gift exchange

12-09-99

Tonight was the holiday dinner for the band squadron. Hell, who am I kidding, it was a fucking Christmas dinner. If anyone in that band celebrates any other holidays, they'd be crazy to admit it. Everybody thinks I'm weird, and all I did was keep my last name.

John and I sat at a table with two other couples, none of whom I'd ever met before. To my knowledge. One of the women tried to convert me to her church, through the music scene (they have a conservatory where I could teach) and an aerobics class. Who thinks I need an aerobics class?

They had one of those convoluted gift exchanges where you can trade the people ahead of you for better things. I tried very hard to get this little thing called a "Dung Buddy." It's a garden sculpture, shaped like a turtle, and it's made out of poop! The guy who got it kept shouting "Who wants this crappy turtle?" (I thought Dad would love it--I'm going to find out where it came from.) The dung winners wouldn't trade us for our stupid prize, though--we got somebody's stupid old electric typewriter. (John chose the heaviest box—unwisely.) The worst one of the night, in my opinion, was Becky's score: a tin bank in the shape of a football, filled with shampoo and soap samples from all the hotels that the band has stayed in this year. And somebody got stuck with a framed picture of the guy who was kicked out of the band a month ago.

The whole ordeal took hours, there were over 60 presents, and we had to wait for everybody to unwrap theirs. Then they had to decide whether the gift was funny or not, so they knew whether to make jokes about it. So many of the presents were cute little angels or polished wood crosses, and lots of candles, and potpourri dishes, and then there were Chia Pets and packages of freeze-dried worms. One of the couples who BROUGHT a cross as a sweet little present RECEIVED a box of whipped cream and edible underwear. I was happy to see them squirm; the woman was the one who'd spent the whole meal trying to get me to go to aerobics classes at the Second Baptist Church.

Aside from the ancient typewriter, we scored a little stuffed bear as a door prize. I was delighted when we found out that the bear's coat opened in the front and he was naked underneath. Had a great time making the little bear, whose Ty name is Malcolm, flash Becky and Anna during the Captain's closing speech.

We came home and began scavenging the house for coins to use for our Dollar a Day jar. In doing so, John knocked one of my crazy knickknacks on the floor and a piece broke off of it. Now, I can't say what the thing was, because it's remarkably similar to a present that I'm giving to someone who reads this journal. Five minutes' time found me chipping pieces of said knickknack off with a steak knife, so's I could repair and reglue. Need I say what happened? The knife jumped, and made a tidy little hole in my thumb.

Blood all over the place! Running down over my fingers, my arm, onto the knickknack and the floor, the table, the coins that were still in my fist. The coins most likely caused the accident in the first place. I headed for the sink and bled into our dirty dishes while John wigged out. After all that blood, there was just a little puncture wound on the back of my thumb. Damn thing didn't even hurt.