wandering away to jot things down or sneaking away to my office for long stretches of time.

With the number of unfinished projects sitting on my desktop, that probably won’t change, but it might be a little different.

I’ve gotten so much out of writing this column from sharpening my views and developing my “writing voice,” to validating my belief that there’s inherent value in every part of our shared experience.

I figure if I can write a 650-word Ode to Paper Towels and actually gain subscribers at least a few others feel the same way.

There is so much more that unites us than divides us and all of it is cause for celebration or at least a tiny chuckle before scrolling on to the next adventure.

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Incidental contact; my foot brushed against the couch.

Unexpected motion.

Something nearly imperceptible soaring through the pre-dawn darkness illuminated only by the blue glow of a cool-mist humidifier, then skittering across the hardwood floor.

Though my instinct was to investigate immediately, I held a swaddled newborn baby in my arms.

Laying him down with anything less than a full stomach risked piercing the morning silence with his cry and possibly waking both my wife and two-year-old daughter.

Wrestling with the issue, the lure of curiosity won.

My prize was horror.

Horror at uncovering the source: my toenail had flown across the room.

How?

I’ve had many toenails fly across the room before but this was the first to happen without the assistance of nail clippers and some purposeful intent.

Stunned, I hobbled gingerly back towards the couch to inspect my feet. I wasn’t in pain but it seems impractical to walk normally when you suspect that parts of your feet are falling off, so I hobbled.

Judging by the nail’s size, It could only be from a big toe, but could it really be mine?

Perhaps some mishap had gotten a long-ago-clipped nail embedded into the fabric of the couch or my sweatpants catapulting it back into my life when I sat cross-legged on the couch to feed my son.

I inspected my left big-toe toenail and felt a splintered edge. A piece of nail was missing.

A big piece. Torn from the center leaving a jagged crescent hook on the outside edge and exposing a patch of tender, vulnerable flesh below.

None of the other toenails were disturbed, at least not physically.

It seemed as if the biggest little piggy had been chosen to send a message to the others and was assaulted, alone, most likely while making his way to the market.

I’d been meaning to cut my toenails for some time but with a newborn son, two-year-old daughter, wife recovering from birth, new home repair issues, and sandal season still at least a month away, it’s importance had slipped a bit.

Of course, I’ve heard the expression that our bodies fall apart as we age but until now I imagined that to be hyperbole or a metaphor for sagging skin and aching knees.

Now I understood it to be an understatement of the actual catapulting of parts of my anatomy onto my recently refinished hardwood floor.

Perhaps the most glaring thing about having kids while older (40 with a newborn) is the contrast between their rapid development and my sluggish deterioration.

It’s bad enough that when my kids draw family pictures in school the crayon they’ll grab for me is grey but now they’ll draw me with a bandage on my toe as well. Hobbled old Dad with his jagged little toes.

Newborn photographers love taking pictures of parents cradling their baby’s feet. It’s meant to highlight just how small the precious baby is but to me it shows the glaring contrast between youth and age. Brittleness vs vitality.

My children need their fingernails clipped every 30 minutes or they start tearing the flesh from their own faces. They’re innocent but deadly like Edward Scissorhands twirling in the snow.

I, too, once had indestructible nails. I spent my early years prying open lids with reckless abandon.

In our science class’ mineral scratch test, I eviscerated the Gypsum. It never stood a chance.

In high school, a beautiful girl fawned over my nails, though said I needed to work on my cuticles. I said “I think you’re pretty cuticle,” and the next day her boyfriend gave me a nasty look while passing me in the hall.

Now, just twenty-five short years later, the mere act of sitting on a sofa splinters my mightiest toe’s nail and sends it’s shrapnel spinning across the room.

The same toe that may someday be tagged to make sure it’s my body in the casket my family mourns and not some other unfortunate soul.

I took my toenail for granted and it found it’s own way out. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience but future body parts may not be so generous in their insubordination.

There’s probably a lesson in there, but my priority list is full for now so I’ll kick that can a little further down the road (with the side of my foot). I never much cared for sandals anyways.

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How awesome would it be to wake up one morning with a vivid memory of being a meatball who’s chased around town by a wedge of Parmesan Cheese? (I assume most of my dreams are about meatballs).

I’d love to know what it feels like to be a meatball but, alas, such joys are only for the dream rememberers.

Jenny remembers her dreams.

Nothing brings my wife more joy than telling me every single detail of a dream I wasn’t in. She’ll even wake me up to do it and gets really mad when I absolutely DO NOT CARE.

My wife once woke me from a dead sleep insisting that she’d been shot, which is a horrible way to wake someone up.

As soon as I discerned she was talking about a dream and my heart rate dipped back down from quadruple digits, I rolled over and went back to sleep, which somehow made me the bad guy.

I guess it would be frustrating to have a story about being shot and nobody tell it to but I doubt it’s as frustrating as being woken up by someone who hasn’t been shot.

Though I admittedly DO NOT CARE about my wife’s dreams, I’d love to know what my children dream about.

I often ask my two-year-old daughter when she wakes up if she saw any pictures in her sleep but she usually either responds, “open curtains,” or “poopy diaper.” She’s very good at living in the moment.

She once responded by singing Frosty the Snowman, which may actually be what she dreams about. Snowmen are something of an obsession for her. We met Mr. Peanut this weekend and she insisted he was a snowman because he wears a top hat.

Dreams are Mad Libs for the subliminal recesses of your soul and if my daughter’s soul had to name five nouns, “snowman” would definitely be one of them.

I’ve gotten so bad at remembering my dreams that I can’t even remember the last time I remembered a dream. In fact, lately I’ve found myself struggling to even remember things that actually happened during the night.

Our newborn sleeps in our room just one wall away from our toddler so tip-toe theatrics take place multiple times per night. It isn’t at all unusual for me to be jarred awake by my newborn crying only to be told to, “go back to sleep, it’s only a clogged nipple.”

I’ve been so tired lately I no longer clarify that she’s talking about a bottle’s rubber nipple.

By the time my toddler goes to bed and the baby is finally down I’m exhausted but I stay up a little bit later just to feel like myself.

Turns out I like feeling like myself, so I stay up even later still reading, writing, or watching TV. It’s a vicious cycle.

Being able to remember my dreams would probably help me break the cycle.

I’ve never been very good at going to sleep (though I’m exceptional at staying asleep) so vivid dreams would be the perfect attraction to draw me in a little earlier.

Maybe I’m just too prudent to pay careful enough attention to my dreams.

I’m not normally one to second-guess God but having angels speak to people in their dreams seems like a very unreliable communication method. I wouldn’t trust any messenger who only existed in my dreams.

That’s the modern equivalent of reaching out via an unsolicited text message. You have a $50 Amazon gift card waiting for you AND you shall bear the Lord’s son then name him Jesus Christ.

I like to think if God called on me to do something I’d respond but if he did it in a dream I’d more likely just say “no more spicy food before bed.”

Which also would’ve been the lesson from my many, many meatball dreams – if I only could remember.

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This is expected when it comes to thoughts like, “this is the slowest traffic light in the world,” or “please let my daughter sleep in today,” but it also happens as I write my weekly columns.

Sometimes it’s a line of thought that stays with me plodding slowly after me like a zombie trying to feed off what little brains I have left.

Other times, they’re premises that marinate within my subconscious only popping up when the conditions are right, like werewolves drawn toward the harvest moon.

They’re easy to identify when scrolling through my “scrap content” file looking at the one-liners and paragraphs I’ve lovingly trimmed from past columns for space or for narrative consistency.

Occasionally, I draw upon this resource to help shape a draft in progress. And other times I bundle a few favorite bits and repurpose them as a clip-show column to keep the content coming.

That’s what I’m doing this week with a few brief excerpts for another clip-show column swept from the cutting room floor.

On Bonding with Other Parents

There are several people in my life who I speak to on a normal basis and know everything about except for their last name. It’s a little awkward to ask for a proper introduction after talking at length about their most intimate concerns and vulnerabilities.

“Haha, of course it doesn’t mean you’re a failure as a parent just because he won’t stop crying when he sees you. Anyways, what’s your name again?” It doesn’t really flow.

On My Daughter’s (former) Nursery

Don’t worry, my daughter doesn’t sleep in a closet; it’s just a room with closet-like tendencies.

On Sibling Rivalry

Here are just a few things my brothers and I have competed over:

• What color game pieces we each get in a game of Sorry.
• How to determine who gets to first choose what color game piece they’ll have in a game of Sorry.
• How to determine the way to determine who gets to first choose what color game piece they’ll have in a game of Sorry.
• And, how to determine whether that determination method should be conducted once, until someone wins two-out-of-three times, or until someone wins three-out-of-five times.

On Living with a Girl

The most life-changing aspect of living with my wife is a constant sense of consideration for someone else’s needs. For example, I’m far more likely to finish doing the dishes late at night out of consideration for how much nicer her day will start if she walks into a clean kitchen.

If it were just me, I’d wait until everything, including the Christmas-themed serving platters were still dirty. I know this because I spent a whole year living with five other guys in college and once all the dishes were dirty we just switched to paper plates.

It’s not that we didn’t know how to clean dishes, it’s just that to get to the sink you had to pass the fridge and the fridge was full of beer so who feels like doing dishes when you’ve got a fridge full of beer? It all made sense at the time.

On Paper Towels

Paper towels are easily my favorite perforated product.

Research shows that paper towels are actually cleaner than cloth towels and air dryers, according to Bathroom Attendant’s Magazine: The Go-To News Source for When You Have to Go.

On Santa

Has anyone ever proven that Santa’s not a vampire? And what’s with all the nose twitching? He’s showing a suspicious amount of energy for someone who hasn’t worked in a year.

On Baby’s First Christmas

A surprising amount of stress comes when baby’s first Christmas falls on the tail end of the baby’s first year. We’ve had over ten months of anticipation for this moment, which instills a pressing need to get everything just right (even though, of course, we don’t because we’re busy parenting a BABY).

On Christmas in New England

On a snow-filled Christmas Eve I’d put New England churches up against the finest cathedrals anywhere in the world. I’ve never been to the Sistine Chapel but I doubt the Pope has ever sang Silent Night while watching a fresh coat of snow slowly fill one of Connecticut’s picturesque town greens.

On New Year’s Eve

New Years Eve has never been that big of a holiday for me. My mother always excused her anti-social New Years streak by chiding that there were too many drunk drivers on the road. This isn’t as big a concern since the Mad Men-style culture has passed. It’s 2020 now, our drivers aren’t all drunk; lots of them are just high on opioids.

There’s no better way to ring in the new year than an atmosphere of self-imposed fear.

On the Arts

By investing in HBO instead of PBS, we’ve lifted the fortunes of Hollywood executives instead of arts communities in every city in our country.

We have The Wire showing how hopeless inner city life has become without even a glimmer of hope for how to work our way out.

If Family Ties were made today the father wouldn’t run a local television station, he’d be just another one of Bill Maher’s producers waiting outside a marijuana dispensary so Maher can spend his time focusing on the show.

On Barbershop Chair Conversations

New barbers always want some guidance but they’re the experts. My default instruction is, “short but not too short,” which is as helpful as turning on GPS to find out if you should turn left or right only to be told to, “turn south.”

Thanks Siri, just give me a second to take out my trusty compass.

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It’s comforting to look at a place you used to live and see how it all plays out.

I can’t go to Ithaca, New York without stopping at my freshman dorm Lyon Hall or drive through the commons without checking if the dilapidated house I lived in during senior year has finally collapsed on top of itself.

Just last week, my wife had occasion to pass the first house we lived in together and we both found it way more interesting than we should have.

She noticed that the creepy old neighbor had moved out and I wondered if he died or found somewhere a little warmer to spend his final years. I doubt I’ll ever know but I hope he’s well.

I’m not really looking for anything specific when I pass these houses, it’s just fun to notice things.

It’s the same way I prefer being the passenger in a car for the brief glimpses into all the other cars we pass. It sucks so much when you pass a car with something interesting going on and still have to keep your eye on the road because you’re driving.

I once passed a guy playing a forward-facing flute (with both hands) while driving down the Merritt Parkway, which if you’re not from Connecticut is basically a two-lane version of Toad’s Turnpike from Mario Kart.

I assume he was charming a snake but I have no idea because I had to immediately turn my attention back to the stupid, boring road in front of me.

This is why social media is so addicting. You can peek into all the lives you’ve passed before from the comfort and safety of your own home.

Sure, it’s just a glimpse at 70-miles-per-hour, but it’s fun to notice things.

For example, I still enjoy following my old neighborhood’s Facebook group.

I fully intend to leave the page at some point but every time I try to, I can’t. It would be like shutting off a movie before it ends – I need to see the story play out.

Does the former business park get converted into the trucking warehouse that the neighborhood opposes?

Will the car-handle-jiggling miscreants ever be brought to justice?

Will the lady at 12 Marie Lane ever find her missing Amazon package?

Something inside of me desperately wants to know the answers to these questions even though I absolutely do not care. If they all disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t be any worse for the wear yet I hold onto them like a midwestern stepmom dusting her Beanie Baby shelf.

I haven’t always been this way.

One of the things I liked most about leaving for college was leaving high school behind so why am I still spending so much time liking, commenting on, and caring about what people I went to high school with have posted on Facebook?

It might be a fear of missing out but it’s more likely a fear of being forgotten.

I used to scan Facebook’s birthday notifications the way senior citizens scan the obituaries every day (until Facebook moved them to an undisclosed location) and half the time I’d have to click through just to remember how I knew my “friend,” especially in my mid-30’s when girls kept getting married and changing their last names.

Ours is a disposable society but the guy who taught me how to build a beer funnel in 2002 somehow still keeps popping into my life via social media. And why am I always happy to see him when he does!?

My feed is mostly composed of zombie friendships stuck laughing in perpetuity about some inside joke from the summer of 2002. Nobody cares about 2002. It was a dead weight year sandwiched between 9/11 and invading Iraq.

There is no earthly reason I should ever know what happened to that guy. Male nurse? Okay, I guess. Wouldn’t have guessed that but good for him. He seems happy and really into backyard barbecues, which is cute.

When I was a little kid exclusion was the best part of communication. I wanted walkie talkies with their own radio frequency or invisible ink pens you needed a special highlighter to decode.

How’d I go from trying to master pig latin so nobody else could understand me and my friends to chasing likes on Facebook from the very people I used to want to exclude?

It isn’t about the likes, it’s about being remembered. How weird would it be to reach out to someone you haven’t seen for decades just to say, “I remember you”? Yet that’s all a Facebook like really amounts to anymore.

It feels nice.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pick up my phone without scrolling past the stories of the people I used to know. It’s comforting to look at people you used to know and see how it all plays out.

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But when used this way, “2020” is also a shorthand for the hope that things will get better soon (though I fully expect to see 2021 “hold my beer” memes in the very near future).

The events of this year will undoubtedly shape my kids’ development for years. My 23-months-old daughter hit huge milestones with very limited social interactions and my son was conceived in May, carried through the bulk of the year, and is due to be born soon in a hospital that’ll likely be under siege from a post-holiday coronavirus surge.

His class will likely be labeled and analyzed as “quarantine babies” for their entire lives.

As the year draws to a close I’m thinking a lot about what I’ll tell my kids when they ask about 2020 – not wanting their earliest moments to be a punchline or some long sustained tragedy they were lucky to escape.

With the full understanding that history can’t be written from the present and that future events may overshadow the way I see it now (i.e. it turned out to be “democracy’s dying gasp,” or the virus was just an alien species’ tactic for softening us up prior to invasion), I’m starting to frame my own understanding of a year that saw our country handle a global pandemic, slog through a disgustingly bitter election, have it’s economy turned upside down, and have systemic racism dragged into the open for everyone to see.

I view 2020 as a national stress test that revealed troubling, though not yet fatal, results. 2020 has made our country acutely aware of its weaknesses and vulnerabilities; only we can decide whether to address them or to sidle back up to the all-you-can-eat buffet.

Unfortunately, knowing the right thing to do isn’t the same as doing the right thing.

I learned this watching Mom.

Mom was a biologist who trusted science as much as anyone I’ve ever known yet she smoked her way through pancreatic cancer and back again to a tragically early grave.

Mom wasn’t stupid or self-centered; she was human – just like all of us.

When I hear 2020’s heart-wrenching stories of people who didn’t take covid seriously dying alone on ventilators with last words like “I thought it was a hoax,” I can’t help but think of Mom and how a month from now (God-willing) she will have twice the number of grandchildren that she never met as the two she briefly knew and loved so well.

Regrets don’t die with death.

If you’re expecting heartache to disappear with the year 2020, you’re sorely mistaken. Heartache is essential to the human condition.

When my kids ask what it was like to live in 2020, I won’t gloss over the heartaches like the strains it put on family relationships.

Love isn’t shown when people meet our highest expectations, it’s shown when they fail; I want my kids to know that.

Though 2020’s challenges have divided us in many ways, they have not defined us.

What defines us this year isn’t HOW we adapted, but rather THAT we adapted trying our best to protect our families and our communities.

I’ll tell my kids how though we weren’t at our best in 2020, we proved resilient.

It’s frustrating that things have gotten so out of hand since Thanksgiving. With the end in sight, our country collectively became that one coworker who’s clearly sick in the company meeting but says, “it’s just allergies,” so he can use his PTO next week to go tubing down a river when his friends are in town.

I understand why they’re doing it but it doesn’t make me any less angry to hear them sniffling through the meeting without any consideration for the other people around the table.

Mainly though, I’ll tell my kids about finding calm amid chaos (and not just from my Zoom yoga class). I’ll tell them about when the first lockdown started and everyone hunkered down to make do with the things we have and with the people who we love.

I’m sure they’ll be fascinated by the toilet paper and the masks but I hope their takeaways are the persistence and the laughs. I hope my retelling gives justice to the beautiful things that happened each and every day in spite of the hard times.

Here’s to the end of 2020 with gratitude for the tough lessons it’s imparted and continued hope for better times ahead.

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The place exploded with sustained cheers that ended with my Aunt chasing her middle-aged son out into the street screaming, “don’t buy a new car yet!”

It bordered on delirium; another Aunt heard the news and immediately quit her job.

My immediate family was more reserved, our fatalistic Irish genes contrasted with their Italian exuberance.

Nobody personified this spirit better than my oldest brother who simply shook his seventeen-year-old head and said, “we didn’t win the lottery. Good things don’t happen to us.”

He was right.

You can blame it on fate, my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, or the more likely scenario of getting Slippin’ Jimmied by a Yellow Pages attorney but our collective cheer quickly turned to grief.

It’s a pattern I’ve noted often in life. But the reverse is just as true.

2013 was a tough year. We lost several family members including Mom. The holidays didn’t feel like the holidays. Times were dark.

2014 started off much better with a nephew born in each of the first three months: January, February, and March. That Memorial Day weekend, we hosted a big family barbeque for no reason other than to gather as a family.

It was as if a dark cloud had finally passed. With blue skies finally peeking through, a burst of sunlight filled the sky when Jenny accepted a proposal to become my wife.

It’s amazing how cyclical these things become. Grief and cheer: two sides of a perpetually spinning coin.

Jenny and I have effectively been quarantined with our 19-month-old daughter Senita for over six months now. We’re being extra cautious for a pretty good reason with one overwhelming exception: we’re moving.

As in simultaneously buying a new home and selling our current one.

The last thing I ever expected to do during quarantine was to abandon my home. But we’ve been looking for a waterfront home that meets our needs for over five years and couldn’t let this opportunity pass.

That’s how we’ve gotten to the point where just over a week from now we’ll (hopefully) be closing on a new-to-us house overlooking a reservoir two towns down the road.

It’s strange cultivating a better life for your family when every natural impulse is screaming to just hunker down.

The impulse to downsize the house we’re selling for staging clashes with the impulse to hoard a little something extra to get through quarantine. The two have reverberated through my life this past month like animatronic possums playing dueling banjos.

Da-da da-da da-da-da duh dum dum. Be sure to socially distance at all times and avoid non-essential people.

Da-da da-da da-da- da da da. But let as many people as you can inside your house while you’re gone and never think about not knowing what they breathed on or touched.
—
Da-da da-da da-da-da duh dum dum. Have nothing on your bathroom shelves or counters and hide any signs of normal human life.

Da-da da-da da-da- da da da. But know that you’re one headline away from being unable to buy toilet paper for five months.

Right now I’m simultaneously thankful for what I have but ever-striving to create the best possible home for my family. For me, that doesn’t mean the biggest, or the safest, or the newest – it means the most enjoyable.

Numerous studies confirm the truth we feel that being near water increases calmness, happiness, creativity, and health. That’s why we’ve been looking for so long.

Making matters even stranger is that although we’ve only had three houseguests since March, the house we’re buying is basically made for entertaining.

Why are we buying a house made for entertaining when we’re no longer inviting people over? It’s an affirmation that things will get better.

Dark clouds will pass, the sun will shine, and holidays will feel like holidays again.

Grief will turn to cheer and we’ll have a place to gather when it does.

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Whether you believe confirmation bias is a product of nefarious forces, hyper-focused algorithms, or our mankind’s natural social instincts, it’s clear that (for many of us), our deepest-held beliefs heavily influence the information we consume.

I believe there’s another bias though that takes place before confirmation bias even has a chance to set in: I call it, intuition bias.

Intuition bias is when you’re so sure of your own ability to discern truth that you don’t even bother to consume a news story, you simply look at the headline and accompanying photograph then assume you’ve pretty much got the gist.

I text articles to friends who respond so quickly I know there’s no way they actually read it. These knee-jerk reactions are often way off base, but more often, they pretty much get it right.

I’m as guilty of intuition bias as anyone else, but I always acknowledge the extent of what I’ve heard from reputable sources and the parts I just assumed.

So when someone asks me what I think of a news story I’ll often reply with something like, “Well I’ve only seen the headline, but it seems outrageous!” Or, “Perhaps I’ll click later but if any celebrity’s gonna rock quarantine with stay-at-home style, it’s Jenna Bush Hager.”

Next time you find yourself readily agreeing that the news is too misleading, ask yourself: WAS the news too misleading, or did you just see a tiny snippet out of context and mislead yourself?

All of this is just a long way of justifying the fact that I’m about to devote the rest of this column to a topic I know absolutely nothing about.

It isn’t that weird. We all do it with the news and now I’m doing it with a complex psychological theory. I may be wildly off-base to anyone who actually knows about the topic, but my take feels true and that’s a passing standard nowadays.

The topic is: meta-emotions.

I recently learned about meta-emotions while reading the book Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive by Marc Brackett, Ph.D.

This should not be confused with the similarly-named book Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Career-Destroying Power of Cell Phone Cameras by Honkin’ Al Franken.

Meta-emotions are how we feel about our feelings.

The examples Dr. Brackett provides include being afraid of public speaking and then being embarrassed about being afraid, and, feeling victimized because you’re being bullied and then being ashamed of yourself for allowing that to happen.

Understanding the meta-emotions we’re experiencing is pivotal to accurately assessing ourselves and pursuing optimum well-being.

Since learning about this concept, I now see meta-emotions everywhere in my day-to-day life. But it’s always the same emotion: resentment.

In fact, I resent having any emotions whatsoever. Sure, I understand that emotions create all meaning and purpose in life, but I just feel put upon by them.

Sometimes life feels like a surprise party I was tipped off about beforehand and now I’ve got to play the whole thing out or I’ll seem like a jerk.

Nobody who goes through the trouble of throwing a surprise party expects the honoree to react with a simple, “Oh.. hey guys,” just like nobody who tells you their dog just died expects you to say, “Oh.. sorry,” even though that’s been my reaction to every single dog death I’ve ever learned about.

It’s ridiculous how often I feel pressured to amp up my emotional response. Examples include returning big greetings (“It’s SO good to see you!”), the quality of food someone else has cooked (“Everything tastes AMAZING!”), and looking at pictures of someone else’s kid (“Too CUTE!”).

Most of my social interactions largely follow paths of conventional thinking that are often easier to follow than upset. I’m like an overeager improv actor “yes and-ing” my way through life.

A few things I’ll readily agree to just to keep things moving include: “It IS crazy how long this line is!,” “some people just DON’T get it!”, and “that never would’ve happened when we were kids.”

Complete strangers constantly look to me for validation of their personal perspectives and, more often than not, I readily supply it just to keep them happy.

But now that I’m aware of that, it’s starting to change.

I’ve drawn a few small lines in the sand of social cliches I’ll no longer endorse. For starters, you’ll never hear me blame the calendar year 2020 for weird or unexplained phenomena. That just shows an incredible ignorance of history.

I no longer shrug with a “whatchya gonna do?” expression when people complain about government agencies, teachers or schools.

Also, boys will not “be boys,” girl’s aren’t “always so emotional,” and everyone’s not “just looking for a handout.”

I’ve turned my overriding meta-emotion into a meta-meta-emotion. Instead of resenting the emotions I have, I now resent the social situations that cause the resentment in the first place.

Rounding the corner on forty, it feels like I’ve seen enough of life to get the gist so from here on out I’m just gonna call it like I see it and follow my intuition. What could possibly go wrong?

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I was anxious about celebrating our first anniversary since I’d never lived in a home where a wedding anniversary was celebrated (my parents divorced before I turned one).

I had no idea where on the gift-giving spectrum between a card or flowers and a Christmas-style blowout a wedding anniversary should land.

We decided that since our anniversary comes right after Mother’s Day and just before Father’s Day, a gift exchange didn’t really seem like the best use of resources.

Since we already use Valentine’s Day for new experiences, we decided, when possible, to make anniversaries our traveling celebrations. The first three years included trips to Stowe, Vermont, Lake George, New York, and Bay City, Michigan.

The more memories you make together, the harder they are to sort.

For instance, It took us a while to remember what we did last year for our fourth anniversary. The answer is that, with a three-month-old baby, we didn’t travel at all. Instead we let friends and family travel to us for our daughter’s baptism.

Which is why we had big plans for this year’s anniversary.

After successfully lining up an unprecedented (for us) three consecutive nights of babysitting, we planned to return to the Bahamas resort where we spent our honeymoon.

But right before we made our reservations, I got nervous about a mysterious new virus and studied up on the resort’s refund policy.

This all-inclusive resort’s policy provided about as much protection as an open-toed shoe so we timidly changed our plans to a Florida resort that has since canceled for a full refund.

It’s hard taking a trip when you’ve lost the desire to travel, the airline canceled your flights, and the resort is closed.

So this year we’re traveling down memory lane: the price is right and the amenities make us feel like we’re right at home.

It’s actually working out well.

Jenny tagged a few extra days off onto the long weekend so we’ll spend some time finally hanging up our picture frames and sorting through print outs to fill an empty album.

The five-year wedding anniversary appears to be the first where our main focus transitioned from the future to the past.

Whereas we used to speak mostly about the future (when we’ll have a child, when we’ll buy a house, when she’ll finish her MBA), this year we’re mostly reflecting on the memories we’ve made together.

When there are so many uncertainties about the future, it’s nice to take comfort in the past.

Our anniversary’s highlight was sharing our wedding video with our fifteen-month-old daughter, Senita, for the first time.

Nobody really enjoys watching a wedding video except for the bride and groom since the entire day was a blur to them the first time around. Senita was no exception, but at least she got into the music.

After 72 days of self-isolating because of the coronavirus, this weekend was the perfect time to be reminded that one of the many things we have to be thankful for right now is each other.

We didn’t renew our vows, but we held hands while watching our former selves make our vows, and that came pretty close.

Though we’ve only been married for five years, we’ve been together for nearly twelve.

It’s been approximately 4,304 days since we started dating and about 3,387 since we first moved in together. Furthermore, it’s been 1,828 days since we got married and only 474 days since we became parents.

That helps put our 72-day quasi-quarantine into a little perspective and provides a hell of an itinerary when traveling down memory lane.

When I look back on this anniversary a few years from now, I won’t remember it as the year when we couldn’t take a trip.

I’ll remember it as the year we traveled down memory lane and discovered that the only thing sweeter than wishing for shared dreams is looking back with gratitude at the ones that you’ve already attained.

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I constantly give people the benefit of the doubt or joyfully spin negative developments with a positive twist.

When I lost a race for State Representative on the day before my thirtieth birthday I cheerfully announced that I’d, “come in second place!”

So it shouldn’t have surprised me when I started justifying how, if the coronavirus quarantine had to happen, this was the perfect time (in my life) for it to happen.

As I compared my current life circumstances to past situations, an extremely compelling argument emerged almost tricking me into being thankful for the global pandemic.

It started as an attempt to cheer myself up that my fourteen-month-old daughter Senita was missing Easter celebrations at my church and with my family.

I thought, “wow, I’m glad this didn’t happen last year so that the Rona tinges every ‘baby’s first’ memory: Baby’s first Easter, baby’s first walk through the neighborhood, baby’s first trip to the playground.”

Indeed, we even would have missed the library and town programs where we met other kids her age and started building a small community of other parents in the area.

Then I wondered if it would’ve been better to be on lockdown before we had kids. We’d be considerably more well-rested throughout the quarantine, but perhaps lacking that all-consuming focus that helps keep us centered.

Caring for a rapidly-developing baby provides tangible growth and value to our day-to-day existence that many others seem to be lacking from their comments throughout the spring.

Then I imagined the darker scenarios, like if this had happened when we had larger uncertainties in our lives like long-term unemployment, or the frustrating gap we had between renting a house and closing on a house of our own, or near the end of Mom’s life when she was so frail and tensions and anxieties were already so high.

That’s the point at which, like a needle scratching across a record, I stopped.

I’m not spinning my version of events to make it seem like this global pandemic is a blessing in disguise.

It’s ok to acknowledge when a situation absolutely sucks.

I learned this a few years back when I was rear-ended at a dead stop while traveling with my fiance and two brothers to my uncle’s funeral. We were hit so hard our car was totaled at a time and location sufficient enough to cause us all to miss the remembrance.

As always, my initial impulse was to make lemonade. It started with sayings like, “what really matters is nobody was badly hurt,” and “cars can be replaced,” but immediately fell flat.

We were kept (through no fault of our own) from helping our cousins grieve their father’s loss; no amount of sugar will ever mix away how much that sucks.

I’m not sure why I’m compelled to try justifying bad things in a positive light.

It is a coping strategy I recognized in my mother, the only person I’ve ever known to fall into an abusive relationship with a cat.

Mom shrugged off the claw-spaced scabs the way I’m suddenly shrugging off wearing a face mask to go grocery shopping. The common thread is that neither are accepted in a normal, healthy world.

Throughout this pandemic, I’ve seen a lot of stories about people who are faring far worse than me from the pandemic (they’re impossible to avoid). Every time I see one, I immediately empathize with their struggles and then force myself to be grateful that’s not my story.

It’s a strange fascination that makes about as much sense as walking into a singles bar just to find other guys who are uglier than you so you can say “at least I’m not that guy” as solace from loneliness.

The truth is that I know lots of people who are living lives of various complexity right now.

An Aunt who can’t visit her mother in the nursing home, a cousin and several friends who gave birth while the virus raged inside their hospitals, those who are happily self-quarantining, and those who are unable or unwilling to keep themselves at home.

Everybody has been rear-ended by some sort of obstacle they didn’t see coming. Our experiences won’t be made any easier or better by comparing them against each other.

Turning lemons into lemonade is a wonderful, appropriate thing to do. Even if for no other reason than it means you’re acknowledging that you’ve been given lemons and avoiding the sweet temptation of denial.

But, sometimes lemonade is made just a little bit too sour, or a little bit too sweet, or with a whole bunch of booze mixed in.

However you choose to mix your lemonade, don’t get stuck following someone else’s recipe; for the duration of this pandemic, give yourself permission to flavor it to your taste.

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