Greatest Mystery: Solved

Newsletter 2022-02-28

I pretend that I write these newsletters for you, but really, they’re for me. Writing is just thinking on paper—or, in this case, on a screen since ink is expensive and I’m too cheap to ever print anything out. Every week, I use these emails to figure out my own life. Usually, it’s to pin down how everything went so very, very wrong, and, if possible, to learn from my mistakes. As you can probably guess by the fact that I’ve sent hundreds of newsletters in a row, I have yet to learn a single lesson. They say that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That’s also the definition of parenting.

I’m using today’s newsletter to solve the greatest mystery of all: how it takes my kids ten hours to do half an hour of cleaning. Every time we declare a cleaning day, I lose all faith in both humanity and linear time. You’d think if the kids made any progress at all, no matter how slow, the house would look gradually better over the course of the day,…