You see I have hit a bit of a reading slump over the past six months, a time period that just so happens to coincide with the birth of my first child.

Let’s turn back the clock to six months ago. I was preparing to have a child like most other fathers, mainly doing whatever my wife told me to do. I was, and continue to be, pretty pumped to have a baby. We had registered for all the necessary things, and by necessary I mean largely unnecessary, sleeping apparatus, feeding equipment and the ever important University of Kentucky basketball clothing that all little girls need.  Eventually, at the request of my wife, I even put together a small bag of necessities for the possible mad dash from our apartment to the hospital.

Among the items in my hastily packed hospital bag was a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I figured that with my wife most likely exhausted and finding myself alone in a hospital room, there would be plenty of time to read. Well between visitors, nurses, the baby and the complete lack of sleep for a few days, the number of sentences read in Infinite Jest were indirectly proportional to the amount of free coffee from the hospital that I drank.

When Josh and his family came to visit us he almost immediately pointed out the absurdity of not only bringing a book to the hospital but also my choice in book being a particularly thick, figuratively and literally, read. I probably should have realized at that point that a bumpy literary road lay ahead.

I have read a few pages out of Infinite Jest since then. I have read several other books, but Infinite Jest has been put on hold.

Having a child wreaks havoc upon your daily schedules and routines. Is it worth it? Absolutely, but at some point you should get back to doing at least some of the things that you enjoyed before having the baby. Also, I should note that the first few months of having a kid are exhausting, and extremely difficult, especially on your sleep. It gets better and eventually you will not only return to some semblance of a normal life, but you will also have time to actually interact with your baby, not just feed it and put it to bed.

Before I get to the dos of reading in the time of kids, let’s have a look at the don’ts.

Do not use the baby’s nap time as your reading time (at least early on). Nap time might seem like the most logical free period to pick up that novel you have been putting off reading for the past few months. I think that this is a mistake. Allow me to explain. Nap time is one of the few moments that you will have alone with your wife, moments of uninterrupted, quiet and relatively peaceful interaction with your significant other. Similarly, someone has to be home while your child naps so don’t simply assume that since your wife can stay home that you can run out and do something that you want or need to do. I doubt your wife will be thrilled that you snuck in a quick round of disc golf or read Huck Finn by the creek on a 7o degree spring day while she stared out the window watching the other mom’s play with their kids. You should probably spend this time talking to each other, perhaps about topics other than the baby, asking how each other’s day is going. You could also use nap time for more amorous pursuits just remember that this is how you got here in the first place. The point is, use nap time as a moment together. Even if it is just laying on the couch/bed and taking a nap together.

Think twice before deciding to stay up late, while your wife sleeps, in order to read that book on your shelf that has been gathering dust. As with all of the advice offered here there certainly are exceptions, but allow me to explain. Staying up late when you are exhausted is generally a bad idea. Below I will suggest that you wake up earlier to read and you may think that it is no different than staying up late. For me there is a big difference as I can always focus more clearly after sleeping as opposed to when I am tired. Secondly, if your wife is anything like mine,  she wakes easily and when you come to bed at midnight you have then caused  your wife to wake up. No good can come from that.

A few suggestions:

Read on long car rides. Every once in a while I will have to travel a long distance to the job site where we will work. This means that I sit shotgun to the guy I am working with and sometime we can spend up to three hours in the car per day. When this is the case I usually pack a book and a pen. This is obviously not the best choice for many of you prone to car sickness, but for me it is a great way to get in some much needed reading time.

Read on your lunch break. I would bet that many of you already take advantage of your lunch break to read. I have done this several times. As a construction worker it seems a bit pretentious to pull out Infinite Jest and read it while eating a PB&J sandwich but sometimes there aren’t any other options. It can be a pain to lug a book around with you all day, especially if you work outside of an office as I do, but you could always find smaller editions that can be concealed and carried quite easily, and without a permit at that.

Read early in the morning. This has become my go to reading time. Before the baby was born I would wake up at 5 A.M. and spend thirty minutes to an hour, depending on where I was working and when I needed to leave, reading. For me this usually includes a biblical passage to start of the morning followed by whatever book I am reading at the time. So for example right now I am working on 2 Corinthians and Oscar Romero’s The Violence of Love. These two readings actually go pretty well together and make great companions. Many times it will not work out so well, but nevertheless reading in the morning has turned out to be a great choice for me both mentally and spiritually.

It has required that I change my schedule and habits a bit. Obviously I have to wake up earlier, but I have quickly acclimated to the hour difference. I have also changed and increased my coffee consumption. Previously I would fill up a traveller’s mug before I walked out the door and I would sip coffee for up to an hour into work. Now I start the pot as soon as I wake up and polish off three or four of my favorite mugs full of joe while I read (I immediately regretted using the word “joe” in pace of “coffee”).

Not only is reading in the early A.M. the most quiet and least distracting time for me to read. It is also the time in which I have the lowest opportunity cost. In other words, if I choose to read for a few hours right after work those are a few hours that I could have spent helping out my wife or playing with my young daughter. Being sixth months old she still requires quite a bit of attention and there is almost always something that needs to be done. If I choose to read then I am missing out on those other opportunities and or duties. However, if I choose to read in the early morning when my wife and child are both still asleep, I am not missing out on a thing, other than sleep, and sleep can easily be made up by going to bed a bit earlier the night before or by drinking another cup of coffee or two in the morning.

I would gladly give up reading for my wife or daughter. Luckily, neither my wife or daughter are Nazis from the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (aka the best movie in the series) and they both allow for the liberal use of books. Even still it can be difficult to find time in the day to accomplish all of the things that I would like to and need to get done. My solution? Wake up early and read for yourself. Spend time with your family as much as possible and try to limit your nightly reading to Dr. Suess and Eric Carle.

A great many smart people claim that TV’s take over as the preeminent form of narrative media started with The Sopranos. HBO was offering something that we hadn’t seen before, or so the story goes.

But I beg to differ. In 1999, right alongside HBO’s strange new animal debuted a regular ol’ network drama called The West Wing. When TV historians (because that’s a thing we have now) tell the tale of how the medium changed in ’99, they don’t often mention the show that brought a big time screenwriter and playwrite (Aaron Sorkin) and won four straight Emmys for Best Drama (I’m not saying awards always get it right, but it’s something). While The West Wing isn’t exactly forgotten (it routinely places pretty highly on “Best of” lists), it too often plays second class citizen to its cable-based brethren. Well, I’m here to tell you that it deserves better, that it deserves to be seen (or re-seen if you missed any of it the first time through).

1. The Theme Music

Not a compelling enough first reason, right? Right. But hear me out. Each episode of The West Wing opens with a short scene that sets the stage for the rest of the show and/or bridges the gap between the current and previous episodes. Almost without fail, the moment that ends the opening scene is (A) particularly profound, (B) shocking or unexpected in some important way, or (C) thoroughly amusing. And then the music swells from nothing into a triumphant wave of horns and strings that I would be totally ok with writing words to and using as our new national anthem. The music alone could convince me to run for office…

2. Its Aspirational Quality

… which leads me here. Politics is an ugly mess. We don’t trust, like, or even expect much out of our so-called public servants, right? The West Wing doesn’t pretend politics aren’t ugly, or that the politicians who create the ugliness should be loved anyway. Instead, it abides firmly by Churchill’s maxim that Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. The show’s characters constantly display ideals and aspirations that even they know they likely can’t achieve, and yet they never stop trying. The President and his staff are the show’s primary characters, and at every turn these people are besieged by the incongruities of political office. Political hectoring and horse trading and obstructionism frustrate their attempts to push an agenda that they feel is best for the country (even if you don’t). But even in these moments of near rage at the difficulties of the process, the show consistently illustrates that this is not just the way it is as a kind of fatalistic cop-out, but that this is the way it must be. Democracy should be messy and difficult and frustrating because nothing good comes easy. Defeats don’t crush their hope of service, they mostly just cause a redoubling of effort. The show loves to throw around the phrase “our best selves” used by Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet to describe the way we might be if we relied on hope rather than cynicism and pushed ourselves to make the right choices rather than the easy ones. I can’t claim that The West Wing shows us politics and government as it is; it aims higher, showing us instead what they might be.

3. Its Focus on Language

This may seem like a(nother) strange thing to focus on when it comes to a TV drama, but as a guy with a passion for the way we use words, The West Wing is practically euphoric. Not only is the writing excellent (although I’ll confess that things become a little more heavy handed and less crisp once you reach the Sorkin-less seasons [5-7]), but the characters themselves – primarily Communications Director and head speech writer Toby Zeigler and his deputy Sam Seaborn – understand just how meaningful language is to the way we address our nation’s most pressing political and ethical issues. These guys live and die with the right choice of words, and they consistently reveal to us all that has to be considered before we open our mouths or put pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard.

4. You WILL Learn Something You Didn’t Know Before

A list of things I first learned about on The West Wing: capital gains tax, appropriations committees, judicial confirmation, mandatory minimum sentences, tax credits, health care reform, and continuing resolutions. This was between ages 14-16, during the show’s original run. Even though the show sometimes has to stage situations where complex governmental or political activity is taking place just so that the audience won’t be lost, these exchanges are usually provide genuine insight into processes that might otherwise remain entirely mysterious to viewers. (Yes, I know you can just look up the things I mentioned earlier, but isn’t delivering them through a satisfying narrative so much better? Yes. Yes it is.)

5. You’ll Want Jed Bartlet to be Your President

Ok, maybe you won’t. Not if you’re one of the lunatics who threatened Curt when he wrote about gun control. But I think a great many people would go for a president (however you feel about the current one) was a devout Catholic, Nobel Prize-winning economist from New Hampshire. There are times when this fictional Commander-in-Chief eviscerates an opponent or drops the hammer in a moving speech that I’m half-ready to leap from the couch and start going door to door. The gravitas of Sheen’s performance and the writing of the character never fail to impress.

So there. The West Wing is currently available in all its glory on Netflix’s instant streaming service. If you don’t have it, sign up for a free one month trial and binge-watch to your heart’s content.

Live Now: Josh Ritter Performs His New Album

From ‘Oz,’ A Less Than Magical Prequel

Fifth-grader is starter on high school team

How Military Posters Have Changed Since the Civil War

Senate Confirms John Brennan As Next CIA Chief

The art of Dave Matthews 

Rare look at Nasa’s moon mining lab Watch02:35

Bin Laden’s ‘mouthpiece’ captured

Chavez under glass — forever

       Thousands march with Chavez coffin

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez dies aged 58

 Juan De Marcos And The Afro-Cuban All Stars: Dig That ‘Dundunbanza’

U.S. drone strike? One word answer

Colorado Boy Falls Out of 3 Story Window, Lands on Feet

Syria rebels detain UN Golan team

Download 100 Songs By SXSW Artists Worth Discovering

America’s Most Depressing States

‘Forgotten’ inmate gets $15.5 million

10 bold predictions for 2013 MLB season

Old Triumph Over Young In Federal Spending, And Sequester Makes It Worse

Scientists Are The New Kings (Or At Least Secretaries) At Energy Department

Steve Boggan, British Writer, Follows $10 Bill Across America

Syria fight spills into Iraq; dozens killed

TSA allowing knives back on planes

The not-so-slight return of Jimi Hendrix

US seeks ‘toughest’ N Korea sanctions Watch01:41

Counting starts in Kenyan election

Pope election to begin on Tuesday

Malaysia troops launch Borneo attack

Does Crime Drop When Immigrants Move In?

Venezuela’s Chavez: An Outsized Personality, A Domineering Figure

Football boss

The Dow Isn’t Really At A Record High (And It Wouldn’t Matter If It Were)

Geek Love

N. Korean prison swallowing village?

Infections With ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Rise In U.S. Hospitals

There are two kinds of dads, dads that are there and dads that aren’t. Don’t be the latter.

If you choose to imbibe, and it is fine if you do not,  remember to stay away from anything clear.

Do something with your hands. That doesn’t mean you have to master it, just try it. You’ll learn more from the process than the outcome anyway. Build a birdhouse, sharpen a lawn mower blade or fix a leaky sink.

When you use expletives liberally it generally suggests that you are too dumb to come up with another adjective.

You may not have your dream job but that doesn’t mean you do nothing and hold out and wait for it. Sometimes being a man means doing what you don’t want to do so you can take care of what needs to be taken care of. A real man can wait.

It’s just a car.

Don’t ever get a tattoo in a language that you don’t know. If you have to look it up don’t get it inked.

Wear whatever you want, don’t let anyone tell you that you are any more or less of a man based on how you dress.

Find something worth memorizing and memorize it. Be it a passage of scripture, lyrics to a song or a quote by someone older and wiser, commit it to memory and in turn begin to commit it to your life.

Watch less and read more.

Take your wife/significant other on dates. Real ones. Out in public. To restaurants that don’t have a dollar menu. And talk and stuff, don’t just sit there thinking about work and other things on your to-do list.

Spend less money on stuff and more money on people.

Sit on the couch less and travel more.

Your political stance says nothing about your manliness. Left/right, pro-gun/anti-gun, soldier/pacifist, big government/little government. In anything believe what you believe, but don’t be arrogant. What you do have to do is treat others with respect

Never be so arrogant that you think your opinion on something is the only correct one.

All generalizations are false, including this one -Mark Twain-

Make it a goal to learn something from someone else at least once a month. This is best done by listening.

Killing something doesn’t make you more of a man.

Make it a goal to teach something to someone else at least once a month. This is best done by example.

Better to have to hire a guy to build you a shelf because you can’t do it than hire someone to take care of your kid because you can’t do it.

Fiction is just as manly as non-fiction.

Video games are just as dangerous as alcohol; both are best enjoyed in moderation.

There are worse things in the world than not understanding sports.

Blue-collar labor and white-collar labor are both important. Don’t ever forget the importance of either.

A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live  -Martin Luther King Jr.-

Crying is acceptable.

Knowing when not to speak your mind is just as important as knowing when to speak your mind.

God created the outdoors, man created the indoors. The outdoors are better, spend time there. It’s OK if you don’t like to fish and hunt but you can still read, eat, sleep and do many other things outside.

Every man should have a favorite author.

Age means nothing. Maturity means everything.

Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.

Thanks for reading. This is a work in progress. We want you to add your  own personal manifesto lines in the comment section below.

We are a group of guys blogging about a variety of topics. You may want to have a look at our most popular posts from last year to get a feel for our site. You can also click on the pages in the top, right hand corner for further info about what we do and who we are. When I say “who we are” what I really mean is ridiculously false biographies of the four main writers.

You may only be interested in what we write about books (FYI- all book related posts are tagged “Outside Of A Dog” If this is the case I have compiled a list of a few of the most read book related posts from our first year in existence.

Always Carry a Pocketbook

Eleven (Really) Long Novels Worth Your While

9 Books You Should Have Read as a Child

Four Reasons You Should Be Reading Graham Greene

Carrying the Torch for Indecency

But What Does it DO? Why Men Need Literature

Holden Caulfield

How to Read a “Classic”

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: The End

12 Books (And An Author) That Every Man Must Read

George R.R. Martin: The Power and the Gory

Books I Want my Son to Read

Lastly, you may have noticed that we are slacking in our post writing these days. All four of the founders of TTAF are pretty busy people. There are four of writers and six and a half (Josh’s wife is expecting) kids between us. There are also many things going on in our lives, job changes, children being born, additional writing assignments, and school. Between all of that, the approaching of disc gold conducive weather, six hour games of Risk every Sunday and March Madness/2013 college basketball recruiting, we are pretty slammed these days. All of this rambling is to simply say that we are looking for people who would be willing to contribute to the site. If you like writing, or even if you don’t but you have something to say, let us know, we would love to have you contribute.

Thanks for reading the site.

Last week, the website Book Riot (www.bookriot.com) made me a contributor. Both of the pieces I submitted in my application were originally published here at TTAF. There is no way I would have gotten this gig without the invitation that Curt, Matt, and Drew extended to me almost exactly one year ago and without the readers who gave me a reason to keep tapping out my rambling diatribes.

As for TTAF, not much is changing. I’ll still be posting here frequently, although less often about books, since that stuff will probably see the light of day at Book Riot first.

This may all seem like small potatoes, but I’m really excited about having a chance to reach an even bigger audience and I wanted everyone who reads this site to understand how instrumental you’ve been in helping me take a step towards one of my biggest goals.

Thanks to Sara for her unwavering support. Thanks to Curt, Matt, and Drew for allowing me to be involved here and in your lives. Thanks to my mom for always reading. And thanks to my friends for being the kinds of people that make faith and the world of ideas a such a part of our communal lives.

Check out my stuff at Book Riot, and, as always, thanks for reading.

The first piece is up! http://bookriot.com/2013/03/04/how-to-dump-a-reading-slump/

A game in need of repair

 Whitey Bulger Bio Profiles Boston’s Most Notorious Gangster

How Did Our Brains Evolve To Equate Food With Love?

One Strategy For A GOP Overhaul? Follow The Democrats’ Example

To Spot Kids Who Will Overcome Poverty, Look At Babies

The Oscars Broadcast, Zooming Way Past Cheeky To Land Squarely On Crass

The Vaportini: A Cocktail Inhaled, Not Stirred

Senate confirms Chuck Hagel

The sequester blame game

 Acceptance of Defense Cuts Signals Shift in G.O.P. Focus

Boy’s bright idea saves lions

Kenyan Teen Uses Lights To Save Cows And Lions

A Rebirth in the Great White North

John Kerry To German Students: Americans Have ‘Right To Be Stupid’

Benedict XVI steps down from papacy

 Book News: 50 Poems From Rudyard Kipling Discovered

Pete Rose: A Living Legend, Off The Record

Man vanishes into bedroom sinkhole

One Strategy For A GOP Overhaul? Follow The Democrats’ Example

Historical Vocab: When We Get It Wrong, Does It Matter?

Natural Gas Dethrones King Coal As Companies Look To Future

How Washington Chose Not To Be Careful With Spending Cuts

19 die in hot air balloon blast

In Depressed Spain, ATMs That Dispense Free Cash

Boehner draws a line in the sequester sand 

The Sports Interview Non–Sports Fans Have to Read: My Talk With NBA Player Royce White

Tumbleweeds cover house

Obama urges court to end same-sex marriage ban

The following is nothing more than the late night ramblings of a heterosexual, christian, male.

I have thought about sharing this opinion for quite some time and after quite a bit of thought I am now hastily scribbling down my thoughts on the matter. Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

As always this opinion is my own and not necessarily that of any other TTAF writer.

I believe that same sex-marriage should be one hundred percent legal.

There, I said it. Now allow me to explain.

I am a christian. I believe that Jesus existed, was the son of God and I attempt to model my life on his teachings (I fail quite often). I also believe that Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, denounce homosexuality as a sin, just as drunkenness, lying, adultery, greed, malice, envy, mistreatment of the poor and many more. I do not think that homosexuality is any more or less a sin than the ones that I struggle with and commit on a regular basis. I believe that a Biblical marriage exists between one man and one woman together in a monogamous and loving relationship.

I am also an American. I was born in Kentucky and enjoy all the rights and privileges of a US citizen. I believe that America was founded by a group of people seeking freedom of all types, religious, political, financial etc. I also believe that some of those men had some type of monotheistic Judeo-Christian faith (the specifics of those beliefs get a bit hairy). Again, I do not believe that make America a christian nation, in as much as it is impossible for any nation to be a (insert religion here) nation. I know that there are many people in America that do not have the same faith that I do. It is wrong, in my opinion, for me to expect my government to create laws, legislating the morality of my religion, upon people who are not a part of that same religion.

Please note that I am attempting to approach the topic from a legal matter. It is my thought that under the law there is no such thing as a gay, straight, black, white, young, old, christian, non-christian, or disabled American. There are only Americans. It is wrong to discriminate against a person.

Many will make the argument that by making gay marriage legal there is some sort of impact on “the sanctity of marriage.” Allow me to disagree. Two men and or women were probably married in some corner of the country today. I still love my wife. To my knowledge my wife still loves me. Our marriage did not become anything less in either of our opinions, which are the only two opinions that matter in our marriage. We are still madly in love and no number of gay men or women getting married will have any effect on that. Similarly, while on the topic of “the sanctity of marriage” let us not forget the toll that our current divorce culture is taking on marriages, families and children who will grow up and be in relationships.

Once more allow me to reiterate. I believe that gay marriage is morally wrong according to my own christian faith. But that does not mean that it should be illegal. I do not expect the government to legislate the morality of my religion, or any religion over the religion or belief of any other citizen.

I could be wrong, I have been wrong before, but I do not remember reading about Paul spending his time protesting Roman laws, or lack thereof, that went against his beliefs. I would imagine there would have been quite a few more than there are in America. Rather Paul preached the Gospel and let it fall among those willing to hear it. He discipled believers. He most certainly spoke out against moral issues which he believed to be out of line with the teaching of Jesus, but that was his focus, not the statutes of the Roman legal system.

If gay marriage were to become legal in America tomorrow it shouldn’t make a difference to those of us who will not go out the next day and marry someone of our own sex. Legally, I believe that homosexuals are owed the right as Americans to marry one another if they choose to do so. Morally, I believe the act is wrong, but I do not expect everyone to live by my own moral code.

It’s getting late and I have a long day of work tomorrow, please don’t fill up my inbox with obscenities ala the post on gun control. This post was by no means a comprehensive or well written essay on the topic so please continue the discussion below. I will do my best to participate.

Campfire Cologne

Campfire Cologne is being offered yet again as a part of the Huckberry Essentials: Grooming store. I think the video below sums it up best.

Life Straw

Camping season is upon us and any outdoorsman worth his salt should have a way to filter water on him at all times. Life Straw is a great and space saving option when you find yourself in a pinch for clean water.
 

Prints From Old Try

These are some my my favorite items on the site right now. I am particularly fond, and partial to, the Kentucky print.