So I was just in the bathtub reading through the ginormous pile of catalogs that I’ve received in the last few weeks (yes, I know I could get off all those mailing lists, but I like to look at the pretty pictures!). I fell in love with a few things, none of it stuff I needed at all, but stuff I wanted, stuff I desired, stuff I coveted, and I figure someone must be buying this stuff for someone somewhere…so I want to know how normal women get this stuff as gifts without coming right out and saying BUY ME THIS RING ON PAGE 32! I must’ve missed out on the women’s seminar on how to get fabulous gifts when I was instead attending the seminar on how to snake a drain or something that I deemed more useful at the time.
I love presents. I love good presents. I love surprise presents for no reason at all, the ones that I don’t have to ask for and yet are so perfectly perfect I want to pee in my pants. But how do you get them? Men are not looking at these catalogs. Men are only reading catalogs with firearms, car parts and hooters on the cover, not artsy fartsy catalogs with fountains, jewelry and mobiles made of little Chinese parasols.
What man wakes up and thinks, “ya know, after I go to Home Depot for a case of Gorilla Glue and a caulking gun, I’m gonna buy my woman one of them rings with a fancy love message in some foreign language engraved on it.” NO MAN WAKES UP AND THINKS THAT! He will only think to do that if his woman has ripped the page out of the catalog, circled what she wants in Sharpie and stuck it in the middle of his copy of Playboy in the bathroom with a note that says, “I am holding the centerfold photo hostage unless you get me this ring from this catalog in a size 7.”
So I have to directly ask for what I want so specifically that I have to tear the page out of the book and hand it to someone and say GIMME?! Pffffffffffft! Where’s the fun in that? I think that sucks totally and completely. Where’s the element of surprise? Where’s the plotting and the planning and the mystery to that? I think that’s stupid and I want a do over. Maybe it’s better to just read the catalogs in a hot bubble bath and imagine than it is to actually get the stuff inside the pages…