You're not allowed to wear the T-shirt from the place you are.

It's one of those subtle laws of American culture that most of us pick up on without even realizing it: You can buy a T-shirt that says "I Love New York", but you can't wear it in New York.

Seems weird when you think about it. You should be able to proclaim your love for the place you're in. But doing so marks you as a dweeb. Or worse, a foreigner who doesn't know how to fit in.

Of course, I'm not a fan of T-shirts that proclaim anything, but that's just me. And I'd be lying if I said I never was. I've had my share. But as I've gotten older, I've found other things that make better souvenirs. I'll go on about that in another post.

Never be the drunkest person in the room.

You're going to drink. I expect you to. Partly because your mother and I enjoy wine pretty regularly and you're being raised in an environment where alcohol isn't treated as some mysterious evil that you should never come in contact with.

That having been said, there's drinking and there's drinking.

I'd be lying if I told you that I'd never been drunk. I have. And I'm sure your mother has, too. Frankly, I don't like the feeling. Although every once in a while circumstances used to occasionally conspire to convince me that getting drunk was an appropriate course of action, I've come to the point where I'm simply not going to do that anymore.

What you need to know about alcohol is that it lowers your inhibitions. Which means you're more likely to say or do something drunk that your better judgement would prevent you from doing sober.

But there's another part to having lowered inhibitions: The more drunk you are, the more drunk you're likely to think it's a good idea to get.

Alcohol also clouds your judgement, so in addition to embarrassing yourself, you have a hard time realizing just how embarrassing you are being -- and just how drunk other people aren't.

Still, I expect you to drink. And I expect you to get drunk. This is, after all, America.

But when you do, I hope you'll do what works for me: Drink less than the people you're with. I do that by having a glass of water for every other drink the people I'm with are having. It's saved me from a lot of embarrassing situations, although it doesn't prevent them all. Particularly the ones where someone I'm with regrets something that he or she has done in front of me and I can't pretend to have been too drunk to remember.

I'm also convinced that staying hydrated prevents hangovers. I've only had a hangover once, but believe me, once is more than enough.

The definition of civilization is specialization.

You know where civilization came from? Some cave person was better at hunting than some other cave person. So they made a deal. The better hunter went off to find food while the not-so-good hunter stayed home to clean the cave. It worked out better than both of them hunting and cleaning, so the idea took off.

Pretty soon, the hunters found that some of them were better at big animals, others had a talent for fish. And the cave cleaners discovered that some of them were better at taking care of cave babies while others cooked a mean mastodon stew.

The dawn of 'civilization', the way they like to define it in school, is really the moment that people had to depend on other people for survival.

Now we're so civilized that you couldn't possibly take care of all your own needs. But the upside is that you get to live more than twice as long as the average cave person and you know about stuff like music, taxes, and quantum mechanics.

What's interesting is that while people like the idea of civilization, they tend to see an increase in specialization as ridiculous. A hundred years ago, a doctor was a doctor. Now we have doctors who specialize in internal medicine, emergency medicine, livers, hearts, skin, cancer, all kinds of things. By the time you're an adult, we'll probably have doctors that specialize in medicine for 3-year-olds. Or ring fingers. Or something else I can't imagine.

The reality is, back when the first doctor decided that he or she didn't want to bother with anything other than patients who had problems with their pancreas, a lot of people thought it was ridiculous. Now, if I have a problem with my pancreas, I'm going to find the best person I can afford to fix it.

My father--your grandfather--told me that he believes that the government is deliberately encouraging specialization to make it harder for small businesses to survive. It used to be that you could start a company with a desk, a telephone, and a secretary, but now you're required to have an attorney, an accountant, and a human resources person. This, he says, is bad.

Later in the conversation, he asked how you were doing. He wanted to know whether you were talking yet. I joked that you were speaking two languages, which he thought was great. He said he thought we should hire a French cook, Swedish maid, German driver, and Chinese butler so you could be exposed to a bunch of different languages.

I told him we were going to hire one person to handle all the languages, but he didn't think that would work as well. I guess he didn't think it would be civilized.

How to clean a cast iron pan

One of the things I learned from my father--your grandfather--is the beauty of a cast iron pan. They're relatively inexpensive, hold heat really well, and develop a non-stick surface when you season them well.

Seasoning is another way of saying that they don't get washed. At least not with soap. The oils from whatever you're cooking coat the pan, creating a layer between the pan and whatever you cook next. Sounds gross, but the heat kills anything nasty. Plus, you get a bunch of flavors--seasoning--that get imparted to anything you cook with it.

There are a lot of ways that people care for their cast iron pans. My father--your grandfather--takes a pretty hard line. No cleaning. You can rinse it out, and maybe wipe some of the bigger chunks off, but that's it.

My approach is a little less dogmatic. You're still not allowed to use soap, but I figure food doesn't taste any better just because it's cooking on chunks of burned stuff.

What I do is run the pan under hot water, then pour salt into it. Using a paper towel, I scour the pan. Then I rinse it off and put it on a burner to warm it up and wipe it with another paper towel.

Sometimes, if I've cooked something really smelly or greasy, I'll scrub with the salt a few times to get all the nastiness out.

And don't tell your mom, but if things get really nasty I'll even take some soap to it. Okay, I did once. But that was because your mom cooked teriyaki in the pan and the sugar burned onto it. I couldn't get it off with just salt, so I had to scrub it with detergent.

Once I did, though, I dried the pan thoroughly and then wiped it with a layer of oil. You have to. If you don't, your pan will rust.

You're from Portland.

By the time you read this, you'll have heard all the stories. About how I was born in Japan, but grew up mostly in Florida. How your mother was born and raised in Nova Scotia. And how my mother grew up in Houston and my father grew up in New York.

I think of myself as being from Florida. Which is strange for a couple of reasons. I wasn't born there. And I've spent more than twice as much time not living there as I ever did living there.

Still, it's where I grew up, and that's what makes it where I'm from.

The realization I had about you is that you're from Oregon. I'm sure that seems normal to you, but I didn't move to Oregon until I was well into my 40s. Before that, I'd only been here maybe five times. And yet, this is where you're from.

Your mother's not from Oregon. And my parents weren't from the place that I'm from.

And that's the neat thing. How you can be from a place that your own parents think of as new to them.

In some ways I envy you. You get to grow up in a place we chose for all the things that we hope will make it a good place to be a kid--good neighbors, a conscientious populace, seasons, a reasonably cosmopolitan city without the congestion, traffic, and stress of a big city. The down side is that you won't have any idea how good you have it. In fact, I think it's probably inevitable that you'll want to move away, to experience life in the big city.

I can't tell you not to. I did. I moved to New York when I was 22 and LA when I was 24. Your mother left Nova Scotia for Hollywood when she was 26. And your grandmother left Texas for New York. All I can say is that I hope you get New York or LA or wherever you decide to go out of your system and eventually find your way to whatever becomes your home. Selfishly, I hope that's Portland, but that's only because I'd love to have you close.

There's a saying I heard once: "Everyone should live in New York, but leave before they get hard. And everyone should live in LA, but leave before they get soft."

It's not true for everyone, but it works for me.

My parents weren't from Florida, either.

The difference between "love" and "in love".

I did my share of dating before I met your mother. More than my share, actually, given that I had long hair, a runner's body, a very good job, a promising career, and a gift for turning a clever phrase.

At one point, I had a girlfriend I really wanted to be The One. (To be fair, I wanted every single one of them to be The One, which probably explains why I got to date so much and so well. It also explains why I couldn't just enjoy dating, but I'll get to that in another episode.)

One day, I told this girl that I loved her. Naturally, I expected that she'd say she loved me back, but she didn't. Instead, she asked how I defined love.

In addition to being taken aback, I was stumped. I hadn't actually defined love for myself. I just figured that like porn, as the famous quote goes, I would know it when I saw it.

She helped me out, though. She told me that to her, love meant "appreciating in someone else the qualities you like most in yourself." And at the time, I thought that that was a pretty workable definition.

If I'd thought about it more deeply, I would have realized that by her definition, what I felt for her wasn't love. One of the things I admired most about her was the purity of her beliefs--something I didn't possess myself.

Since then, I've come to change my definition of love. And while it's still a little fuzzy, I have a better sense of what it means. Here goes.

Love is valuing someone for what he or she is. Not because of what he or she is, and not in spite of what he or she is. And it's not valuing certain aspects of a person. It's valuing an entire person for all the things he or she is.

By that definition, I love your mother. And I love you.

In love is completely different. In love is not about what is, it's about what you wish it to be. In love is about hope, while love is about knowledge.

This is why I don't believe in love at first sight.

I believe you can have incredible chemistry at first sight. But you can't know someone at first sight. You can imagine what they might be like, and if you're lucky, they'll turn out to be who you imagine they are. But the odds are very much against that happening.

Hope is a powerful thing. Which is why being in love is usually so painful. You're hoping he or she will call or say the right thing or touch you in just the right way because you're hoping he or she will turn out to be the kind of person you want him or her to be.

It takes time to realize that what you have may not be what you imagine you want. And it's only then that you can honestly evaluate what you have and decide whether to keep going at it.

For me, it always took four months to fall out of love. For your mother, it took two weeks.

For both of us, once the initial infatuation went away, we came to realize that we loved each other. Not because we're perfect, but because even with our annoying habits and faults and weaknesses and baggage from other relationships, we value each other completely. We know each other well enough to anticipate--and compensate for--the things we're not crazy about in each other.

I think the search for love is somehow inevitable. It's programmed into our biology and there's not a whole lot we can do about it.

It pains me to know that someday, you're probably going to fall passionately in love with the wrong person. Over and over. You'll lose sleep, sacrifice friends, compromise your career, and make some pretty dumb decisions, all in the name of hope.

But I also know that those are the experiences that will ultimately make you who you are meant to be, and that person will find real, lasting, true love. I hope I'm around long enough to see it. I''m excited to meet the person you're going to end up with.

Always use a comma before an "and" in a series.

The purpose of grammar is to avoid ambiguity. Most of the time, using a comma before an "and" in a series doesn’t make anything clearer.

But it’s consistency that makes grammar work. You can’t just apply a rule when you think it’s going to help. So always use the comma.