The NYC public school system has over one million students, all of whom are eligible for free lunch and breakfast. Kina avails herself of both, in addition to the breakfast she eats at home. She shares her table with kids from families all over the neighborhood—some well-off, some below the poverty line. The fact that they all eat breakfast, for free, without question or distinction, means that nobody has to be singled out, pitied, or shamed. This is one of the greatest and most important social programs in the city. Kina loves the yogurt.

dad

It is funny to be a kid and believe that you need to have a favorite planet, and then deliberate on the matter and make a choice that involves your parents. That is not how cosmology works, kid!

dad

I really do try not to annoy Kina, but she desperately hates it when I sing, and I went to college for a degree in music performance, so we are at loggerheads here. Still, as annoying as I can be, I am equally lovable in ways that cannot be ignored. This is how family works.

dad

That damn tooth has been wiggly for literal months. I have no idea what it has to do with carnival, but I’m quite proud of her imagined costume and felt it merited top coverage.

dad

It was nice having Lala in town for a few days this week, even if her granddaughter pressed her continually for frilly dresses. That is just their love language. That, and truth.

dad

Thank you to Kina’s darling Lala, here for the weekend, who watched Kina overnight as her parents overate and stayed in a fancy hotel and read the printed Sunday paper like old fashioned humans.

Thank you also to Kina for this chaotic Parade. I helped out with the little Kinas hanging everywhere. If you read this as “for people who goth,” know that I did, too. It actually says “for people who join,” which is apparently her sales pitch for becoming a pledged subscriber. Unique value!

Look. At. Me.

dad

Kina’s Lala is here. Her Mommy’s Mommy, coincidentally, is also here—and it’s been a long time. So in the area grandparental affection, there’s an issue of scarcity and mutual exclusivity that Kina has been wrestling with all day.

There are moments, even without my mother-in-law around, in which Kina doesn’t like us talking to each other. Sometimes she says it’s because it’s distracting. Sometimes she frets that it’s boring. I suspect much of it is about her not being part of the story.

I think readers of this paper can appreciate that Kina is the center of the universe, no? Imagine what it must be like to be the sun—or daughter—when the satellites that orbit you had once themselves been the center of their own respective solar systems, and what it might feel like when two of your satellites begin to orbit each other instead.

The Lala has landed. Let the games begin.

dad

The kid knows a lot about skin and the sea of germs through which our guts meander, separated by mere millimeters from a thorough blobbing-out and horrible sickness that could require the emergency application of a band aid or medicine.

dad

It must be a strange thing to come to that moment in your childhood when you realize that your life is actually, technically, your own. It’s certainly not the case that your parents feel that way, having spent the prior half decade ensuring you do not fall into holes or starve to death; your life is their problem, as far as they are concerned. It’s not even the case that you know what agency in your life truly means—and it is probably a good thing that you don’t.

It’s just that you really wanted a third consecutive pasta meal, and you have come to understand that it is reasonably arbitrary that another human being gets to choose otherwise on your behalf.

I get it. It sucks. They also write newspapers about you every day, which I imagine will also someday be an issue. Until then, it is your life; we just cannot eat another bowl of pasta.

This may well be one if my favorite headlines ever. Living with a kid this age is incredible. She’s sound asleep in the other room, and in the center of the universe. What a gift.

dad

I cannot tell you how proud I am of Kina and her commitment to gowns-for-all in the face of insidious societal transphobia. She’s a fantastic daughter and a great friend to Nicky, whom she’s known for her entire life and who looks totally fetching in his prince’s dress.

This is language she’s constructed for herself, by the way, which is amazing to me. She’s building a moral case for dresses out of plain cloth. It’s sad that she’s having to do this out of a sense of opposition to ignorance, but she’ll need that later on.

We hope that this daily front page has been clear in its commitment to trans lives, and we can promise you that it always will be.

It can’t possibly get much bigger than a hundred and one, can it?

dad

Kina doesn’t see a lot of value in proper tea etiquette.

dad

You heard it here first, folks.

dad

To be fair, caftans are pretty comfortable even when you’re six. She wrote the fake glasses today, too, once the other fake elders finally arrived.

dad

It was truly such an epic weekend that even the sight of Kina on a dance floor at the local bowling alley dancing to a Beyoncé cover band and tearing into a chicken leg was just another passing example of the reckless abandon she brings to her favorite days of the week. Happy birthday, Georgia.

dad

For a very long time now, Kina has asked us to take her to a place of her own invention, where you can dress up in costumes and do makeup things and hang out with your friends and without parents and have your pick of tiaras. Ha! Ha! says her father—surely that is either nonexistent or will cost a million dollars.

Reader, it exists, and you can drop your child off for two hours to the tune of just forty-five U.S. dollars. And! And! They will feed your child high tea and ply her with pink lemonade and take a cute polaroid picture of her dressed up as some princess or another and actually do a reasonably good job with the eye shadow.

Afterwards, when your child is wearing her normal princess dress that she brought from home, they will usher you out into the shadows of 19th Street between 7th and 8th, where your child and her friend will take each other by the arm and start walking down the sidewalk gossiping and laughing, completely ignoring that you are there and being extremely charming to passers-by.

It’s hard to imagine being able to write this newsletter without the invention of movable type by Johannes Dooginsberg. We can all thank Mister Dooginsberg for the advent of affordable bibles and other literature, efforts that underlie outstanding and ironically hand-drawn newsletters like the Daily Kina, to which you can still pledge your eternal allegiance.

Urk.

dad