Falling Asleep in Any Chair With Even the Slightest Recline
Dads typically love websites that want you to accept all of their cookies, are a landmine of links that bring you perilously close to the edge of the dark web, and are an echo chamber of countless people’s misinformation that collectively forms the strength of an off-shore hurricane, of which the coast is aware of and lightly threatened by but is shakily confident its need for anarchy is fairly contained and easy to keep a thumb on – e.g. Reddit.
Because I know dads have infiltrated every nook and cranny of this informational black hole, I poked around until I found the post “Why do dads nap in the living room”, in which this comment gave me a chuckle (as I envisioned the Lowe’s theme song lightly playing in the background):
And then I realized there is a weird sanctity of the nap chair. It was either Confucius or a dad speaking about his designated living room chair who said “the best naps are the naps that you weren’t planning”. There is typically one spot in the living room where everyone else in the household never seems to sit, as if all acknowledging some unspoken agreement that this is his sanctified area. No one knows where it came from (it seems to have magically manifested after the age of 45), how it became only his chair, and why it is so comfortable to render him comatose in under 5 minutes. The nap chair has supernatural abilities, allowing him to restfully snooze while his hand is still gripping the remote and “Diners, Drive-in, and Dives” is blaring at full volume (because his hearing isn’t what it used to be) and rendering him blissfully unaware of anything happening in the room because he was just “resting his eyes”. The house could literally be on fire and he would be in the protected aura of nap mode, a skill only honed by the most fatherly.
Many say that for women, the moment upon giving birth our motherly instincts all come rushing to the surface, along with a tyrannical urge to rule the PTA with an iron fist. For men, these idiosyncrasies slowly emerge over time, becoming more comically obtuse with age. While quirks like never letting anyone touch the thermostat to insisting upon doing every home-improvement job himself instead of paying a professional are adorable, the relationship between a dad and his recliner is the true crown jewel of wholesome, innocuous dad’isms.