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Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold.
A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge – out of fairness to goats.
My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.
As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don’t adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.
Toxins love to get you while you’re young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it’s mature and comparatively fixed.
A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes – as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.
Paul McCartney had a baby when he was 61 Rod Stewart was 66 Rupert Murdoch was a stunning 72. Not only does that mean they’ll have less stamina than the average dad, that means they’ll, well, check out a lot sooner too.
When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules, but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls, and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you’ve got an adolescent boy, you’re in the sweet spot for trouble.
There are a lot of downsides to being male. We age faster and die younger. But give us this: we’re lifetime baby-making machines. Women’s reproductive abilities start to wane when they’re as young as 35. Men? We’re good to go pretty much till we’re dead.
Older fatherhood isn’t all bad: testosterone rates drop about 1% per year as men age, making them less reactive and more patient, and a professionally established middle-aged man is likely to have more time and money to devote to his kids than a twenty-something who’s just getting started.