Choose the kids. There will be plenty of time later to choose work.

Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own.

The dark aftermath of the frontier, of the vast promise of possibility this country first offered, is an inflated sense of American entitlement today. We want what we want, and we want it now. Easy credit. Fast food. A straight shot down the interstate from point A to point B. The endless highway is crowded with the kinds of cars large enough to take a mountain pass in high snow. Instead they are used to take children from soccer practice to Pizza Hut. In the process they burn fuel like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow's coming.

And a great misunderstanding is that children think their parents are grown-up, and parents feel obliged to act as if they were.

My father expected his first child to be a boy, and when it didn't turn out that way he didn't let the fact get in the way of a good story.

At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year after year, decade after decade. I remember I very badly wanted to write a newspaper column when I was only 21 years old, and I went to my editor and told him that, and he said, "You're a really good writer, but you haven't lived long enough to be qualified to live out loud."

I think there was a long period of time when we got real invested in a youth culture, and not coincidentally it was when the baby boomers, who let's face it, take up a lot of space on the planet, were young.