THE THOUGHTS THAT COUNT

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (12-16-21)- Please remember small business in your town during this coronavirus pandemic

 
     There are still a couple more days until my birthday, which happens to conveniently fall on Christmas Day, so you can get all your shopping in at once. I'm pretty easy to please, and if you can't think of anything I'll accept a personal check with two forms of identification.

     I've been nice this year, not as naughty as past years. I learned how to do the laundry, for instance. I separate the colored items from the whites and the darks and I add the correct amount of bleach and detergent. Like trigonometry, learning it is enough. To actually DO the laundry would be ostentatious, and also I'm not sure which one is the washer and which is the dryer.

     There are a couple items I saw on TV that might streamline your shopping experience, and if you call now you can get the second one FREE! Just pay a separate fee, but I said that part really quietly so you probably didn't hear it. I saw a commercial for the "Tac Pen," which is short for "tactical pen," and you can probably imagine several military tactics that your current pen isn't properly trained to handle. I have my own tactical pen in the bathroom that writes in invisible ink, no matter how hard I shake it, scribble it, threaten it or try to flush it down the toilet. The one on TV has a strobe light that you can use to temporarily incapacitate criminals, like Jimmy Stewart did in "Rear Window." I picture this function being used to temporarily incapacitate myself while I'm writing a postcard, and when I come to Grace Kelly is looking at me like I'm an idiot. The commercial shows someone running over the pen with their car to demonstrate how well-made it is, which looks like something my wife would do to demonstrate how un-well-made my bald car tires are.

     Then there's the "Original Singing Bird Clock," that you might want to buy for someone you hate. To commemorate every single hour of your existence, a different bird chirps its cheerful song as if to say, "I know you've been looking forward for 25 years to being an 'empty nester,' but instead let's sing a song. Do you know 'Dominique' by The Singing Nuns? There's 16 verses, some in French." For fun, try to guess which bird is chirping at 3:00AM: Is it the cackling crow? The inquisitive barn owl? Or is it the frisky bush tit? I don't know and I'm not going to stick around to find out- I've just set fire to the house.

     I've also seen an ad for a beauty product that air-brushes foundation make-up onto your face. This might sound dangerous, not because the chemicals could cause a skin condition, but because if you give a gift that implies that you'd like to see a different face spray-painted onto your significant other, she might do significant damage to your own face with a tactical pen. I would definitely leave out the part about doing some spackling and putting at least two coats of primer down. In the ad several women are depicted spraying this stuff right onto their face with their eyes wide open, and they are beaming as if they think they could do at least as good as Picasso ever did.

     The "Stunning™ Volume Style Brush" is the "faster, easier, and healthier way to bigger, fuller hair!" It infuses soothing botanicals as you brush, which add volume in case you can't hear your hair. It appears as though they've trademarked "stunning," so if you use that word to compliment me on my newly infused hair I may have to hit you with a cease-and-desist order.

     One of my favorite gifts, and I wouldn't mind if you got it for me again, was a chemistry set I got as a kid, with test tubes and vials of different substances. The first thing I did was mix them all together, and the second thing I did was read the directions, which explicitly warned against mixing all the chemicals together. I guess I was trying to invent something that would either blow up, result in a lot of smoke, smell extremely bad or preferably all three at once. And that's how I learned how to cook.

     But any gift I get from you I will cherish, no matter how cheap it makes you look. And if you do splurge on the chemistry set I will take your pH with a sheet of litmus paper and save you the trouble of doing it yourself. I'm starting to feel a little chemistry between us already.