I want to burn my house down.
Every year, I set out to burn my house down at Christmas. Well, that's what my girlfriend tells people when we get around to talking about Christmas.
She foolishly thinks I'm trying to burn our house down because she says I put too many lights into too few sockets and she thinks I will somehow cause a nuclear meltdown.
No amount of explaining will convince her that it's impossible for me to burn the house down, not even reminding her that God has a plan and that we should believe God is protecting us. Rather than immediately arguing the excellent point I've made, she huffs, reminds me that I'm an atheist, and does more eye rolling.
At least she didn't say anything negative, so I'm right.
Right?
This year I wanted to buy a $400 Christmas Light show controller mdash; complete with controllers and relay boards mdash; and we'd have the brightest house in the city.
Rather than worry about the cost, she wanted to know if it would burn the house down.
"Of course not," I told her, "these things are done by professionals. They know what they're doing, man.
They're not gonna make something that'll burn down our house, you know?" Sensing a moment of weakness from her I added, "Besides, they highly recommended hiring an electrician to install more plugs around the outside of the house."
She huffed and rolled her eyes once more.
She was being unreasonable. I explained there were kits on the Internet that teach you how to make your own electronic controllers and relay boards for less than $40 and mdash; most importantly mdash; for an awful lot less than the $400 required to buy the professional-grade kit. She stormed off at the first mention of Internet do-it-yourself kits for less than $40.
I don't know why.
The website, well, it might've had some poor grammar and misspellings, but not all electricians can write in APA format. Even though the pictures contained beer bottles in the background, this was by no means disqualifying the legitimacy of the website, its instructions, or writers.
No amount of reassurances that not all people can make really nice, professional websites seemed to make any sense to her. In fact, when I told her she shouldn't judge a website by its cover, only it's content, she laughed and made some flippant remark about how porn websites never have any covers and plenty of content.
Then she accused me of the unholy of all holies: being unreasonable.
I never become a crazed-holiday person. In fact, I don't know why other people, especially my girlfriend, are so difficult at Christmas time every year. She wants to buy gobs of crap every year that sits in the garage for months on end because she forgot to take the present to some friend she's seen once in two years.
Let her waste money on stuff nobody likes, I say, and give me all the money for a real, legitimate and sincere purpose: to have the brightest, most dazzling display of Christmas lights our city has ever witnessed.
She is being impractical. She thinks I'm too cheap, despite my efforts to buy the $400 light show kit.
I tried to explain to her how it all works: stuff becomes more expensive the closer it gets to Christmas, and then immediately after, everything is dirt-cheap, but it was too late to wait until after Christmas to get the professional-grade kit. I told her she was being a female version of the Grinch who stole my Christmas.
Still, she would not budge on the budget for Christmas lights.
As stupendous an idea as it was, she simply would not agree with my pleas for the light show kit (she did comment that she'd have rather bought the $400 professional-grade kit over the $40 DIY kit, which was but a brief morsel of hope, was dashed when she immediately yelled, "Don't even think about it!").
Now the lights are on the garage floor.
I'd already procrastinated enough and decided to hang the lights up like I do every year. There's really nothing I can do about my selfish girlfriend and her worrisome ways other than to hang the lights up and be done with the whole sordid ordeal.
I began to sort through the wires and plan where the lights will go once again.
It's not difficult to hang Christmas lights. In fact, the hardest part about it is simply finding enough electrical sockets to plug everything into. I resigned myself to waiting another year to have my hopes dashed by a paranoid woman who seems to think I want to create a miniature version of the China nuclear syndrome in our front yard.
As I was sorting the lights, a UPS truck drove down our street. Suddenly it stopped in front of my house. The UPS guy mdash; donned in shorts in the dead of winter mdash; seemed to be in a hurry and rushed out the side of the big, brown truck with a large, heavy-looking package in his hands.
He asked me for my name. I gave it to him. He nodded and gave me the package.
He made a hurried dash back to his brown truck and drove off in a way that would have made Bo Duke scream, "Woo Hoo!" in that good old boy way.
As I watched the UPS truck squeal its tires and quickly disappear, I looked down and felt the package in my hands.
It was a big package; a bit heavy, with the usual markings of a package shipped across the country. I quickly opened it and shuddered with delight because my Christmas present had arrived! It was the $400 Christmas Light professional-grade kit!
My girlfriend, suddenly aware of all the commotion and barking made by our dogs inside the house, barged into the garage and saw my sheer ecstasy. She demanded to know what was in the package. I told her it was from Playboy.
She rolled her eyes again and demanded to see the package. I refused.
She had a perturbed look and insisted I give her the package.
I finally relented, under threat of sleeping on the couch permanently, and gave her the package. She gasped and made the face of a woman scorned, which I knew was a terrible thing to witness. It's even worse when the woman scorned has absolutely no justification to feel that way.
She demanded I return the package immediately. I refused. I told her it was worth every penny of $400.
She asked me if I'd hired an electrician. I told her an electrician wasn't needed, that I would simply buy the $40 DIY kit and merge the two and hope for the best. I asked her why she was being so difficult.
She chuckled and informed me through clenched teeth that I could either sleep on the street and admire my unplugged Christmas Light show kit, or return it and have a nice place in the house. Either way, she said, no Christmas Light show kits were going to be plugged in on our property. I shrugged and sighed.
It was a lost cause. She thought I wanted to burn our house down, like always.
How unreasonable she is, that woman, though I love her.
I hope she'll love me tomorrow after I plug in the $400 kit (I'll worry about the electricians next year.)
Khan:
He/She isn't the "sister" you might think "she" is...not after "she" impregnated a girl and became ...
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. But then again..
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