Let me remove the crust and cut your sandwich into tiny triangles

My table won't stop wobbling unless I hold one side down

There's a certain category of parent or soon to be parent who cares not just that they do the right thing for their children, but also that you know they are doing the right thing for their children. They use a tone which comes off as argumentative and confrontational even though no one has disagreed with them yet; and they are essentially baiting anyone into disagreeing, because they want to argue about something which probably doesn't matter that much.

One subset of this group of folks is the front- vs rear-facing car seat people, who have chosen to focus a lot of energy on something which (on average) almost certainly isn't going to be relevant to their lives. If you don't know about this - there's sort of a moving target of guidance on how to install your car seats. Generally speaking the recommendations are to start off with a rear-facing car seat when you have an infant, and at some point in their future you switch that to front-facing. The exact moment when you switch is the point of contention, and is also something on which expert guidance has changed over the years. There are some guidelines suggesting a certain age (1 year, 2 years, etc) and some suggesting a certain height or weight. There are also some that are of the "as long as possible" variety.

People feel very passionately about this. My take is not that it doesn't matter ... but just that the returns to worrying and fretting about it a lot start to diminish very quickly. Once you have a securely installed car-seat you have probably done the one thing which is worth the time and worry investment. Beyond that, if you are unfortunate enough to be in a car accident where you have a baby in the car and the accident is so bad that the direction in which you installed the car seat starts to become a relevant factor in how things turn out, you are very very far out on the statistical margin, and you can blame bad luck as much as you can your own car seat habits.

There are many more problems in life that are more likely to be relevant to you, and you should worry about those instead because your actions might actually effect the outcomes. This is an awkward thing to explain to anyone because people care a lot about their kids.

A generous serving of beef

Years ago, while reading the bestselling mystery-thriller _Angels & Demons_ by American author Dan Brown, I encountered a character whose name was Carlo Ventresca and whose title was "Camerlengo". As it turns out, the Camerlengo is like an executive assistant for the pope, and translates roughly as "Chamberlain" from the Italian. This person controls the property and revenue and whatnot of the Vatican and the catholic church and so is in a prime position to get into some fictional corruption, and that's what happens in this book, which by the way is not very good.

One thing I enjoyed about reading this book was that I never had to learn how to pronounce "Camerlengo". I just kept reading, and every time I read the word I would avoid trying to say it in my head, and just move right ahead. This was really nice and allowed me to finish the book slightly more quickly than I otherwise could have.

I can't necessarily recommend this as a strategy for reading every book or for how to handle every new word you encounter. If you encounter a word that sounds interesting or important, you might want to take some time out of your day to look up the meaning and pronunciation of that word. But, if you are reading a Dan Brown book and sort of just passing time, it's perfectly cool to just skip ahead without having gained that knowledge. I read this book at least 10 years ago and I just learned how to pronounce that word this morning.