Parenting Advice from a Serious Dad

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Moving to a Bigger Place. Because of a Baby.

A wise man once said, “Good things come in small packages,” and that’s true sometimes, like if you have a small package with a diamond in it or one with a car that got hit by a shrinking ray. But when it comes to babies, you cannot keep yours in a tupperware box in a kitchen cabinet and tell the police  “some wise guy told me to." They will not accept that as a plea.

So you’re going to need a bigger place. 

Renting a Place

Rents are going up everywhere. If you live in a city, you’re probably aware that cities used to be where they put “undesirable” people, mostly that was people who were not yet considered White™, but were totally white if you just looked at them. Then they all moved to the suburbs and had behind closed doors meetings to be like, look at me, I'm White™, and now they're coming back! And they want to charge you $3,000 a month for a room that’s big enough to hold your bike if you take the wheels off it! You and your partner and your baby will not survive here.

So you have to find a bigger place, no problem. There are tons of big places listed online, just search for a place with two or three bedrooms, and adjust your settings like so: 

  1. Neighborhood - Inconveniently located.
  2. Rent - $7,000 and up. 
  3. Amenities - No dishwasher. 
  4. Parking - Covered. 

You gotta have covered parking. 

 This probably hasn’t happened to you, because of our fabulously non-judgmental, live-and-let-live society, but someone came up to me and told me that I was wasting my life and money by renting instead of buying. You see, when you give money to your landlord, they use that money to pay their mortgage, which means that they’re earning equity in their own property, thereby carving up the Earth into tiny packages (good things!) that can be bought and sold in defiance of the natural law. My characterization of property ownership may sound like I'm part of an extremist movement, that the land belongs to all peoples and cannot be doled out to individuals. But try and remember that long before White™ people came to this continent, there was no such thing as an extremist movement. 

In any case, ignore this whole section because renting is for losers and millenials. 

Buying a Place

Now we’re cooking with gas. You may have heard that owning a home is part of “The American Dream,” the other parts being owning a car, owning a business, and subordinating your fellow Men to your Will. Well, it’s all true. In order to live the American Dream that your forebears brought forth this land to provide, you must carve a small patch of land out of the Earth and mow it.

Buying a house is a long process, the first step is to come from a long line of homeowners who can give you a down payment. “But my parents didn’t own a home!”  you might be whining, well, they obviously didn’t work very hard. Hard workers have homes. Work harder. 

The second step is to take the money that you’ve saved and inherited and been given, and put it into a bank account where it will sit while you look at houses. People will want to check your account to make sure you've got the goods. It's like when a bouncer checks your wallet before you get into the bar, you might not even want a drink there, but you'd better have $50,000 on you before you check the menu.

When you look at houses, it’s important to look deeply at the building, tease out its secrets, notice if there’s a weird closet that has a secret room or safe in it. Buy a house with a safe. It probably has treasure or ghosts in it.

If you can’t find a house with a safe, then you’ll have to settle for a “starter house.” The idea here is that it is not enough to own a piece of land and mow it, it must be the first step in a larger plan to own larger and larger pieces of land and to mow them until you no longer have time to shop for homes because mowing has become an all-encompassing monastic lifestyle that precludes all other activity. 

“When will I find time to raise a family and have a career?” you might ask. But keep in mind that all those who have achieved the American Dream were also abusive alcoholic absentee fathers (e.g. Bing Crosby, Steve Jobs, Zack Morris’s dad). 

Just Staying Where You Are

One time  while I was visiting a doctor's office for an appointment, the nurse checking my vitals asked me if I was planning to have kids. I said, yeah, eventually. She said, "Why wait? Just do it now, babies are cheap, they can sleep in a drawer, all that matters is that you love your kid and try your best to be present in their lives; they grow up so fast you could miss it if you’re not careful."

“A DRAWER?!” I said, tearing the blood pressure cuff from my arm and rolling my sleeve back down. “Whatever’s wrong with you, it’s the worst version of it!” And with that I stormed out. I still don’t know my blood pressure to this day. 

Maybe you want to take this insane nurse's advice and choose to live a life based on love and togetherness and not mowing things. That's fine, I guess, but consider this: you are wrong.