I am Heroic. Period.

My daughter’s friends were over the other day. My daughter’s friends are all hyper intelligent and busy as hell just like my daughter but, unlike her, they all have hero-quality dads who bend steel bars with their bare hands for a living and rescue babies from vats of molten lead and who, most of all, go away during the day to return haggard and stoic and dead tired sometime after 5pm.

I, on the other hand, wrestle laundry to the basement and immerse myself in the minutiae of dishwasher load planning and the use of “bluing” to make my whites whiter. I also make twisted knock knock jokes¹ and have a tendency to sing where I ought to mumble and I have, somehow, become their hero.

I didn’t mean to and I say somehow but I’m being unnecessarily (and uncharacteristically) modest--I know exactly how I became their hero: I told them I chart my daughter’s . . . um . . . I keep a record of, uh . . . I mark the calendar for. . .

I’m steadfastly abreast of her punctuation.

This is not the lowest depth my steady emasculation, by the way. That’s surely marked by me sitting through a stuttering presentation of a Hugh Grant movie so insipidly British even Hugh Grant was rolling his eyes--IN THE MOVIE HE WAS STARRING IN! It was a chick flick so flicking chicked I think I grew breasts while I was watching. But, such is marriage. I made my attorney sit through Spawn once so I owe her forever.

It is, however, a most unmasculine thing to do, to chart the, er, grammatical manifestation of your little princess. In fact, if you are a man, just Stumble elsewhere. I’m embarrassed, ok? Chicks, keep reading.

It all started because [My Attorney] is pretty much too frikkin busy to pay attention to her own [red swarm]. One day she was working hard, staying up late after a 14 hour day deciphering antennae displacement graphs or something equally insanely technical. She was sleep deprived and focused with such unwavering intensity that she actually burned a hole through a deposition with her very eyes.

She said “God I feel like crap. I feel bloated and woggly and irritable and—“

“You’re getting your [red tide]”

“I just had my [monsoon wedding]!”

“Yeah, 27 days ago.”

She’d been working so hard she’d actually lost her sense of time. I think if she didn’t have a calendar on her blackberry, she wouldn’t know what day it was. So her [mighty mighty bosstone] snuck up on her and smacked her across the head. I felt sorry for my little legal Lolita and decided to add her [insane in the membrane] to my automatic calendar and I’ve been charting ever since. To the minute.

Being that busy, she never really explained to the teen that this is a regular occurrence, that it can be expected, that JEANS DAY on the calendar is not referring too a dress code.

So, in for a dollar if you’re in for a dime. The next time my daughter screamed “PAD!” from the bathroom, I tossed a couple in (like grenades) and put her on my calendar too.

So there she is, hanging with her friends—ok . . . hanging is way too energetic to describe what they do. They flop. They flop over the chair. They flop down in front of the TV. They flop down the steps, flop into the car, and flop out. They’re virtually boneless. They're all draped across the furniture expending less energy than most dead field mice when I casually mention to Rah that I’d stocked the bathroom with [ammunition] and she might want to remember that since she was due for her [screaming orc horde].

Her friends howled with approval and the Polish one screamed out YOU ARE MY HERO!

So there you go. My ability to suppress my natural male tendency to fish and work on trucks in favor of ticking off the days until the women in my life are assaulted by their respective [mammy tsunamis] has elevated me to the level of hero. I should have a statue.

I can see myself now, standing tall, cast in bronze, a metallic cape forever blown behind me in chunky statuesque bravery, my brow pointed ever eastward, my countenance ever grim, ever focused—-a fistful of tampons at my side.

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(1) KK/WT?/Dyslexic interrupting cow./Dyslexic--/Ooooom!

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