{"id":14,"date":"2004-12-10T01:53:24","date_gmt":"2004-12-10T05:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/newblog\/?p=14"},"modified":"2004-12-10T01:53:24","modified_gmt":"2004-12-10T05:53:24","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"Good things come in small packages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So today I walk from my office to my girlfriend&#8217;s office picking up the package I saw waiting for her at the front desk (and signing for it). While I was already planning to pick up the package, you should not for later, that she did ask me to pick it up when I said I was coming over.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a slightly-padded legal-size envelope. I didn&#8217;t think much of it. As I walk in and hand her the envelope, I tell her what company it&#8217;s from and as she takes it from me hand, with a sly smile she goes &#8220;oh&#8230; that&#8217;s actually your Christmas present.&#8221; She then rips open a small corner, peaks inside, and closes it and puts it on her desk and gives me the hug I came over for. Unsure if she&#8217;s just messing with me, I ask if she&#8217;s serious, and she is. I try not to let me mind churn over the possibilities.<\/p>\n<p>I sit down and chat briefly. At one point, I mentioned how tempting it was to have my Christmas present two feet from me. My girlfriend, the evil temptress that she is, actually says &#8220;if you want it, you can have it now.&#8221; What the <i>hell<\/i> kind of Christmas spirit is that? Anyway, I use the last bits of strength I have to say no thanks, and I leave. As I step out of her office, she makes some comment about it not being paper (admittedly while I had assumed my gift was not a sheet of paper, this was a small relief), and I turned around and walked back into her office to assure her I would like whatever it was she gives me and as I walk back in the doorway she scrambles to cover up something (obviously my gift) which she apparently laid out on her desk. Silly girl&#8230; wait till I get more than 3 steps down the hall! I&#8217;ve only forgotten water, sunglasses, or something else in your office 90% of the times I&#8217;ve been in there.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, moving along to my point (yes, I have a point), I came to the conclusion today that knowing the size of your gift sucks &#8211; especially if that size is best described by &#8220;small.&#8221; Because there are many wonderful things that came in very small sizes&#8230; oh so many (the larger your gift gets the more distinctive a particular size can be, but with small, it could be oh so many things). And once you have a size, try as you might, your mind will enumerate all of the possibilities it can fathom. Even if you know roughly how much it cost (because your sly girlfriend didn&#8217;t mention she already had ordered your gift when you asked what the season&#8217;s spending limit should be, thus giving her an upper hand), you will come up with absurdly expensive ideas of great extravagance, medium ideas, small ideas. You will fathom gifts from $.50 to $50,000. And the last thing I want to do is have expectations. That never leads to anything good (it was one of my ex-girlfriend&#8217;s many downfalls). So what is a man to do?<\/p>\n<p>Yeah. She totally did this one on purpose&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>P.S. Refrain from posting guesses in the comments. I didn&#8217;t post the name of the company for a reason. I actually want to be surprised, and I&#8217;m fighting every urge I have to look it up so that I can be surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So today I walk from my office to my girlfriend&#8217;s office picking up the package I saw waiting for her at the front desk (and signing for it). While I was already planning to pick up the package, you should not for later, that she did ask me to pick it up when I said [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phildev.net\/phil\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}