I’ll tell you something about the beau, he is wildly predictable. In theory this makes it easy to give him gifts, but it also makes for some shockingly limited options. There are only so many quirky robots-fighting-dinosaurs t-shirts I can get him before I start questioning my abilities as a gift-giver. Have I grown complacent? Have I lost my creative spark? Was I… was I just never that good to begin with?

Don’t answer that.

I feel like I’m really scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of gift ideas lately, guys. With everyone on my list, but especially the beau. What do you get the person with whom you’ve made idle conversation for eightish years? What do you get the person who’s fled the room from your farts, and vice versa? What do you get the person you’ve seen prance naked around the house like a yearling shouting, “I feel pretty!”

So I sat down and tried to brainstorm. Or maybe I was standing up at the time. I can’t tell you my position for sure, but I can tell you that I managed to come up with some excellent gift ideas that unfortunately don’t appear to be in stock on Amazon.

1. Sausage Necklace

You know those candy bead necklaces you’d get as a kid that were always more like candy chokers? You tried to pull them over your head but they always sort of got stuck around the bridge of your nose, the elastic stretched taut. So you’d double them around your hand like a bracelet and then spend a good half-hour gnawing at your wrist with your molars like a Golden Retriever with a naugahyde bone wedged between its front paws. Some would snap clean in half with a bright crack and others would shatter into powder. The yellow ones were always the worst flavor. No, the white. No, the pink. Okay, I think they were all the same flavor: sugared chalk. God, I wish I was wearing one of these things right now. 

That’s the same idea, except for the beau instead of sugared chalk it would be sausages. 

Kind of like this but with like, more sausage. Sausage necklace by Fake Food Hatanaka

 

2. Levitating Glass

You know what the problem with sitting down is? Drinking. You know what the problem with drinking is? Sitting down. When you sit down you cannot reach your drink. When you reach your drink you are not quite sitting down anymore so much as straining towards the coffee table in a sort-of half-crouch while moaning softly, because this is way more exertion than you had signed up for. So then you start setting your drink down on the sofa cushion beside you, even when your drink is a spindly glass of red wine, which is why it looks like someone has repeatedly thrown up a box of Red Vines in the corners of your sofa.

A toddler’s sippy cup won’t spill, but a grownup’s Levitating Glass™ won’t spill and patiently floats in the air beside you wherever you happen to release it from your clawlike grasp. Eh? Eh? WHY IS THIS NOT A THING I would pay to have it be a thing!

An approximation; in real life the glass would of course be bigger duh

 

3. Individually Wrapped Readymade Dim Sum Snacks

The thing about the beau is that he wants what you’re eating. Unlike his boss, though, he understands that it’s not socially acceptable to just take the food right off your plate.1 So he begins his negotiations by offering you some of his, so that the onus is on you to reciprocate the generosity.

What a magnificent bastard.

I wasn’t raised with “family-style” eating, so I guess I have the beau to thank for the fact that I no longer choose one dish at a restaurant for myself and hunch over it protectively, elbows jutted out as a defensive measure and eyes continually roving the room for potential threats. I’ve been opened up to the beau’s eating style, which can be described as “everything available.” Since he usually cannot order one of each item on the menu, he brokers deals with the rest of the dining party and if necessary dining parties at other tables over which entrees everyone will get to share. Just a taste of each is all that’s necessary! Unless it’s delicious, in which case he will have several more tastes. And then he’ll have the rest boxed up so he can continue to sample on the way home, and later on, in his sleep.

Dim sum is the perfect cuisine for the beau, because 1) he can actually literally order one of each and 2) it’s fucking delicious. The bean curd thing! And the dumpling with the hot soup inside! Alas, good dim sum is hard to get where we live and takes forever to make. Imagine, instead, reaching into the cupboard when feeling a bit peckish, tearing open a package and having a freshly steamed bun or pot sticker come tumbling out. The beau would POOP HIS DRAWERS IN EXCITEMENT.

I have no picture for dim sum or pooped drawers, you will have to use your damn fool imaginations like people of olden times. 🙁

4. Exploding Wall

The beau likes to watch movies with soundtracks that basically go BLAM BLAOW PEW PEW KAPOW EURRRRGHKK. Once, early on in our dating, I went over to his house and ended up watching seventeen Lethal Weapon movies in a row with him and his roommate, and all I dreamt about that night were gunfights. I personally tend to favor films where people flap their mouthspaces around more than they shoot other people (girl stereotype alert!), so sometimes I will go in the bedroom and shut the door and let him have alonetimes with his chosen collection of loud aggressive noises and violently colored special effects.

But the problem with giving the beau the gift of action movies is that I’m basically agreeing to spend 2014 pacing the top of the stairs, twisting my hands as I listen for a break where no one is actively killing anyone else so I can dash downstairs and into the kitchen to top up my drink and maybe fix a piece of toast before racing back upstairs again to resume furtively watching my neighbors out the window.

The problem with watching my neighbors, though, is that they rarely explode anything. In fact, I don’t think there’s been one single massive detonation on my street since we’ve moved in. And that, I would argue, is the single best part of any action movie. So why not cut to the chase? Who needs simulated murder and terrible dialogue and shaky plot structure when you can get straight on down to FIERY DESTRUCTION?

Turn any wall in your home into an Exploding Wall™ with patented high-intensity combustion. Slo-mo mode available. Fun for the whole family! No cleanup necessary! No compromise to the structural integrity of your home! Simply blow up any wall of your choice and watch it regenerate. Like magic because it totally is.

Illustration by John Seares Riley

 

1 I don’t think he’s quite over this. “I was eating those fries,” he occasionally mutters.