In case you haven't noticed, I'm a guy. And as such, my behavior is governed by a simple set of Guy Laws, most of which are concerned with fixing things that are broken, or breaking things that offend (the rest are generally centered around beer-guzzling ettiquette, comical farts, and creative use of fire accellerants). The Guy Laws have served the male end of humanity well for millenia, but like any system, they have shortcomings and incompatibilities with various phenomena encountered in the course of one's life. I was intimated with one such incompatibility recently, when my daughter Veronica came down with a cold.

I'm not talking about a mild case of the sniffles here; no, I am talking about 105-degree fever, wierd red spots from head to toe, and raging torrents of baby snot. Ronnie Lou was miserable, and as the only way for a 7 month-old to express her misery is to scream at the top of her disproportionately powerful lungs, Tobi and I were miserable as well. Actually, 'miserable' doesn't really capture the mood as well as 'scared four notches past batshit,' but I digress.

There is nothing more inexcusable in the Guy pantheon than to do nothing when you could be doing something, anything, to fix a broken situation. When something makes my daughter suffer, Guy Law is very simple and explicit in my directed course of action:

1. Identify the offender.
2. Find a bat.
3. Beat said offender into tiny, unrecognizable pieces.
4. Repeat if necessary.

While this procedure works perfectly for telemarketers, used-car salesmen and most home appliances, it is useless against an insensate microorganism that only knows how to reproduce and overrun its host environment, much like Pentecostals. My expertise on farts, beer and homemade napalm proved equally ineffective in the face of Ronnie's sickness, leaving me fully acquainted with the concept of impotent rage, which, it turns out, has nothing to do with angst over losing your erection.

A trip to the Children's Hospital, followed by a consultation with the drummer for Dr. Funk, who is also a pediatrician, led us to conclude that Ronnie needed little more than Tylenol, Motrin, some antibiotics, and a few days' worth of patience. While it felt good to finally do something to fix the problem, gently squeezing a tube of Infant Tylenol down Ronnie's gullet lacked the Guy panache and satisfaction of pounding someone's deserving face into gooey red mush, but no one seems to know who invented the cold. Here I am stuck with unrequited Guy Rage, even though Ronnie's rash, fever and screaming fits subsided days ago. I was genuinely concerned that I might lose my composure at any given moment and just randomly nut up on some poor bastard who just asked me if I had a light, until a more experienced (read: spear bald) father gave me a piece of excellent advice on my pent-up dyspepsia:

Save it for when she starts dating.

I'm sure I'll encounter many, many more daughter-related problems that I cannot solve through perfectly sensible Guy Violence. This will constantly add to my inner store of white-knuckle stress, so that the time Ronnie hits dating age (somewhere in her late forties), I'll be primed to meet her various and sundry suitors with a bloody axe and a drooly grin, because frankly, I will have lost my mind. I'm going to enjoy that phase of my life 'way too much, but I will have earned it.