I’m hopeless. I promise to post a blog every Sunday night or Monday morning to provide my faithful readers (don’t laugh) with some predictability. And yet I posted mid-week last week. And I didn’t post Sunday. And here I am posting mid-week again. No doubt I’ve created mass confusion in your respective lives. And for that, I apologize. But it’s the holidays, right? That gives me some leeway, doesn’t it?

I’ve been awake since 5 a.m. Eastern time, which is 3 a.m. Mountain time, the zone in which I now sit and type. And it is indeed Mountain time because I am, indeed, in the mountains. The rocky ones, to be exact. We arrived this morning and now I sit in a house in the middle of ski country (courtesy of Dave’s father, God bless him) and try to rally my sleep-deprived brain cells to write something interesting and worth reading.

It’s harder than you might think.

But before I begin, I have to get a little housekeeping out of the way: I promised my brother-in-law Dan (the elder of the three Lyons boys) that I would dedicate this blog to him because he’s kind and generous and got Dave and me a $100 gift certificate to a really nice wine vendor for Christmas, while Dave and I generously got him nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. He drops a Benjamin on us and we give him a hug. We are a whole new kind of asshole.

So, like a kindergartener, I’m making him a gift. And because the only skill I have is writing, he gets a blog. Just for him.

But it’s not going to really be about him. This isn’t DanTalks.com after all. But it’s inspired by him. Because what I’d like to write about is how much I suck at giving gifts.

If you are my friend, you know this: I never give gifts. Well, almost never. Occasionally, inspiration strikes. For instance, recently my friend “Lee Ann” celebrated her 40^th birthday. You might recall from At the Crack of Dong that Lee Ann is the one who thought my dawn simulator was actually a dong simulator. So for her birthday, I made a special weeknight trip to The Pleasure Place in Georgetown, where I bought her a vibrator. Not just any vibrator, but a huge, flesh-colored, vein-mapped dildo. I strode confidently into the store, browsed the wall of fake phalluses, made my selection, and took it to the counter, where the friendly gay cashier took it out of the package and slipped batteries into it, then asked me to hold it. They do this because (and you’ll be glad to know this if you’re in the market for a vibrator) you can’t return them. So I held onto it and he turned it on and it did, indeed, vibrate. (When I recounted this story to Dave, he asked me if I told the cashier it was a gag gift for a friend. “No,” I replied, “because no one ever believes anyone who says it’s a gag gift for a friend.”) Then he told me as he was putting it back in the package to wash it with antibacterial soap after using it. I’m not sure why, but this spurred me to ask him if it was submersible. (Dave: “You asked a follow-up question? Why? Are you planning to use it underwater?”) “No,” the cashier told me, “it’s not submersible. Just wash the shaft to the base.”

“Okay,” I told him. Glad we were square on that point.

I walked out of the store with my $20 dong simulator that was too big to fit in my purse and headed to CVS to buy the second part of the gift: a battery-operated Christmas candle to duct-tape to the dildo—thus making it a combo dong/dawn simulator. I returned home and sat on the couch, putting the gift together, giggling the whole time. Dave stared at me a little suspiciously and then said finally, “I’ve never seen you put this much effort into a gift in your life.”

He’s right. Because I don’t give gifts. It’s not a conscious choice. I seem to have a mental block when it comes to gift giving. Part of it is just because I’m not a shopper. I spend literally no time in stores outside of the grocery store and, occasionally, Target. So I don’t have the opportunity to see things and think, “So-and-so would love this!”

But is that really a good enough excuse? Shouldn’t I at least make an effort?

This Christmas Eve, Dave and I were wrapping gifts and congratulating ourselves on what a great job we’d done getting gifts for our parents and the kids. And I realized at that moment that I didn’t get Dave a gift. Nothing. Not even a card.

“Crap, Dave,” I said to him. “I didn’t get you a gift.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “We said no gifts this year.”

“But you got me one, didn’t you?”

Silence.

“Dave! That’s not fair! We said no gifts and you got me one.”

“No, that’s not true. Technically, I didn’t get you a gift…”

“Good.”

“…the kids got you a gift.”

“Dammit, Dave.”

My thoughtlessness extends beyond gift giving. I don’t even remember to say things like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” or—worst of all—“Happy Birthday.” My best friend in the whole wide world who has been my best friend since college has a birthday the day after mine, and still, I forget. Luckily, she forgets mine, too. We usually end up talking to each other a week later and one of us tells a story that starts, “Well, I went to dinner last week for my birthday,” and then the other says, “Oh God, I totally forgot. Happy birthday,” and the other says, “Yeah, you, too.” This is a big part of the reason we are best friends.

I’m not sure my other friends take it so well. And I don’t blame them. I make sure to let any serious friend know early in our relationship that I don’t remember birthdays and I suck at buying gifts. I make it clear that if they’re in this for the loot, they best keep moving. So my friends’ expectations are mercifully low. Snake-belly low. But I’m not sure low expectations are the best foundation for friendship.

Sometimes I’ve considered changing my ways. I tell myself that I could keep a calendar of birthdays and anniversaries. I could easily set up email reminders. It would require almost no effort at all. But I can’t bring myself to do it. It would just feel forced and insincere, like when John McCain smiles. When it comes down to it, being thoughtful just isn’t me.

So I try to be a good friend in other ways: I’m a good, non-judgmental listener. I don’t give my friends unsolicited advice. I love them, unequivocally, for who they are. I never say things like, “No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to put on weight!” And, occasionally, I mention them in a blog. Like I’m mentioning Dan. Because that’s the kind of friend I am. I hope that’s enough. I’m banking on it.