Recently, one of the parents of Riley's schoolmates called to arrange a playdate between her son and Riley. I don't remember having so many playmates as a kid, and I certainly don't remember how my parents arranged them. Even though I appreciate the opportunity to socialize Riley among his classmates outside of school, this whole process seems kind of strange to me.

It's not so strange that our contact information is available. The home and school association produces a White Pages-like book of student names and addresses, organized by grade. You can opt in/out each year, but most parent include their addresses for purposes of convenience, like setting up playmates. I assume it also helps for homework help, since some of Abby's classmates have called asking for clarification on something they were doing in class.

What really perplexes me, though, is how the playdate itself is supposed to work. Maybe I put too much thought into this whole thing, but take this most recent instance as an example. A strange woman calls the house and asks, "Are you Riley's dad?" Uh, yes. "I'm Riley's friend from school's mom. You know, Riley's friend, Bob." Uh, ok. "Bob wanted to invite Riley over for a playdate." Oh! That sounds great; I'm sure he'd like that. Now what?

Maybe it would be easier if I wasn't so weird about it myself. But like any meeting, you arrange a place and time. Usually it's at the caller's house, after all, you don't call someone up and say, "Hey, we've never met, but I'd like to come over and hang out!" The time is a weird thing, too. We talked about summer camps, which seem to be the thing parents do around here - send their kids off to camp for the summer. Riley had a week of day camp this summer, but mostly he's been at home, so he's free during the day. Sort of.

Have I mentioned at all about how I'm becoming more like Mr. Mom? Back during the weeks I was carting the kids to and from day camp, and between activities, it felt more and more like I was a stay at home Dad with a part time job. While I find nothing wrong with that lifestyle (if one can afford it), I don't want to be perceived that way unless that's really how it is. I find myself vociferously defending my work, how I work from home, etc. As if everyone is now unfamiliar with the concept. (It seems that half of the men on my street work from home at some point or another, at least. Weird I never see them, though...)

So yes, I can cart Riley over mid-day for a playdate. Am I expected to stay? As a parent, should I be wanting to stay and observe this stranger's environment that my kid will be playing in? What if they have knives? What if Riley comes home with a tattoo? Aren't these things I should be worried about? "It's ok if you just want to drop him off."

I'm telling you, there should be a manual. I've met only a few parents who I would not want to leave my kids alone with, and combined with the number of people I know who are not parents that I absolutely would not leave my kids with, I believe I have a healthy enough fear of leaving my kids with anyone. On the other hand, I've seen parents participate in playdates as if the kid's presence was contingent only upon their ability to dote. I've seen other parents behave as though they were the ones coming over to play. So who knows. Me? I'm happy to leave Riley to play with other parents that seem sane and responsible. Maybe that makes me neglectful in the eyes of the doting won't-leave-my-house playdate parents, but I find that I am not really trying to hard to please random people in the school directory.

Oh. Another problem. What happens when you make all of these plans with this "friend of your kid's" parent, and then you go talk to your kid and his eyes get wide and he says to you, "I don't want to go!" and then runs off and hides in a corner somewhere? Yeah. I guess I should have asked him first. But how do you do that in the middle of a phone conversation? Moreover, what do you say to the parent when you get back to the phone from that discussion? Oh, sorry, Riley doesn't like your kid, so thanks anyway.

And that's not even the case. My opinion, lacking any evidence otherwise, is that Riley is simply reluctant to leave his routine of being at home. He's not really making "best friends" at school because, apart from him being a kind of shy, slow friend-maker, the school actually dissuades them from making "best friends" (yeah, I should write a whole post about this, too). As a result, visits to classmates outside of what's required for school are an expected uphill battle for us.

Well. I personally can't wait for Riley's playdate. I'm going to get all this awkward parenting nonsense ironed out. Awkward human beingness, really. And then I will be formidable. And the kids will learn from my example. Yeah, looking forward to that.

I was struck again several times just this weekend by this idea that I've been having regarding levels of knowledge and learning. And when things come in batches like this, it makes sense to pay attention and think about them.

The basic example of the situation is this: When you first learn about a subject, you are by definition a novice. Depending on the topic area, there may be many books on the subject geared toward your knowledge level. As you become more adept though, the number of books on the topic that are worthwhile to you dwindle.

We were looking at books on home decorating over the weekend. There simply are no basic books. The books that exist all assume some fundamental level of interior design skill that we simply don't possess.

As an aside, these interior design books are also particularly annoying in that there is no practical guide -- all of the photos in the books are of well-designed houses that are configured nothing like the box of bricks the typical family lives in. I'm sure I'll eventually discover a book that shows how to decorate a typical American cookie-cutter home, and I'll be pleased when I do, but until then all I have to look at are books where every ceiling is vaulted, every entryway is parquet'ed, and all the woodwork is antique.

Programming is certainly this way. When I started to learn how to code, I was typing code from magazine listings and the scant few books that talked about programming. These were very basic. I don't know of any analogue to those publications these days. Where are the true beginner materials?

One of the fundamental things I discovered about people learning to program is that everyone starts at a different place. When you get into programming, you don't all get in on the "ground floor". The building certainly isn't a single high-rise, but a weaving Escher-esque nightmare of staircases that converge at odd angles, sometimes upside-down. As a result, many people are missing certain things that I find fundamental to know. For example, being able to "read" code - where you sort of "execute" the code in your head to imagine what it will do - is a fundamental skill that very few of the people I know practice explicitly.

But assuming you even obtain a basic layer of knowledge, everyone's ground floor is different. And like a concept well-described in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", as the automation of a technology increases, the layers of abstraction increase to the point that the truly basic underlying systems are understood by hardly anyone. Take for example the workings of the web. While practically anyone with a keyboard these days can produce a web site using software they stumble upon while browsing, just because you can do so does not mean you have the knowledge of how the browser works, or how your TCP/IP stack requests the information it gets, or how the routers between you and the internet move that traffic, or how your computer is able to turn the code it receives into something readable, or how the jpeg images are decoded for display, or how the code that displays the images received from those vast distances is dissembled into bits of assembler instructions that cause the microscopic components of that machine to execute anything. What few software engineers know anything about the low level functionality of a floating point processing unit, for example?

Yet, you can pick up a magazine at any bookstore that will explain how to build whole, useful web sites.

Is it useful for a web designer to know anything about assembler? Probably not. And I don't posit that the art of compiler design is lost (yet) for all of them fleeing to build a new Facebook. But there is an interesting disparity of knowledge there. And my point here is that there's no real connection to be made between.

Sure, you can pick up the knowledge of how to build web sites, but if you wanted to learn the next thing - maybe it's how to build a browser - you'd be hard pressed to find a manual on that. And I think that's the case with a great many disciplines. After you've learned the basics, and maybe a level on top of that, things tend to either get specialized to the point of requiring knowledge that you would have to have obtained externally, or simply don't exist.

I wonder if there's a place for these in-between classes. A class you could take to learn how to get from novice to advanced specialist that is more general than jumping directly to the specialist class. Because I think that the way we learn these days is different than most formal instruction. With formal instruction, you have a path from knowing nothing to specializing. These days, you start out as a specialist, not needing to know more basics or advanced techniques to survive. But a class or some books that I don't think exist now to fill in the gaps to allow people to move laterally into related disciplines seems like something that could be beneficial.

Both Berta and I work during the day. This will not come as a shock to most Americans who have families like ours. We could have chosen a smaller house, a smaller family, a tighter budget, but we like the way we live and it requires two working parents. What is perplexing is how many parents in our area don't understand this and count on the opposite to be true.

Maybe it's a strange assumption on my part to believe that stay-at-home parents are not the norm. I think it's pretty common here where we live. I suppose the natural tendency would be to assume that other parents or families also live the way you live until you find out otherwise, so maybe it's normal to be constantly questioned as to why we can't be involved in various school activities during the work day, as if it's abnormal not to be available.

The main thing that plagues me week-to-week is Girl Scouts. Everyone likes Girl Scouts, especially Abby, and I'm not saying anything against the organization or calling out particular parents or the scout leaders, but it does seem unusual to me that it's assumed that a parent will always be around to pick up the girls right after the traditional workday. On normal days, the bus brings the kids home from school, and they're here at home without me having to leave work. Is there an assumption that there is mobile childcare for fetching Abby from random Girls Scout events that these other people know of that I've been made unaware? The same inconvenience exists for Riley's activities.

The karate class Riley participates in, and practically any extracurricular class we'd be interested in the kids taking, takes place during the work day. I can't think of any way he would be able to take this class if it wasn't for his school being right next to the dojo, and the karate instructors being willing to walk their students over. But for classes like the kids' acting classes that I've seen offered at the local theater company, or art classes that happen at the local art studio... These all happen during the day when it would be inconvenient for anyone who has no stay-at-home to ferry the kids to.

Moreover, I feel a kind of brash inconsiderateness on the part of the stay-at-home parents who participate toward the working parents, like me, that occasionally are able to spend an afternoon helping out with their kid's school class or extracurricular activities. It's hard enough getting the time out to help, and it's something we want to do. Do they think that we're purposefully avoiding our kids with work? Apparently. So when we volunteer, they should use us because often we otherwise can't. By excluding us, they're purposefully eliminating us from being part of our kids' lives, which is nearly criminal.

Let us participate in our kids' growing outside of the home. To me, it seems like a bunch of stay-at-homes that get themselves together using the kids' activities as an excuse. They want to keep their little parent-cliques together, so they wait for all the stay-at-homes who typically volunteer to do so, at the exclusion of the parents who hardly ever are able to help as they would want to.

Even if I was to volunteer more time, and make more allowances for the activities that the kids participate in, I think I still wouldn't be "in" these cliques because I'm not a stay-at-home. And don't get me started on the fact that I'm a dad, and am apparently only good for coaching sports teams - a laughable concept if ever I've heard one.

Riley's been concerned lately with our too-easy dismissal of his creative works from school. Every day, he comes home with one or two, sometimes more, creations that he has constructed in kindergarten. Granted, they're not all masterpieces - some are just assignments that are colored in with blanks filled out using the right letters of numbers. Others, though, are nice works of art for a 6-year-old. A recent project that included a double rainbow, a unicorn, a castle, and a dragon is certainly the stuff of keepsake.

But how much of this should we keep? I think this is a similar question to the one skippy presents about keepsake books. I'm not sure that Riley's formative scribblings are going to be something he's going to want to show to his kids, but is still begs the question, how do we decide which of the things are going to turn out to be important to him when he grows up?

I have a folder of my own junk (and here I use the word "junk" with meaning) from school. I'm not sure any of it means anything to me, apart from a vague recollection of having produced it. Seeing that I haven't seen it in a while, I could possibly go forever without ever wanting to. Recently I was thinking about some notes from a discrete math class in college, but the thought was fleeting, and the information I sought from my notes was easily recovered from the internet.

I think the solution we've arrived at for Riley's complaints - which stem from the fact that there is simply so much material to review that we don't know what to do with it or how to store it and simply end up recycling most of it without oo much thought - is twofold. First, we're obtaining a box for Riley to keep his special papers in. The key point here is that he gets to select which things he thinks are important. And as he grows, I'm sure that will change, and we'll swap out a bunch of stuff. Second, I'm working on a web site where he can easily take photos of his schoolwork with an iPod and upload it to the site. This way, he can take pictures of everything he brings home, so there's nothing missed. And hopefully, eventually, the habit will extend beyond his schoolwork into extraordinary things we do now and then.

It'll be interesting to see what he thinks is important enough to save, and I'm glad that he'll have a way to keep things that he might like to have when he's older.

Two days a week I pick up Riley after his half day of kindergarten. At the beginning of the year, they sent home (oh yeah, there's another whole fiasco - remind me to tell you about school bureaucracy later) a sheet on the procedure for picking up kids after the morning kindergarten session. It was very specific.

You could tell from the letter that the school's primary concern was safety. They didn't want any kids getting run over. It was obvious from the way that the letter was worded that parents frequently found ways to get around the rules, and the school had to spell out specific things just to make sure those incidents weren't repeated.

The main problem seemed to be this: There is a driveway, in kind of an oval shape, that parents drive up through to pick up the kids. You park near the curb and hold up the sign for your kid. The teacher on duty sees the kid's name on the sign and sends him out to the car. You load up the kid in the car and only upon all cars having moved away in front of you you may continue around the drive and exit the school grounds. Basically, you may not pass the car in front of you, for the safety of the kids. For the most part, this works. But there is a problem.

There are a few parents who load their kids, drive around to the other side of the oval, and park. I don't know why they do this, but they then get out of their cars, fiddle around with their kid in the back seat, and then move on. This process takes probably less than 5 minutes, but the whole process of picking up kids form the school only takes 10, so this is a substantial portion of the pickup process. Note that they're specifically causing the parents behind them to break the no passing rule, either that or they hold up the whole process when a parent follows the rules.

To compound the insanity, just outside the exit to the oval, there's a parking lot. It's easily entered, 20 seconds drive from where they usually stop, and just as easily exited. It would cause them no inconvenience to pull into the lot instead of causing confusion and traffic issues by stopping inside the pickup driveway.

But that's just the setting. Let me tell you what makes all of this more interesting to me. The cars that do it are always, always, always $60k+ luxury vehicles.

Granted, we live in a nice area, and there are a lot of people around with a lot of money. And I'm not driving a used beater, but I'm not driving a car that has TVs in the back of every seat with separate heat controls and a personal masseuse in the trunk. There are a handful of the standard minivans and family cars, but it's always the luxury cars, the Cadillac SUVs, that feel the need to ignore the rules. And this has me wondering the fundamental question of this post: Does having money lead you to ignore the rules, or does ignoring the rules lead you to money?

There is a good deal of evidence both ways. I'm not really advocating getting money illegally, but look at the extreme examples. Do you think the Enron guys weren't rich at some point? And that is probably the wild "took it too far and got nailed" edge case. Think of all of the people who must be just skirting the rules and raking in the money.

Probably a better example is people who turn the rules sideways. It's not that they're breaking a rule, not even that a rule hasn't been written, just that they've discovered a place outside of the box that everyone else thinks in, and they result in profit. I'm sure you can think of a handful of examples of companies that started out with a crazy idea - outside the rules - and ended up quite rich as a result.

But on the other hand... I also get the impression from meeting some of these people that privilege makes them better. Completely opposite to the people who come up with a good idea and work it, these folks have money for one reason or another (no doubt there is plenty of old money spread around in this area) and just expect a certain amount of extra consideration. They have money, they have the fancy car, they have things, and so they're entitled - for no reason that's apparent to the rest of us - to park someplace and cause that, albeit minor, amount of consternation in everyone else just... because.

It's even funny talking to those folks. When they do those things, there's no remorse or apology. "Yeah, I did park there, and did you see my son's drawing from art class today? Nothing like what he did in his private lesson last week."

The answer to the question seems vital. After all, if simply ignoring a few key rules, or at least bending them a bit, leads to more cash, leads to my not caring whether I disrupt the flow of drivers behind me, then apparently my following of the rules really isn't getting me anywhere! I should just skip the rules I don't like and take what I want, right? Works for them.

There's a movie - I think it's either Diggstown or Roadhouse - where the antagonist drives this antique car, and has no mind for what side of the road he's on. He's so rich that he doesn't care. He feels like he's above the law, without need to care for the rules in society. It's a good scene to illustrate what I think of every time I see these parents showing their kids how to ignore the rules by parking in that spot.

I'm inclined to put up some traffic cones on the sidewalk with signs, "Do not park here. Park in the lot." Just to see how many people outright ignore them. But every time, without fail, there's some parent that parks in that spot.