I'll Take A Quiet Life, A Handshake Of Carbon Monoxide, And No Alarms And No Surprises

--"No Surprises (cover)", Regina Spektor

Last year was the first year in my eighteen years of buying gifts for Breanne that I really didn't give her a proper gift. I blame that on the unemployment. But every year before that I've managed to get her something "nice." In 2009 we made the theme watches so I managed to find her a $400 watch I thought she might like and she ended up doing the same for me. It didn't matter that neither of us were watch people. We both thought it was high time we had "nice" watches. In 2007 we agreed the present would be meeting up in Chicago--I taking care of the tickets and hotels, and she taking care of the food and outings--so I guess that was a year where we didn't exactly give each other presents.

My point is that I've known her for such a long time that I'm actually struggling as to what to get her this year. This year there is no theme. This year I'm on my own. Without that guidance it feels like looking for a key among a pile of a thousand keys... and you're not even sure that any of them open it up in the first place. I want it to be decent. I want it to be special. But most of all I just want her to like it. Everybody says that it's the thought that counts, but I've received plenty of gifts (not from her) where I can tell there was a lot of thought put into them and I was still disappointed. Granted, she's more gracious than I am, but when nails get pounded into walls, a lackluster gift is a lackluster gift.

And after eighteen years I have no excuses for a lackluster gift.

The trouble is I've set the bar too high. More precisely, I've set the bar too wide. Over the years I've given everything from jewelry to movies to clothing to trips to what have you. There doesn't seem to be any type of gift I haven't given to her for either her birthday or Christmas. That's why it feels like at this point everything I'm considering would be a retread of something she's already received from me. The originality is gone. The surprise factor just isn't there any more.

You would have thought that after this many years I might have run into this problem before. Surprisingly, I haven't. Each year I've had an inkling of something she might like. Without fail, I've received inspiration from whatever source and it's inevitably turned out for the best when I settled on something. I used to think she was the easiest person to shop for because I knew her so well and I knew which way her tastes ran. Well, that information hasn't all of a sudden dried up. What's run dry are the manifestations of that knowledge. There's only so many koala-inspired stuffed animals I can look for, only so many orange-tinged perfumes and sprays and body washes I can buy, and only so much Bee-Gee collectibles I can scour the earth for before it seems blase. I've just run out of options that seem fresh and new.

I hate feeling like this. I hate feeling like looking for stuff for her is a chore because it really isn't. It's just that this one of the two days of the year where I can fully express how much she means to me. I don't want to ever fall short on that attempt and squander the opportunity. The way I see it, the early years of our friendship was all about making a good impression on her. The middle years were suggestive of solidifying the foundation we had built. And these later years, it's about keeping the life pumping through the veins. I want to forestall the feeling that we've grown stagnant as people who know each other as much as possible. We're not old folks just yet.

Part of the problem I believe too is that we're not small gestures kind of people. We've always been and always will continue to be grand gestures kind of people. We'll always be Ephram Brown, wanting to find the big, sweeping moments to footnote the important milestones in our life. We never want it to be said that we didn't do enough, say enough, or care enough to make that extra effort to show one another how we feel.

Maybe if we were more boring people a card and a phone call might be enough every year. We could be people who believed the thought that counts. As it stands now, we're people who think the thought is only the first step in a very long journey to getting the right gift. And as it stands now, I'm very much a person who hasn't even taken that first step yet.

Sometimes I wish there was one gift that could really say it all, encapsulate everything I've ever felt or wanted or had with her or because of her. Sometimes I wish there was one gift that could be the end-all-be-all of gifts and prove once and for all how much I truly do love her in every possible way.

Then I could just buy that for her every year.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers