I love birthdays. I love Christmas. I love gifts.<\/p>\n
Well, at least\u00a0I love the\u00a0idea<\/em><\/strong> of all of those things. I hate the actual act of giving gifts. It has nothing to do with the expense, it has to do with the inability to know what others might want. I always feel a bit heart-broken when I exchange gifts – as if I’m going to let the person down.\u00a0<\/p>\n I’m always reminded of that episode in Will &\u00a0Grace when\u00a0Grace\u00a0is giving Woody Harrelson his birthday present (their first birthday together). Very sweetly, she decided to give him a book on motorcyles since she knew he always loved motorcycles. But minutes before she can give him his book, Karen walks in and gives him an actual motorcyle.<\/p>\n Grace is crestfallen. That is me.<\/p>\n This isn’t a new phenomena for me. I must admit that things got better when I was dating Matt for 10 years. He made it perfectly obvious what he wanted (usually CD’s and DVD’s). I know I let him down a few times, but overall he made it clear what he wanted and gift-giving was made simple.<\/p>\n Things are a bit more complicated with Randy. For example:<\/p>\n 1) He’s comfortable enough financially that he’s already bought everything he wants or needs<\/p>\n 2) He’s not given me\u00a0any idea of what he might want (well, until this morning when he requested a flat screen TV…yeah, maybe not).<\/p>\n 3) He has a reputation for returning things. In fact, last year for Christmas he gave me specific things he wanted (even telling me the store to go to and item to get).\u00a0 He still returned them. But I don’t take it personally…he returns at least half of the things he buys for himself, too.<\/p>\n Anyway, I’ve got just over two weeks left to figure things out. If I fail, the gift he wants most just might be a new boyfriend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love birthdays. I love Christmas. I love gifts. Well, at least\u00a0I love the\u00a0idea of all of those things. I hate the actual act of giving gifts. It has nothing to do with the expense, it has to do with the inability to know what others might want. I always feel a bit heart-broken when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}