Hello, non-gift-giver

Have you noticed that I have been prolific this month? I have blogged every day. Okay, it's the 3rd of May. But still. What if I blog every day this month? Will you be proud of me?

Remember that scene at the end of The Sixth Sense (Marvin Gardens got the big secret of that movie like 10 minutes into it, and then he had to tell me and ruin the whole dang thing) where the kid tells his mom he sees dead people and that he sees Grandma all the time? And Grandma said to tell the mom, "You make me proud every day"? Didn't that just rip you to shreds? What about Hallmark commercials? Do you convulse when those come on? Do you wonder how I got off on this tangent? Do you hope to all that is holy and merciful that I do not blog every day this month if this is the kind of crap I am going to pontificate on?

Today I am going to talk about giving gifts, or, rather, not giving them. I know that I have already touched on this subject previously, but now it is getting serious. This month I have the wedding of a dear friend of mine, and also Mother's Day, in which you are supposed to celebrate the fact that your enormous head broke your mother in two. At least that's what my gorilla head did. As you may recall, I practically had a beehive hairdo coming out of the womb. I never DIDN'T have too much hair, not since day one.

My Easter Island head was probably the least of my mother's worries, since I -- how shall we say this? -- made her ass itch at all times. Don't you think I at least owe it to my mother, and Marvin to his, to give a little something-something for Mother's Day? Of course, out of every human in the world, it would be a mother who would say, "I don't need anything. Make me something. Send me a card." You know those phony things moms say.

Now, my mother has suggested that for a Mother's Day gift I actually start calling her "mom," which is ridiculous, since I have been calling her Pam, seeing as it is her name, since I could talk. She could have tried to nip this in the bud in 1967, not now.

Hey, she's the one who decided to be a total hippie and get married in front of a peace sign and to say "Call me Pam" all that. Heavy. Love the one you're with.

And yes, that is an actual photo of my parents and me. Note the desperate attempt to keep my hair reasonable by giving me a masculine haircut. It still looks like my face is in the middle of parentheses.

In a completely unrelated note, which actually deals with maternal instincts, so I do kind of have a theme going, in a sort of bag lady, babbling and waving my hands kind of a way, I read an interesting article about Hello Kitty today. Someone is studying this phenomenon in Japan wherein most of adult society there is obsessed with cute, childlike things, including Hello Kitty. There is even some Japanese-sounding name for the trend, which I could tell you if I felt like going back and looking at the article.

Anyway, some idiot has been studying this trend for years (where do people get jobs like this? "Yes, I study Hello Kitty. It took years of greeting cats to acquire my degree.") and the theory is that Japan has the lowest birthrate, and that these childless adults like these things as their way of satisfying their unmet maternal instincts.

Hmmph. I do not have kids. I have never wanted kids (which, by the way, does not translate to "she hates kids!" which for some reason people love to think). After I read this article, I took a photo of my desk at work:

Okay, so I have a Hello Kitty water cooler, stapler, paper holder, bowl, box of candy and screen saver. What do you mean I have some sort of thwarted maternal instinct? My ass itches.