December 20, 2002 Generally, I think I'm a pretty good significant other. Sure, I might possibly have a few eensy little faults. For example, I might develop obsessions with strange celebrities, running the gamut from 6'6" magicians to 5'7" hobbits to a range of crime drama detectives, district attorneys, and forensic experts, none of whom bear even the slightest resemblance to you. I might be terribly impressed and proud of the fact that a certain 6'6" magician seemed to think I was cute on two separate ocassions and I might tell that story to anyone willing to listen to it. I might also half-seriously consider going to Vegas with my girlfriends to see that certain magician's show just so I can find out how cute he really thinks I am. I might never actually clean the kitchen or vacuum the living room rug, no matter how many times I tell you that I'm going to do exactly that "tomorrow" because well, you know, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death." (Macbeth. I wrote it from memory. Aren't you impressed?) And I might quote Shakespeare from memory and expect you to be impressed. I might "not hear" certain things that you say to me, like how you don't really want a dog, even if it is a Pug named Mr. Pemberton who wears a bowler hat and coat, or how you draw the line at putting my grandmother's antique pig-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers from the Poconos in our living room, or even how you don't want me using my Wicca to put money and success spells on you. I might stay up too late reading serial killer novels and then have to sleep with the bedside light on. I might use too much butter when I cook, even though you are sort of lactose intolerant. I might talk way too loudly and cry at everything from pet food commercials to the ending of Revenge of the Nerds (c'mon, admit it, Gilbert's big speech about finally accepting that he's a nerd is pretty touching). I might keep bugging you to let me mix M&Ms in with our popcorn at the movies and I might order things in restaurants without ascertaining if there are onions in them and then make you switch meals with me because I won't eat onions. I might make you drive hours to see shows that I am stage managing and I might strictly forbid you from reading anything that I've ever written, including this journal, of which you are an integral part. I might tell my friends that you are applying to law school even after you told me not to and I might feed the cats pieces of my dinner when you aren't looking. I might leave the faucets running in the bathroom and the lights on all over the house. I might even still hang out with my best friend even though you hate him and I might monopolize the TV annd I might play Playstation2 for hours on end and I might really hate to share my food with you and I might drop my clothes on the floor wherever I take them off and let them lay there for weeks. Ah, but I will also support your ass for eight months while you pursue a career in stand-up comedy and then for six more while you wallow in depression because you didn't become the next Jerry Seinfeld. I will actually laugh at your jokes (which are good) and at the jokes of your comic friends (which are usually lame -- the jokes, not the friends. Well, not most of the friends.). I will go to dinner with your sister and actually share my dessert with her and NOT strangle her at the dinner table when she is being more annoying than the women on The View and not even after she makes us loiter in Tower Records for three hours because she can't decide what 80's compilation CDs to buy with the gift certificate we gave her. I will sit through two hour rain delays at baseball games because you hate to leave a game before it's over. I won't even complain too much as long as you buy me a hot dog. I will let you watch M*A*S*H marathons on FX for hours on end even though I despise Alan Alda. I will make special trips to the grocery store at midnight when you are sick and want ice pops for your sore throat. I will cook for hours if you say you want a nice dinner. I will know your favorite foods and that you really liked the Pillsbury dinner rolls we had last week and that you like your hamburgers thinner and more well done than I do. I may draw the line at hanging up paintings of Hilter and ventriloquist dummies and an assortment of other puppets sitting around a dinner table snacking on some rib cages (don't ask), but I will let you put up something from Joe Murray even though I'm not altogether crazy about his work. I will make you hash browns from scratch. I might talk in my sleep but I don't hog the covers and I've stopped kicking people in my sleep for the most part. If I am not sleepy, I'll come downstairs and read instead of turning on the bedside light and disturbing you. I will watch endless repeats of Spongebob and I will be able to talk about The Simpsons with even your most fanatical of friends. I will run interference with my mother so we won't have to have a Big Wedding in a Church and I will take most of the heat for being a pagan and not mention the fact that you might just want to elope to Vegas. I will get you out of having to go to my Uncle Paulie's house on Staten Island for Christmas Eve so you can hang out with my dogs and eat a hoagie and watch HBO while I eat overdone, rubbery calamari with the original models for The Sopranos. I won't expect you to come to all of my shows or to listen to endless stories about backstage hijinks. I will think you are cute even when you desperately need a haircut and your clothes are two years out of date and you have a giant zit on your nose. I think widow's peaks are kind of sexy. I will indulge your passion for bowling shirts. I won't even get mad if you make us walk out in the middle of a swing dance lesson without any explanation to the teacher because you were frustrated by the fact that you couldn't master the Lindy Hop. So, yeah, when it counts, I think I'm pretty good girlfriend. Except when it comes to birthdays. Then I am a TERRIBLE girlfriend. See, I have this problem. If I love you, I want to do spectacular things for you. The only problem is this: I am an adjunct English instructor with no fabulously wealthy parents and no trust fund and no outstanding flair for creating fabulous, yet masculine gifts that only seem like they cost a lot of money. Poor Holden. His birthday is December 21st. Every year it's there -- smack in the middle of Hanukkah and Christmas -- at the very moment when I have even less money than I normally do -- and, believe me, I normally don't have that much. I think I might actually qualify to be sponsored by Feed the Children. Well, maybe I'm a little too fat for that, but still.... Anyway, yeah, Holden's birthday is at a really bad time of year. But really, his birthday could be in August, with no holidays or other birthdays in sight, and I would most likely still be broke. I don't make any money. You'd be surprised what an MA in Creative Writing doesn't earn you. But we can talk about the fact that American colleges and universities have become nothing more than profit-generating big businesses who prefer to hire part-time instructors so they don't have to pay for health benefits and so they can also keep people who actually *think* in the "working poor" category of society in another entry. For this one, suffice to say, I can barely support myself on what I make teaching at the university level. Which dictates that my present buying cannot be extravagant. No surprise weekends in Venice. No new Lexus. Sometimes, not even the first season of South Park on DVD. But, like I said, it KILLS me not to be able to give Holden super-fabulous presents. And, since I'm not really the type to pull an O. Henry sort of trick and sell my most treasured possessions to buy him (or anyone else. Don't kid yourselves) that pocketwatch chain, I've had to come up with another way to give those big bang type gifts on a no-matches-and-a-wet-fuse type budget. (And, please, before you condemn me for my unwillingness to sell my hair or my collection of fake credit cards that Richard Belzer used for the filming of Homicide: Life on the Street, keep in mind that if I cut my hair off, I would suffer from the worst case of "Pea Head" in recorded history, and that I'm probably the only idiot who was willing to buy those fake cards in the first place and I can't very well sell them to myself.) Whatever. Unfortunately for Holden, "Plan B for Giving Extravagant Birthday Presents to the Man I Love" isn't very effective. Or, actually, it's only half-effective. See, it produces the desired joyful, elated effect on his birthday when he learns what his fabulous gift is, it just lacks follow through. What happens is this: Holden's birthday rolls around. I'm broke from holiday shopping and from just generally living an inch above the poverty level and carrying on daily activities like, oh, I don't know...eating?. I've already borrowed my mom's credit card to buy presents for my brother and sister so there is no way she's loaning it to me again and I pass out every time I have blood drawn, so I can't raise money by selling my blood. However, there is a ray of hope; for I know that come January/February, I will get my hot little hands on a decent chunk of cold cash, i.e., Spring-semester student loan disbursement, money given to me for my own birthday, my tax refund, something. So, with that knowledge in mind, I figure out some big ticket present that Holden will really love -- season tickets to the Phillies; a weekend in New York; an antique bakelite, art deco Skyscraper clock, you get the idea -- and I decide that I will buy it for him when I get the money. So for his actually birthday, I make a little certificate (an IOU, if you will) and present it to him with a sappy card and a CD or a DVD just so he has an actual present to open on his birthday. The certificate tells him that I will purchase the big ticket present -- the season tickets, the weekend in New York, the antique art deco clock -- when I get the money in January/February. And so, Holden's birthday celebration is terrific. He feels loved and special and he is excited about his extravagant gift. However, it's AFTER the birthday celebration that the system tends to break down. See, over the six years we've been together, I have given Holden little birthday IOUs for those Phillies season tickets and that weekend in New York and yes, even the antique art deco skyscraper clock -- all to be redeemed when I got some sizeable check that I was expecting at the beginning of the year. The problem is that when I finally get the money, I have ten other urgent things that I end up having to use those funds on -- emergency dental work (something I desperately NEED right now, actually), catch-up credit card and bill payments, textbooks, groceries, daily life. And so, sadly, Holden's birthday present never actually gets bought. The weeks pass and every now and again I'll think of the fact that I never bought the present I promised him, but then I'll be faced with choosing between using my last ten dollars to do laundry or to buy subway tokens so I can get back and forth between the jobs that pay me so extravagantly (yes, I'm being sarcastic), and the thought of buying Holden a pack of gum, let alone a luxurious present, gets pushed to the back burner. Not without more than a little guilt, mind you, but it gets pushed back just the same. And he's such a trooper that he rarely mentions it. He sits on eBay for eight hours at a stretch, bidding on Merry and Pippin action figures complete with dagger slash movement and a Moria Orc to use it on because I said I wanted them. Then he sits for eight more hours because I change my mind and decide I want the Merry and Pippin set with Treebeard instead and he thinks I should have both. He makes lists of the inane, useless junk I point out in stores and on TV and then saves his money for months so he can buy the crap for me. And only occassionally does he say, "I thought you were getting me those season tickets. I'm only asking because if you can't, I might buy them myself with my tax refund." And usually, those comments come two years after the IOU was issued. And, believe me, I don't mean to welch on those birthday certificates. I create them because I honestly WANT to give Holden these wonderful gifts. Because I want him to feel special and loved on his birthday. And, fuck, if I had any kind of actual disposable income, I would buy him those season tickets and book that trip to New York and find that antique art deco clock the instant I thought of giving them to him. Hell, I'd buy him presents every single day, if I had money. But the real problem has been the fact that I was not able to see that those promises of expensive, extravagant gifts don't make Holden feel special on his birthday. Especially because he is well aware that the fact that I can ill-afford them will lead to the gifts never being purchased, which then makes him feel less special than if I had simply given him three or four CDs, took him out for dinner, and baked him a cake. What's important is not that I give him the BIGGEST present that I think I can afford, but that I actually invest time in making his birthday special for him by being with him and giving him the presents that I can afford to give him at the moment. It's taken me six years and a lot of guilt to realize that a single Gerber daisy and a rasberry truffle from Godiva given on his actual birthday would make Holden feel more loved and special than the promise of an expensive gift that will never be realized. There are only a few people in our lives who carry the responsibility of making sure that we feel special on our birthdays: our parents, our siblings, our children, and our signficant others. And, fuck, even our brothers and sisters can weasel out of the responsibility as long as they eventually call or send a card (I'm not proud of it, but this year, I called my sister the day after her birthday). Children, you might not have. Or they might be demons. And parents? Well, there are so many complications that can screw up family dynamics. So really, it's up to the significant others to make birthdays special. I mean, friends can send cards and give presents and take you out for drinks and call you to wish you a great day and your co-workers can take you to lunch or buy you a cake, and those things are grand, but do they really compare to what your family or the man/woman you love does for your birthday? And, right now, when Holden has not heard from his mother and father for over a year because they are crazy, mean people, it's all the more important that I make his day terrific. So I am resisting the siren song promises of my tax return and my birthday money to buy him a new wardrobe or a Simpsons animation cel at some vague date in the future and instead, I am putting together a celebration that will be complete on the day that we are actually celebrating. I bought him a collection of Rocko's Modern Life videos because he loves that cartoon and it's not on anymore and an official Phillies jersey and a tripod for his digital camera and I am going to be able to give all of these things to him on Saturday, his actual birthday. I'm going to make him a strawberry shortcake and the ricotta cheese cookies that he likes. Who knows? I might actually clean the kitchen and vacuum the living room. Although, I did put my foot in it yet again when I asked him where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner. He chose Marrakesh, this excellent Moroccan restaurant; but when he asked me yesterday if I had made reservations yet, I told him I hadn't. I think he was a little insulted that I hadn't made them yet because he made some comment about how I reserved tickets for tonight's 6:30 showing of The Two Towers almost a week ago. (Perceptive, aren't I?) Luckily, I didn't come back with "Baby, if Billy Boyd were going to be at Marrakesh this Saturday, you can be sure I would have made the reservations for that a week ago, too." Hey, I never said I was the perfect girlfriend. But I'm trying. And I did the reservations right after we had that conversation. Unfortunately, Marrakesh is closed tomorrow evening for a private holiday party. But, hey, that was beyond my control, right? And I've given Holden free reign to make another dining selection. It's progress. Baby steps, kids, baby steps.

7 Deadly Sins and Other, Less Fatal Diversions Pride: Even though my boss at University B despises me, my students really seem to like me. Over the past week, I've gotten a dozen emails from students saying how much they enjoy my class. Of course, their affection might have something to do with the fact that I am a notoriously easy and benevolent grader. Envy: As I was dragging my sorry ass to the subway this morning so I could collect the final projects that my Unversity A students left in my mailbox yesterday, I saw this amazing girl. Long black hair with brilliant red streaks, Bettie Page bangs, cat's eye glasses, black capri pants with leopard trim (hey, it was 60 degrees in Philly today), matching jacket, and black turtleneck, the coolest high heeled pumps. And there was me: brown corduroy carpenter pants that are two sizes too big for me, decimated black Chucks, hand-me-down, bleach-splattered sweater from Holly, dry, frizzy hair with about an inch of roots, no make up. Hmmmm. I wonder who was jealous of whom.... Wrath: Okay, I'm not a man, but if I were and my girlfriend/wife/secretary-I-was-sleeping-with-on-the-side sent me a "Holiday Postcard" from ADiamondIsForever.com, well, it would be a safe bet to say that she would not be my girlfriend/wife/secretary-I-was-sleeping-with for very much longer. What the fuck? Basically, this site is encouraging women to send their husbands/boyfriends E-cards that feature coveted pieces of diamond jewelry plus blatant "hints" that this is what should be under the tree on Christmas morning. For example, I could jaunt on over to "A Diamond is Forever.com" and create a "holiday postcard" to send to Holden that features a stunning photo of a diamond tennis bracelet with the caption: How warm it is this winter is entirely up to you. Or maybe a picture of diamond earrings accompanied by Tell your secretary I already have plenty of perfume. Or an engagement ring with There are times for subtle hints. This is not one of them. Or, my personal favorite, a diamond pendant with I know you love me. I just want my sister to see how much. Okay, part of my incredibly intense reaction is probably related to my father's theory that the diamond industry has conspired to make women feel bad about themselves and their relationships if they are not given big, sparkly diamonds for every birthday, holiday, and anniversary. And, yes, I do realize that my father's paranoia about and hatred of DeBeers might be more than a little colored by the fact that he doesn't really want to be in the market for a three-stone, diamond anniversary band for my mother, but, still, I think he's got a point. Sometimes, I watch those diamond commercials and I think, "How many women really want these shiny rocks and how many just want them because they think they're supposed to have them as a badge of love?" Maybe I'm just weird, but, honestly, I'm not all that keen on being given three grand to wear on my finger, particularly since I can't even keep track of rings I get out of bubble gum machines. Besides, I'd much rather take that three grand and buy Merry and Pippin action figures and a SHAG print. So, yeah, I agree with my dad. The diamond industry is brainwashing women. And, now, what's worse is that they're saying it's acceptable to pressure and guilt your partner into laying out significant amounts of cash for their products. Boy, am I glad I'm not a man. At least when it comes to purchasing diamond jewelry. Sloth: I've just given up for now. Avarice: Since we're all about presents in this entry, I think I should get my presents from Holden on Sunday instead of having to wait until Christmas Day. After all, I am a pagan and Sunday is Winter Solstice, and, who am I kidding, I just want my presents! Gluttony: Fried chicken, candied yams, and macaroni and cheese at Fatou & Fama's in University City. Girls, it rivals Jestine's! Lust: Billy Boyd. At 6:30 this evening, I will be watching him larger than life (well, as larger than life as an actor playing a hobbit can be) on the big screen. Book: The Two Towers. I've read exactly half. So going into the movie tonight, I know what happens to Pippin, Merry, Gandalf, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, but I'm totally in the dark about Frodo and Sam and Gollum. A good balance, I think -- particularly because I never would have left well enough alone until I knew what happened to Pippin anyway. Task at Hand: I have to bake tomorrow. A cake for Holden's birthday and cookies and brioche for Sunday because Scott is stopping by for his annual Egg Nog Run. Quest for Publication: I was supposed to send a story out this week, but, well, whatever.... Total Submissions: 21 Rejections: 12 Acceptances: 1 Withdrawals: 7