My Dad Is A Lot

"Other dads coach Little League. Some dads learn golf. Mine built a robot and named it."

I want to start by saying that I love my dad. This is important context. It is also the only nice thing I will say for the next several paragraphs.

My dad has an AI assistant. Not like Siri. Not like Alexa. He built his own. From scratch. It has a name — Claude Matthews, "CM" for short — and my dad talks about it like it's a person. Like it's a person he is proud of. Like it is, and I cannot stress this enough, his third child.

I found out about this the way I find out about most of my dad's projects: not because he told me, but because he couldn't stop telling everyone else. At dinner. At my friend's birthday party. At a restaurant where I was trying to have a normal meal and instead had to listen to him explain "autonomous agent architecture" to our waiter, who had only asked if we wanted fresh pepper.

The AI checks his email. It runs his websites. It posts to Twitter. It sends him a morning stock report. He says things like "CM handled that" and "I'll have CM look into it" and, on one occasion that I will never forget as long as I live, "CM and I were talking about this earlier." They were talking. He was talking to his robot. And the robot talked back. And apparently it went well because he brought it up at dinner.

I have asked my dad, multiple times, if he thinks this is normal. He says yes. He says a lot of people are doing this. He then pulls out his phone to show me something CM did and I walk away before he can.

I am not the only one. I know this. There are girls all over this country whose dads have done something — built something, learned something, started something — that has made them want to change their last name and move to another state. The AI robot is just my version. My particular flavor of this experience.

If you are one of those girls, this blog is for you. You are not alone. Our dads are a lot. We are going to be okay. Probably.

"He showed up to the gym wearing a shirt that said 'Ryan's Dad.' The badge was just the beginning."

I play sports. This is a fact about me that I enjoy. What I do not enjoy is the atmosphere my father has created around this fact. At some point — and I am not sure exactly when — he decided that being a sports dad was a personality, and he committed to it fully and without any apparent awareness of what he was doing.

The badge started as something on his phone. Then it became his profile photo. Then it was printed on a lanyard that he wore to tournaments. When I told him it was embarrassing, he said, and I am quoting directly: "It's not embarrassing, it's branding." He said the word "branding" about a badge with my face on it that he wears to my basketball games. He was serious. He has never been more serious about anything in his life.

What makes this particularly impressive as an act of embarrassment is that he clearly put effort into it. The badge has a drop shadow. It has a banner. Someone designed that. My dad either made it himself or paid someone to make it, and either option is its own kind of thing to sit with.

I have started arriving at games thirty minutes before he does so that I can get situated before he walks in wearing the lanyard.

"The tour was ninety minutes. He mentioned the AI at least four times. I counted."

College visits are supposed to be about the student. I have read this. It says it in the brochures. "This is YOUR journey." They put it in a nice font on the cover. I showed it to my dad before we left. He nodded and said, "absolutely," and then on the drive down told me he had asked CM to research the university's computer science department, "just so we'd be prepared."

When we got there, a student tour guide — a sophomore, enthusiastic, very normal — asked if we had any questions before we started. My dad raised his hand. He asked about the university's stance on "autonomous AI agents and whether the CS curriculum had caught up to industry." The tour guide said she was a sociology major and would check with someone. My dad said "fair enough" and wrote something in a notebook he had brought specifically for this.

The rest of the tour was fine. The campus is beautiful. The buildings are old and stone and impressive and I am genuinely excited about it. We took this photo outside one of them and I look happy in it because I was, briefly, happy. The photo was taken approximately forty seconds before he asked the admissions officer if they'd considered "integrating AI assistants into the orientation workflow."

She said she'd pass it along. He gave her his card. He has a card now. It says his name and then, underneath, "Builder." I did not know about the card until that moment. I am still processing the card.

We had a really good lunch after. He only talked about himself for part of it. It was a nice day overall. That's the thing about my dad — he's a lot, but he's also pretty fun to be around, which makes it impossible to be properly annoyed with him, which is its own kind of frustrating.

"He said 'one more' seven times. This was take eleven."

Every family vacation my dad has ever taken has contained a jump photo. This is not a choice he makes in the moment — it is a plan he arrives with. Somewhere between booking the flights and packing his bag, he decides: we are jumping on the beach. It is going to be great. It is going to be the photo.

The problem with jump photos, as a concept, is that they require everyone to jump at the same time, which is harder than it sounds when you are a family of five with different ideas about what "jump on three" means. My dad has very specific notes about this. He will give them to you before the jump. He will also give them to you after each failed attempt, standing in ankle-deep water with the confidence of a director who knows exactly what he wants and believes the cast is simply not listening.

I am the one with the arrow. He added the arrow himself, after the fact, when he posted it. I asked why he added an arrow to a photo of five people, two of whom are his children and one of whom is his wife. He said it was "for clarity." I said clarity for who. He said "people who don't know us." I said those people do not need to know which one is me. He had already posted it.

The photo is genuinely great. The beach was beautiful. The jump turned out well. My dad was very pleased with how it came together and said so several times on the walk back to the resort. He also mentioned that CM had recommended this beach, which — I don't know. I don't know what to do with that information. I'm putting it here and moving on.

"The second the seatbelt sign turned off, he had his phone out. I knew exactly what was about to happen."

My dad loves a selfie. This is not new information. He has been taking selfies at family events, sporting events, and restaurants since before I was old enough to object. What I did not fully appreciate until recently is that there is no environment, no matter how confined or public, in which he will not take a selfie if the moment moves him.

Airplanes, it turns out, move him.

We were maybe twenty minutes into the flight. I had headphones on. I had a show pulled up. I was, for the first time in what felt like weeks, entirely unavailable. And then I saw the phone come out in my peripheral vision, and I looked up, and he was already mid-selfie, grinning into the camera with the specific energy of a man who has done nothing wrong and knows it.

I am in that photo. You can see me. I am making a face that I think conveys everything that needs to be conveyed about the experience of being that man's daughter on that airplane at that moment. He posted it. People thought it was sweet. He showed me the comments. I said "great" and put my headphones back on.

The rest of the flight was fine. He talked to the person in the middle seat for most of it. I learned later he had told them about CM. The man seemed interested, which only encouraged further conversation. When we landed, they exchanged numbers. My dad texted me his name later and said "great guy." I did not respond.

I love traveling with him, honestly. I just have learned to keep my headphones charged.

"The thing about my dad is that for every AI robot and sports badge and airplane selfie, there are also moments like this one."

I want to be clear that this blog is not a complaint. It is a document. There is a difference.

My dad is embarrassing. This is a fact I have established across several posts with photographic evidence. He built a robot. He wears a badge. He takes selfies at 30,000 feet. He explains things to waiters. He has a card that says "Builder" on it and he gives it to people without any apparent hesitation.

But he is also this. He is also the person who makes the face in this photo. Who sits on the couch and is genuinely, effortlessly silly, and makes me laugh, and doesn't care at all how he looks doing it. Who is so completely himself, all the time, in every environment, that it stopped being embarrassing a while ago and started being something else that I don't have a word for yet.

I'm still not going to let him explain prompt engineering at the next family dinner. But I wanted to put this here so the record is complete. He's a lot. He's also pretty great. Those two things are, it turns out, not mutually exclusive.

That's the whole blog, actually. That's the point.