Anonymously Famous II

Me me me me.

My first memory of helping my dad do stuff around the house and garage was when I was 4 or 5 and we got snow tires for the station wagon. Didn't have a lot of weight to put on the jack but I could hold things and fetch things and get the lug nuts started...

And of course, your teenage daughter can't get drunk/raped/pregnant/herpes when she's installing drywall at home on a Friday night (Dad taped Rush during the afternoons so he could listen uninterrupted when he had time...if he would just get broadband, I'd get him a subscription to the podcasts).

I should have thrown in the bit about the studies that show teenage girls have less sex less often with fewer people when they have an involved father (they have even less if they're ugly, or at least that was true when I was in high school...now, probably not so much).

Of course, a girl home working on plumbing won't get asked on dates, go to the prom, get married, or have babies--the last two are the point of the original Kay Hymnowitz article K-Lo posted about earlier--but at least she'll make it out of high school before her life is ruined. I don't know how anyone can go out on the road without knowing how to check/add oil, change a tire, add windshield fluid, but going by the workplace phone-home conversations I've been hearing over and over for the past ten years, complete ignorance of all things practical makes you desirable.

I wonder if the women signing up to learn how to use tools because they don't have a tool-wielding man are reacting to the recent American cultural phemonenon of "male adolescence now lasts until 40" or vice versa or both. It seems like a giant feedback loop...