Dat's me.

Like Chris, I too have my mind on bad fathers today, only the bad father is me. Or really, what I am is a bad husband, if the folks at the website Kaboose can be believed.

I came across a short survey that women can take on the habits of their husbands, with the idea of determining which “popular celebrity dad” my wife (or in this case, my ex) conjured up “when [she] closed her eyes, and imagined the perfect man “gracing the magazine covers.”

In short, you answer a series of questions about your husband and at the end, it tells you which celebrity father he comes closest to being (minus the money, muscles, power, fame, etc.).

In the interests of science I decided to take the quiz.

I immediately realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as I imagined. First question was what kind of breakfast in bed your husband serves you. Here were the choices:

• A. Double shot vanilla latte, steak and eggs.
• B. Belgian waffles with blackberry syrup, a coffee, and some bacon on the side
• C. Eggs Benedict with fresh fruit salad and hand-squeezed orange juice

Now, in the seven years of misery that were my marriage (plus three living together prior to that) I never once served my wife breakfast in bed, never made her waffles, don’t know how to make a latte, and the only thing I ever considered “hand-squeezing” was her neck [legal disclaimer: this is a joke; I never considered anything of the sort]. What should I answer then? Well, I went to college, so I know what to do when stumped by a question: I answered C to everything.

This included this little sweetheart of a query: “Your man is known for being:

• A. a real sweetheart who is always there to help
• B. a hands-on dad who is talented in many ways [questions: are they implying oral sex?]
• C. a bit of a tough cookie [translation: PRE-NUP], or so it seems to others, but is really a softie at heart.

C for everything! This meant that, by the survey’s end, I appear to be the sort of man who knows karate, likes to fence, is always up for a “rocking concert,” and drives a Bentley. Score!

Once my answers were tabulated the celebrity dad I most resemble was….this guy below. Sheesh. I wonder: if I did any of the things in the survey, would I still be married? Thank God I didn’t.

Curse You, FAA!

You may have heard about the air-traffic controller at JFK who let his kid step up to the microphone and start directing planes last month. And you can’t quite hate the FAA for coming down like a ton of aircraft parts on the guy. It’s bad enough up there, where the flights are arriving and departing more than once per minute, 1,300 times per day. People are berserk about this, and it looks like he’s going to get canned. He sure as hell shouldn’t have done it.

But come on. The dad told the kid to say “you’re cleared for departure,” and the kid said “you’re cleared for departure.” Then the pilot told him he was awesome, and dad stepped back up to the desk. On a safety-risk scale of 1 to 10, this is a zero. It’s clearly the appearance of concern, rather than actual concern, that’s causing people to freak out here. Firing the guy? When there is a severe shortage of good controllers? Reprimand him, suspend him for a week, whatever. Send a message, and move on.

By the way, I am so jealous of that kid. (One of my best memories of being 6 years old centers around a trip to see the mainframe at my dad’s workplace, back when few people had ever seen a real computer outside the movies. I came home with a printed-out ASCII-character-based picture of Snoopy, which I kept for years.) Get me up in the tower at JFK, even today, and you’d have to pry the mic out of my hands.

OK, so Slate is only trying to keep you from getting laid if you’re trying to bed your child’s babysitter, but still.

I was somehow elected by DadWagon to take on this topic, I think out of some confusion: I said earlier that a previous babysitter had a crush on my son, not me crushing on the babysitter. And, really, I don’t know what the babysitter scene is like outside of New York, but we don’t really have barely-legal teen babysitter/cheerleader types in Gotham, so the whole American Beauty thing just doesn’t apply.

What does apply here and everywhere is that widowers raising children, like the dad who wrote to Dear Prudence’s column, are heroes. And heroes deserve to get laid (that’s why this woman slept with 300 NY Firefighters).

Here’s what the widower has to say about the babysitter, 24:

She just told me she has a serious crush on me and is restless in her relationship. She has also made feints into discussions about sex with me, which I’ve brushed away. She is very attractive, and I have been completely alone since my wife passed, so this is pretty awesome on about 100 levels.

Can you tell how happy the guy is? You can practically hear him smiling through his words. Not even a columnist with Prude in her name could rain on that parade, right? Wrong. Her answer, in part:

I’m afraid pursuing this young woman, awesome though it may sound, is a bad idea on about 100 levels… Hooray that your sap is running again. So use the motivation she’s provided you to start looking for someone more suitable to date.

Now, readers of DadWagon know that I have name-checked sex advice columnist Dan Savage before (though truth be told I doubt he knows/remembers me from our brief overlapping time at the Stranger). Savage sometimes gets a bad rap for advising people to break up too much. I don’t believe that, and I applaud him for doling out the best Valentine’s Day advice of the year this time around: dinner/wine/chocolate AFTER sex, not before. So simple! So smart! He deserves all the joy this unrelated but awesome news will give him this week.

Savage would, I think, have answered this differently. And I think maybe Prudie deserves a bit of  a bad rap for keeping widowers from having sex. Yes, she’s usually somewhat measured and non-hysterical (although it’s easy to come off as sex-positive when your readers are concerned about mental adultery). But I disagree with her here: there’s no reason why sex couldn’t be good for both the dad and the sitter. Yes, it would complicate things. But sex and relationships are always complicated, and in this case there are no workplace harassment laws he’d have to deal with. She’s more than legal age, he’s more than deserving. Let them work out the sex/childcare conundrum in whatever manner they choose. Like adults.

Of course, in a week where Matt and the rest of us have been called cocksitters more than once, maybe I’m just unclear on what duties being a babysitter actually entails.

The USS Frugal Traveler deploys once more

And so, once again, I’m about to head off on a long trip. Eleven days this time—no wife, no baby. It’s hard to say if it was like this last time—that was back in, what, October or November—but I guess I’m kind of sad. When Sasha was just a little pre-sentient nugget, I knew she’d hardly even notice I was away.

Now, though, I was just getting into the habit of picking her up from day care, and hearing her say “Daddy” and all that stuff that I hate getting all emotional about. (Almost crying, almost crying!) And today, I’ve just heard from Jean, Sasha burst into tears at day care when Jean tried to leave. I guess this is how it’s going to go, easy partings balanced by crushing ones.

Let’s just hope the scales are re-tipped in my favor when I return—melancholy good-byes are sometimes worth it for ecstatic reunions.