SOME DAYS.

Some days, you get a message from your carrier in the morning saying you have less than 2% data remaining for the month that ends tomorrow, so you put your phone into airplane mode for the day while you're away from wifi to avoid paying an extra $20.

Some days, you drink coffee black.

Some days, you ditch responsibility and the growing list of to do's and take the family to the water park, and feel smug about how little guilt you feel, especially when the kids remember to say thank you at the end of the day.

Some days, you enjoy a random few minutes of conversation with a stranger about structural engineering and the amazing feats of genius it took to build airplanes and spacecraft in the 1960s.

Some days, your wife winks at you from across a crowded space filled with strangers and it makes you feel super good. Some days.

Some days, you watch your two-year old racing down a four-foot waterslide with an attitude of focus, enthusiasm, and energy that is infectious, and then you realize he's wearing a swim diaper and pray heartily that it holds up on his 497th descent of the slide.

Some days, you watch your eight-year old take on something scary and challenging and dark, like an enclosed supersonic waterslide, and you see him emerge with bravery and the confidence of the conquered, and you feel like Mr. Miyagi must have at the end of the first Karate Kid, even though you know it's not really about you.

Some days, you watch your 11-year old daughter-athlete exit a pool with her mischievous smile of undisguised joy and you want to grab onto that and do whatever it effing takes to keep that mischief and that smile and that inimitable sense of unique self growing boundlessly and eternally.

Some days, you exchange almost no words with your eight-year old son on a rainy afternoon drive because he's so deeply absorbed in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and you smile with happiness at being ignored for a splendid reason.

Some days, you think about stopping for coffee on a rainy day because you really feel like it, and you don't because then you'd wake up your sleeping wife who looks magical with little damp ringlets of blonde drizzled down her face after she's played hard, and besides it means you'd have to take your attention away from listening to Future Islands' Ran, and you're just not okay with breaking up that piece of magic.

Some days, you listen to Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire, the Pixies' Gouge Away, and Xavier Rudd's Storm Boy back-to-back-to-back and think nothing of it.

Some days, you eat a bean burrito from Taco Bell when you're so hungry and it tastes like one of the top five burritos you've ever had in your life. You know it's not true, but for a few brief moments, it seems like it.

Some days, you fight with your wife over a book from the library your daughter finished, and you've both discovered it's pretty good, and then she's two chapters ahead and selfishly dived into bed with it before you could wrest it away. Some days that happens.

Some days, you look over at your wife in bed, reading the book you're supposed to be reading, and she's falling asleep and you can hear frogs singing away in the forest creek a hundred yards away and you know it's time to put the day to rest, because it was a good one, and also you still have .07% of data left on your cell phone plan that rolls over tomorrow, and you totally stuck it to them because you saved twenty bucks. Looks like you're gonna buy yourself some good coffee tomorrow. But that's a different day. Not today.

Some days, you realize were inimitable, like and unlike every other, and you'll carry some special snippets from it around with you for a while. Like...forever.

Some days.