This is me, rediscovering the word "munter".

You clearly have a lot of respect for your workgroup. You clearly recognize them as bright. And I think you know cold that if you were sick that day, Dr. American would stare at her computer for a minute, put on her analytical IT cap, turn the fucker on, roll her eyes at herself and save the anecdote for when you got back because you'd appreciate it.

A lot of how we get along in life is doing the stuff we're better at so our friends can do the stuff they're better at. I don't want to know what my staff's toilet plunging adventures would look like if my wife wasn't there. There would probably have been some internet searches. There would probably have been some clean-up. I don't think there would have been a plumber, and I'm happy to not know for certain.

I have a friend. She's married to a contractor. Her daughter is a sophomore in student housing. And she told me of eight college-aged girls who were pooping and peeing down the street at the gym because one of them clogged the toilet on a Wednesday and student services couldn't get to it before Tuesday. Eight of 'em. Didn't even think to look it up. At least one of them is the daughter of an electrical contractor, who works with his hands all day, who was a phone call away. They found out about this because they were visiting. "Dad, how do I not have to pee down the street" simply didn't occur to their daughter for whatever reason.

I think there's a big difference between "leaning on someone else's expertise" and being fucking helpless. I mean, my wife is intimidated by the procedure to turn on the television. My daughter is not. My wife successfully installed and configured a 5.1 system before I met her so if she's got instructions she can do anything while my daughter knows what to pantomime to accomplish her goals and has the curiosity to solve problems impeding her progress.

It's that curiosity that counts. The people who have it will run things and the people who don't will be vaguely afraid and frustrated by 90% of the things in their life. I think it's always been that way but I think the level of complexity we encounter these days blunts parents from fostering the curiosity.

My daughter is in "cooking class" at school. We paid $350 for ten hour-long lessons. Yesterday? Nachos. The day before that? She selected, made a shopping list for, assembled all equipment necessary to and cooked, under supervision, a gluten-free white chocolate confetti cake with buttercream frosting for her mom's birthday.

I am glad that my daughter is growing up with people who will at least be able to make fucking nachos, and extremely glad that she's just as irritated by this class as I am.