The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad

I don’t go to church, but I regularly attend the Museum of Natural History.

A joke should never end with “I’m joking.

Jokes have been ruined by people who aren't good at telling jokes. A joke should never end with "I'm Joking.

A joke without comedic timing is a statement of pure insanity.

This book is an experiment. We figured it out as we went along. Sort of like a family.

Aging is like climbing to the top of a mountain and then you either jump off and die or inch your way down until you fall to your death. I never imagined the inching part, just the climbing.

I’m not immediately in love with our monkey. I’m committed to our monkey. I start trying to figure out how to finance our life with the monkey for the next twenty years. If someone tried to take the monkey, I would have punched that person until they killed me. But I’m not attached to the monkey. I’d like to tell you that I was. Because some people are. And some people aren’t. And the ones who aren’t generally don’t tell you that they aren’t. I would do anything for our baby monkey. But it doesn’t mean I understand our baby monkey.

My brain is like a Snapple cap. It can hold one piece of information at a time.

You don’t choose what you remember in life, but for some reason I remember all the times I tried.

Cynical is: The glass is half empty. Skeptical is more like: Is that even a glass? Is this even water?

Pizza is a Band Aid for so many problems.

I think if you live in Brooklyn and you order pizza from a Dominos, you're a loser. I don't believe in Heaven or Hell, but I believe if you order a Brooklyn Dominos pizza, you're going to Hell. This is based in scripture.

We joke about things we're most anxious about to diffuse the anxiety of the actual threat.

I think of prayers like tech support. Unless I get a person live on the phone, I’m not sure it’s getting to anybody.

Jokes have been ruined by people who aren’t good at telling jokes.

have the body of someone who’s just about to embark on a robust exercise regimen and then doesn’t.

Writing is always a process of trial and error, but this was writing about my own errors, so the errors felt compounded, like I was re-living my own mistakes and failing at that too.

When I got older it started to occur to me that some people are just filled with existential dread, and maybe I’m one of those people too.

We all ask for things in ways we understand and expect other people to understand, instead of entering their perspective

Look, no one really does the dishes in our apartment and that’s worked out just fine for the two of us. The dishes in our sink get cleaned on a need-to-use basis.

I was this pudgy milkless vice president of the family. Huge title, no power, also oversees Congress.

What does it mean to be a decent neighbor? I think part of it is just listening to people in the context in which they intend their words.