Holy smokes, Internet. You took a trickle of an idea and turned it into a flash flood of open-minded, open-hearted, open-walleted commercial fantasticality. You saw a damsel tied to the tracks and (just a tad under) One Million Moms twirling their moustaches, and you rode in on your steed and shouted, “Aw, hay-ell no!”

OK, it’s not that clear-cut. One Million Moms aren’t evil-hearted. They’re just on the wrong side of progress, and their narrow-minded keening grows fainter every moment.

And Ellen DeGeneres is not a doe-eyed naif. Underneath those pale-blue eyes beats the heart of a stand-up comedian who could probably take you down with a riposte at 20 paces.

But Internet, you definitely rode high in the saddle today.

This post is part of an experiment. It’s 11:45pm on Friday night, my kids are asleep, I’m jacked up on some ridiculously chewy French roast, and 1,349 people have committed to shop at JCPenney on Sunday, as part of the Shop-In to support the company’s decision to stand by Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson. The Facebook page also tells us the news has reached 6,971 other people, who have been invited by their friends.

Thirty-six hours ago, there was bupkis.

Twitter is really fun during a widely viewed event like the Super Bowl. It’s like having a few thousand friends in your living room cheering on the pomp and ridiculing the circumstance.

During the game, a lot more tweets related to the ads than the game itself, and most of them came from women I follow. Perhaps the men were too busy watching one of the most compelling Super Bowls EVER. (And the boys, too: Both my sons are indifferent to football, and neither could look away. My 6yo, TwoBert, spent most of it bouncing like a bedbug on the couch.)

(And attention naysayers: Eli might not look or act the part, but he has two rings. The same as his brother and Frodo Baggins combined. He’s an elite quarterback. Go pick on somebody else.)

Twitter was pleasantly a-flitter until it blew up over the GoDaddy ad. People hate GoDaddy anyway, because they suck. For the eighth Super Bowl in a row, it tried to lure guys to the site with nearlynudes and the promise of MORE NUDITY! (There wasn’t.)

No, really! This year’s even HOTTER THAN BEFORE! (No it isn’t.)

It was embarrassing, and stale, yet it still seems to work. Otherwise, why would they still be shoveling out this same crap year after year?

Women were universally appalled, and rightly so. Soon afterward, however, we saw nearlynude David Beckham showing off his new line of boxerbrief/hotpants, and these same women who decried GoDaddy were anointing the Becks ad as “their favorite, by far.”

What?

This is all very new to me.

Throughout my kids’ lives, I’ve been mostly a homebody. I rarely traveled for my office jobs, and when I worked as a teacher, not only did I never go anywhere, I was home early. And had summers off. Plenty of time for shenanigans with my then-younger children.

Here’s another fun fact: When I realized that my passport had expired last fall, I realized I hadn’t used it to leave the country once. ONCE. For a brief, nauseating moment, I felt like George Bush.

After my marriage cratered, and I had to move out, one stipulation I fought for was that I could come to the apartment every afternoon and hang with the boys until she got home from work. I was grateful she agreed to that, so the kids would know that even though my stuff was gone, I would always be there.

But that was before I got this latest job, as Dad 2.0 Summit-eer. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. A true labor of love, but also a labor. And over the past few weeks, it’s ramped up my plane travel to the point where I’m suddenly Ryan Bingham in the TSA line. And for the first time, I spend days at a time away from my kids.

I’m glad you’re here, because I’m sitting on something of a dilemma. Or perhaps, a paradox. Maybe we should just call this a diledox and move on.

I am a football fan. Not in the rabid, DirecTV Sunday ticket, watch-every-game-and-obsess-over-my-fantasy-stats sort of way, but I watch. I was nuts as a kid, and part of me retains that nutsery when the Giants play in the Super Bowl. Especially when the Giants won in 2008 over the heavily favored Patriots, and I spent the next hour in the streets of Manhattan, high-fiving strangers until my entire upper body was in full-scale rebellion.

This was an important victory, because the Giants are a virtuous and good, owned by a venerable NFL family that gave us The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

And although Tom Brady is dreamy (and a big deal around here), his coach is a grumpy, low-down, cheating schnook.

Some of you may be aware that Magda and I used to be married. To each other. And we write a blog about co-parenting called When The Flames Go Up, where we try to talk candidly about our experience as divorced co-parents. The other day Magda wrote a post about reacting to other people’s divorces, and how stunning it can feel when two people who seem happy together announce that they’re not. When I read it, I was surprised by my reaction, and by how sanguine toward divorce I feel I’ve become.

This wasn’t always the case. When I saw “When Harry Met Sally …” in the theater, it was 1989. I was 23 years old. In the first present-day scene, at the Central Park Boathouse, Carrie Fisher’s character wants to fix Sally up with a guy from her “little black recipe box.” And when she finds out he’s married, she folds the corner of his index card and replaces it. When I saw that, I thought, “What? He’s married! You can’t keep his card. Rip it up! He’s off the market now!”

Pathetic, right?

Three things changed that.

January is and always will be a crappy-ass month. It’s cold, leafless, chapped, debt-ridden, and deadly. There’s really no reason to get up in the morning in January, unless your NFL team is in the playoffs. But one thing that helps make this perpetually rotten month a little more bearable is the chance to make New Year’s resolutions.

People give resolutions a bad rap, because so many of them fall so quickly by the wayside. (Right now, your gym is stuffed with sweaty, grunting loafpeople who’ll be back on the couch by Groundhog Day.) But it doesn’t matter whether our resolutions fail. It matters that we still endeavor to make them. Resolving to try to improve the thing that is us means we still have hope. Our lives are worth living, and we want to be better at them. We might be trying to fill a bathtub with a big hole in the bottom, but at least it isn’t empty. And if you don’t make resolutions, you’re either 1) perfect, or 2) shivering naked in a waterless tub, waiting for the sweet release of death.

Over the last five years, most of my resolutions can be grouped under the broad umbrella of Get Better At Being A Divorced Parent. In excess of that, here’s what I’ll be trying in 2012:

The thing is, I spent much of New Year’s Eve 1984 in an Atlanta drunk tank.

I was a sophomore at the University of Virginia, and several bunches of us road-tripped from Charlottesville to see the Cavaliers play in the Peach Bowl. It was the team’s first-ever bowl appearance, and nobody quite knew what to make of its chances. (The announcers had barely heard of us; when the team stormed onto the field, Verne Lundquist roared, “And here come the Cavaliers from Charlottestown!”) Purdue had a star quarterback and was heavily favored, and we were 1) young, 2) stupid, and 3) full-blown acolytes of New Year’s Eve = Drink Yourself Stupid.

So we had this brilliant idea: let’s do a shot of bourbon for every first down Virginia gets. I remember supporting this fervently, because I wasn’t much of a drinker in high school and was determined to catch up all at once.

To our amazement, we got several first downs early in the game. Which means I don’t remember much of anything else.

Christmas means three very important things to me: The first is the scene in “Talladega Nights” when Ricky Bobby comes home to find his wife with his best friend and asks incredulously, “You want a divorce?” And immediately his two sons throw their arms in the air and exult, “Yay! Two Christmases!”

When I first heard that, I laughed out loud, which movies almost never make me do. And laughing at that particular joke told me the worst of my divorce was over, and my kids and I were going to be OK.

The second great thing about Christmas is that it finally plunges a stake in the heart of The Christmas Season, which is 98% awful. There are glimmers of light, of course. Like the decorations, and the excited kids, and the Sixth Annual Blogger Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concert. (And the cookies!) But the rest is just a big pile of Wretched, and for the sake of my sanity, and to preserve the joy of the actual day, I reject it completely.

When I was in high school, I contributed to a student-run Underground Newspaper. It was cool, because it was SUBVERSIVE. And decidedly low-tech. All we had was a typewriter, a copy machine, and a healthy disrespect for Mr. [REDACTED], the cranky SOB who hovered over us at lunch just because of that one time when [ALSO REDACTED] completely obscured the cafeteria clock with butter pats.

That paper was the tangible beginning of my deep abiding affection for print humor. It’s just so indelibly nerdy. We need our Onions, Spys, National Lampoons, and Insert Eyerolls, because we need to speak sass to power. And feel the artificial empowerment of Sticking it to The Man.

You can imagine, therefore, how my heart leapt when my son told me he wanted to write a humorous newspaper and print it out so he could show his friends. Was I ready to encourage my son’s desire to tweak authority? Sweet Mother of Gumby, yes I was.