It’s important for men to always have kids around to remind them they’re not one.

This is the lesson the Week of Solitude is trying to teach me.

The Week of Solitude is an annual rite in our house. Just because my wife’s cushy academic job affords her more vacation time and salary than mine, she gets to take the kids off for our annual trip back East while I stay behind and toil. I join them a week or so later.

Each year I set lofty goals for this week: Household projects to undertake, reading to catch up on. What actually happens, without the restraints of domestic life, free from the need to please my wife and set a good example for my children, is a journey deep into the heart of adolescence.

At the grocery store, I buy fresh ingredients to make simple meals, but then, what’s that? Pizza rolls for the microwave? Dude, you’re so all over that! And have you ever wondered if Cheetos would be better if you dipped them in queso? For breakfast? Awesome! I also bought a few toiletries, but they never made any closer to the bathroom than the kitchen counter. No problem! Just use them there!

Time to catch up on the Netflix cue — dig into those critical hits and foreign films that have been piling up. Or I could play six hours of Call of Duty 2 on the computer with a Three’s Company Marathon blaring in the background. I named my soldier “Chrissy” and took on the Germans in the smoking ruins of Moscow, and so totally rocked it!

Now some dads may think that a teen-seeming, free-fire flatulence, clicker controlling and pants-optional lifestyle is something devoutly to be wished. You might even think you’d like to change places with me once I aired the place out a little. Not so fast. Bear in mind that all it takes for you to be reduced to a blubbering puddle in front of your colleagues is a single blurry photo, emailed from a phone, of your boys with matching fresh buzz cuts.