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.

What time is it at the North Pole?

I don't know the answer to this, but it's a pretty neat question. Because at the North Pole, all the time zones come together.

So take a couple of steps in any direction and then turn left and with every step it'll get an hour later.

The part that's neat to me is that the hours may vary, but the minutes don't. If it's 1:19 when you're in Pacific Standard time, it'll be 4:;19 when you step into Eastern Standard time.

By the way, if I had to guess, I'd say that the time at the North and South Poles is officially the same as Greenwich Mean Time.

At some point, the temperature in Celsius is the same in Farenheit.

It's kind of obvious when you think about it, but most people don't. There's a point at which the temperature is the same for both scales.

That point is -40 degrees. So now you know.

How to make a decent omelet.

When you were little, I used to make you breakfast, just about every morning. Usually it was an omelet.

I started off trying to make fluffy omelets, and I figured the fluffier, the better. So I'd separate the whites from the yolks, whip the whites (by hand) until they formed soft peaks, then fold in the yolks. I'd cook the mixture over a really low heat, covered, for a long time.

They were good. But they took a lot of work and a long time.

Then I stumbled onto a video segment by Julia Child. In case you're not familiar with your television history, Julia Child was an American woman with an annoying voice--kind of a combination upper-crust accent and falsetto--who had a cooking show on television back in the 1960s and 70s. She was trained as a French chef, and pretty much revolutionized American cooking by opening people's eyes to the way ingredients and kitchen equipment worked.

Anyway, I wish you could hear me imitate her voice because it adds a certain something, but here's what she said:

"To make an omelet, you need a hot fire, butter, salt, pepper, and eggs." You also need a little water, which I've found makes the omelet lighter.

You mix all the ingredients together except the butter. The butter goes in the pan, but only after the pan is hot. And only one or two eggs. I'd sometimes use three egg whites and one yolk, but that was usually too much to fit in the pan.

The tricky part for me is the heat. You want the fire to be as hot as possible without making the butter go brown.

I also don't use a non-stick pan. I don't have one.

I use a lot of butter--enough so that tilting the pan back and forth will get the entire bottom covered with melted butter. If I put too much in the pan, once the bottom is covered I'll pour some out into the sink.

Julia Child says an omelet should take 20 seconds to cook. For me it works out closer to a minute. Either way, it's not long.

I shake the pan immediately so that the egg doesn't stick to the bottom. And sometimes I'll tilt it so that the egg liquid will flow beyond the edge of the puddle that it formed at first, making the omelet bigger.

When it's about halfway done, I'll sometimes sprinkle dill in. Or thyme. Then I use a spatula to fold the omelet in half. That way half of the bottom is cooking at a time, which means the insides can spend more time total being cooked.

When it's 3/4 of the way done, I flip it over.

And that's it. Simple. But delicious. You seemed to agree.

We did not equip you to function in the real world.

Your mom and I are trying really hard to be clear about what we think is acceptable behavior. There are certain things we value--honesty, courtesy, confidence, responsibility, stuff like that--and we want to raise you to value those things, too.

Why? Well, that's a valid question.

We know that some of the things we hope you'll come to value can actually put you at a disadvantage in the world. For instance, if you're competing for a job against someone who's as qualified as you, and they lie on their resume, it's not going to help you land the job if you don't.

If we've done our jobs well, you won't. Which might cost you that job--and lots of other jobs. At some point you're probably going to end up believing that we held you back.

We're okay with that.

We're okay with that, not because we believe the liars are going to get caught, and not because we believe in some divine justice that's going to make everything all right in the end, and not because we think failure builds character, but because when you do get the job, it'll be the right one. You'll end up working for the boss who actually checks your references and verifies your employment. Someone who values your honesty as much as your experience.

You'll be able to do your best, secure in the knowledge that it's your performance, not your politics, that will determine your success.

Eventually, you're going to be in a position to hire people. People you're going to rely on to help you do whatever it is that you do.

When that time comes, we have a feeling you'll be okay with the values we worked so hard to instill in you. And you'll find that while we may have shorted you in one department, you have a different set of tools. Tools that help you surround yourself with people who value honesty, courtesy, confidence, responsibility, stuff like that.

You can't properly see a two-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.

This is going to sound like complicated math, but it's not.

Let's say you're looking at a perfect circle, whether it's the opening to a jar, a coin on a table, or the bell of a trombone. Unless you're looking at it from a point exactly above the circle's center, what you see is actually an oval.

Don't believe me? Find something that's perfectly circular and take a picture of it. Then, just to exaggerate my point, go way off from looking straight down at the center of it and take another picture.

Print the pictures out, then take a piece of tracing paper, and trace the circles you took pictures of.

Unless you're in exactly the right spot, both of the tracings are going to be ovals. (If the first one looks like a circle, rotate the tracing paper a quarter turn and trace the circle again. That'll show you how much you're off.)

So how do you know that something is a circle?

You know because your brain adjusts for your perspective on the circle. It evaluates the information is has about the environment that the shape is in to draw conclusions about the shape.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with life. Well, actually, a lot.

Because a three-dimensional object is more complicated than a two-dimensional one. And a situation is more complicated than an object.

So how do you know what shape things are in? You know because just as with a shape, your brain adjusts for your perspective. And it's no accident that the same word--perspective--is used to mean both the angle and direction from which you view something and the particular frame of mind you have about something.

Your perspective establishes your expectation. But the solution is also a problem if you forget that you have a perspective. Then you only see things from your point of view, without considering that there are other ways to look at them.

The trick is to be aware of your perspective. And to be aware of others'. That way, you can understand why something that looks perfectly obvious to you might not be so clear to somebody else.

When you really know a person, you can write his or her epitaph.

We all have patterns.

Some would say the patterns are inherent, but I'm kind of a fan of free will. I believe we choose the patterns that suit us, within the limitations imposed by heredity and environment.

Doesn't matter for the point I'm making here. What matters is that once you become your own person, what you do, and what is done to you, can be expressed so simply, it can fit on a tombstone.

Take your mother. Someday, if she dies before me, I'm going to make her a bench instead of a headstone. She loves places to sit, and one of her charming idiosyncrasies is that if she's given $1,200.00 to furnish a room, she'll spend $1,100 on a couch and two chairs. Even if the room already has a couch and two chairs.

The bench is going to be hewn by hand from a single slab of the heaviest stone I can find. Because your mother appreciates the hand made. And because whenever we would travel, she managed to find the heaviest, most cumbersome souvenir she could. In San Jose del Cabo it was a pulpit made of timbers that must have originally been used to support the roof of a cathedral. In Mazatlan she found a concrete rain god. When we went to Turkey, we brought back not just two very heavy wool rugs, but probably 50 pounds of glass.

I'm going to place the bench in the most remote, isolated place I can find. Because your mother loved both surprises and helping people. A surprise that would help people would be the best gift she could give for eternity, even if was only a comfortable place to sit in the last place you'd expect to find one.

But what the epitaph goes on, and where the thing the epitaph goes on is placed, are totally distinct from the epitaph itself. It's the difference between style and substance, both of which define a person.

What goes on your mother's bench, out there in the wilds of Patagonia, are the words, "I think I see the trail picking up again."

There's a story behind those words.

Your mother and I once went out to Lake Arrowhead for the weekend with my cousin Shari and some of her friends. One afternoon, we went for a hike.

Actually, it was a walk. Into the woods. With no preparation, no maps, no compasses, no water, no food, and no idea what we'd run into. After a while, the trail started to become a bit, well, thin. We could have turned back, but your mother forged cheerfully ahead.

Hours later, it was too late to turn back. We had no idea where we were and any bare patch of ground might have been the "trail." We were surrounded by trees and brush, with no obvious way to proceed. And it was getting dark.

Your mother shimmied under a fallen tree--one that had clearly been down for decades--shoved her way through a clump of bushes, and disappeared. And that's when I heard her voice, cheerful as ever: "I think I see the trail picking up again."

That, in a sentence, is your mother.

Where others see despair, she sees hope. Where others expect failure, she expects success.

In this case, just like every other case, she was right. When I got under the tree and through the brush, I didn't see a trail. None of us did. But somehow, following her, we managed to get back to the car.

I'm showing off now, but I can give you a couple more examples. Your grandfather's tombstone should say, "As I say." Because if he lives long enough for you to know him, you will discover that what drives him--what absolutely defines him--is his need to be known for knowing.

As for your Uncle Sterling, I can't tell you the epitaph, but I can tell you that the dates will be wrong. And knowing him, he'll probably have four or five graves so that one set of friends won't accidentally run into another set of friends if they happen to decide to pay their respects on the same day.

Your grandmother will have a really nice plot with a lovely view, but she'll be facing the wrong way. And her headstone will say something to the effect of, "See? I knew this was a lousy spot." Twenty years after being buried, she'll be proved right. The cemetery will wash away in a flood or toxic chemicals will be discovered leaching into the soil.

And what about me? I don't really want a headstone, so it's hard to imagine an epitaph. But if there is one, it's probably something really clever, really profound, and not quite complete.

Keep your mind open to change.

This might surprise you. It surprised me. After having been on this planet for more than 45 years, I thought I'd pretty much figured out what I believed in.

My oldest friend is my buddy Carlos from Argentina. We met in 11th grade, which means we've known each other for more than 30 years. And from the beginning, he and I argued, debated, and discussed political philosophy.

Neither one of us ever thought the other would modify his position. And while each of us was convinced the other was wrong, we both knew that our fundamental beliefs were well-considered.

Carlos didn't change my mind. He couldn't have. But a lot of stuff happened during the presidential election of 2008 that did.

I'm not going to go into details because the point here isn't specifically what I believe, but more importantly, that the things I believe--and believed so strongly--changed.

It was hard, but I called Carlos back in November and told him about my "conversion." He was a gentleman about it, and didn't give me too hard of a time.

And that's what a real friend does. But I'll get into that in another section.