A Complicated Birthday Gift

I’m a terrible wrapper. Yeah, that’s wrapper with a W although I am a terrible rapper as well. The best rhymes are can throw down come from Rapture. “Eating bars and eating cars and now he even eats guitars.” Anyone who has every received a wrapped gift from me will agree that my skills at places nicely colored paper with varied designs printed onto it over boxes is atrocious. I don’t know just why it is. Everybody else in my family wraps with the professionalism of those girls who used to run the Eastcourt Mall gift wrapping corner during the holidays those many years ago. Man, those girls were fast. There hands blurred like cartoon mice escaping cartoon cats. You could see the smoke rise from the bows and ribbons. My mother is the best wrapper out of all of us. You can see she takes some care with her gifts. Sure, she often chooses odd boxes to place items in, a common Christmas morning joke in my family is that we keep getting boxes of microwave popcorn instead of a pony, but those boxes are always wrapped with precision. I envision my mother with rulers and protractors at the kitchen table in the weeks before Christmas fanatical over proper gift creases. My sister would be the silver in wrapping inheriting my mother’s skill and then would come my father who you’d expect to be just as clumsy as I am but, like my mother and his daughter, his gifts are wrapped with care and accuracy in the folds. He sometimes slips and allows a few crinkles and this is what has him holding the bronze. I’ve not been able to really study my brother’s gift-wrapping prowess but the one or two times I have been presented with a gift from him the wrapping has been at least six steps ahead of my own, not razor sharp like our other family members but not the clumped messes that I create. My gifts resemble what a gift might look like if it had once been perfect wrapped but then was used as a hockey puck. A hockey puck that has been run over by a car, a few trucks and maybe an elephant. My folds are always off and I have come to think of them as broken butterfly wings all cat mangled and helter-skelter. Tape is placed wherever it is needed and on my gifts tape is generally needed in places that are anything but ascetically pleasing to the eye. When I wrap gifts I suddenly lose my sense of sight. Each year I try to create those Rockwell-like scenes of perfect gift wrap under perfect trees but my presents resemble more something Dali might have rejected. She it was more of the same when I attempted to wrap my daughter’s birthday gift today. Wrapping without wrapping paper made things all the more difficult. I searched all the stores and small malls in my city for anything that could be used to cover the box, a box that was also hard to come by. Sorry Des, but that box was dug out of a Nara box pile left in front of a dollar store after the place had shut down for the night. It was perfectly clean and only one dead rat was decomposing inside. I considered this a good omen! With no paper and rejecting an evening train departing thought of snagging some of the Yagi bum’s newspapers I was left with whatever I could dig up in one of the classrooms. Today was another one of those you have to be in a class and you really should be doing something related to work but we have no way of telling that you actually are days. I had already finished planning my next semester so I had some time to gift wrap. This is not one of my usual classrooms and this particular Japanese teacher has all the foresight of a Gilligan. The place was seriously lacking teaching materials. There was only a bit of the construction paper I’d planed on turning into wrapping paper and the only tape I could find was the extremely none-adhesive electrical tape, the kind of stuff you stick to baseboards when finishing off a paintjob in your den. I’ve never had a den to paint. I’m pining for a den to paint. This tape was about as sticky as a Hilton sister after a weekend bending. No, wait, that would mean the tape would be even more adhesive then a bucket of polyethylene vinyl acetate. What I mean to say the tape is about as sticky as wet marble. I wrapped, and Des you will see this when the package arrives, the box in about a foot thick of the stuff to ensure the thing stayed closed relying that the post office might have some better tape to finish the job. I then discovered that the tape had a glossy finish of sorts and could not be written upon with smearing so I had to use another sixty feet of tape to secure a piece of paper onto the front of the envelope to include the address to which this thing was headed to. By this time I had discovered some regular masking tape but this to would not stick to the electrical tape and now, an hour into having packed the box, made a nice card (birthday cards are about as easy to find in this country as Whoppers) and secured it with enough tape to coat the SkyDome (ohh, sorry…Rogers Center you crazy modernist zealots!) that tape was now beginning to peal and curl. I applied more tape to the curling bits but soon the package was coming apart. I opted to wait until getting to the post office, stuck some nice stickers onto the package that instantly started to slip off the tape gloss and I put the package in the corner to put some finishing touches on lesson plans. Wait, what was this? Damn it! I’d forgot to place a description of the package contents inside, something to outline the significance of each item. Believing now that it was I that would be playing the part of Gilligan in this classroom today I found myself an envelope, glued it to the back of the box and then, yes, more tape was applied to hold the envelope in place. In the end I had spent about an hour and a half wrapping a box. If anybody wishes to refute my claims of being the world’s worst wrapper then take one look at this horrid square of tape and then decide your stance. After I put in my time I stuck the box under my arm and headed over to the post office. I get nervous inside the post office. It isn’t the language barrier but the glares. I walk into the post office and phones top ringing, people stop talking. It’s like I’d walked in with a sawed off shotgun and wearing nothing but a ski-mask and a glow in the dark Daffy Duck sock. I wonder if the initial inclination of the postal service workers upon seeing a foreigner strut on in is that some sort of illegal transaction is about to take place, that maybe I am smuggling crates of Kitty Chans into Canada for resale at trumped up prices. Kitty Chan smuggling is punishable by death in Japan…cutesy annoying death by a disgruntled beefy dude in a Hello Kitty costume wielding a pink ax. You’d be surprised how much work this guy gets! I have never walked in with anything bigger then a manila envelope so hopefully I’d dispelled any notions. There is also that very peculiar man at the front desk that looks like a Japanese Mr. Dress-up with very dark undertones. I imagine him heading home to his “Tickle Trunk” and pulling out an S&M gimp outfit and riding crop for which to repeatedly flog himself with. Ugggh! Please give me a few moments to go and wash out my mind!!! I doesn’t matter if I am standing in another line or if all the clerks are free, the second I step into that little velvet rope hamster maze he motions me over. The first time he did this I thought it was because he knew some English and would be the best person in the place to lend me a hand. Nope. The guy has a translation guide by his desk which he can’t read and the only word in English he appears to know is “you” as he works it into every third word: “Japanese you Japanese Japanese you Japanese Japanese you.” Me don’t understand a word he’s saying outside of you! There is a woman in the place who can speak better English then most I’ve met and she was there today. I started walking towards her but Japanese Mr. Dress-up would have none of it as he stopped me with one of his motions. What could I do? Ignore the guy? I sighed and prepared for the usual twenty minutes of trying to get my point across. I chucked the package onto the countertop and his eyes widened. The woman who could speak better English then most I have met…her eyes widened. The customer behind me…his eyes widened. I think his dog’s eyes widened to. You know, I hadn’t even thought about it until just then. This would be the first time I’d come in here with an actual package, a long, rectangular package that could fit a few keys of coke quite nicely and still have room for the birthday card. I played it cool but Mr. Dress-up-san was giving me the eye. He quickly called over the woman who could speak English, spoke some sharp words to her in Japanese and sent her running to the back. She returned with three pieces of customs paper that I had to fill out describing in detail the contents of the package. Man, you’d think the sticker happy faces would be a sure sign that I was not smuggling drugs but I guess if I was a smart smuggler that is just how I would smuggle them. So I filled out the papers, handed them back and it took about ten minutes to peruse the sheets, fill out necessary weights and double check that I’d filled out all contents accurately before we came to price. It was my turn to have wide eyes as I looked at the near $100 shipping cost. “No, no,” I said in Japanese and pulled out my Phrasebook, turned to the C section and read out the Japanese word for “cheapest”. Mr. Dress-up-san snickered and again motioned for the English speaking lady. A line was forming. This happens every time I go to the post office. I haven’t had such a hassle with the mail since canceling my last Columbia House subscription! The $100 dollar price was, I think, the option to have a nude Japanese woman deliver your parcel while astride a donkey. I declined though Shawn might like that what with the donkey and all. The next option knocked things down a little but was still pricey. It was air-mail. Then came slightly slow air-mail and finally surface mail which I was told could take about two months to arrive. I was about to choose the middle ground when the woman remembered a special postal deal for shipping to Canada and instead of paying an arm and a leg I got away with an arm and two toes. I borrowed some post office tape, did a better job of sealing up the box and handed the package over where Mr. Dress-up-san promptly placed the postal information right over my stickers. Trust me, Des, there are stickers under there! Maybe the folks were extra suspicious today because there was a large parcel waiting there for me. This morning, around 10am, there was a knock on the door. I usually don’t answer it as it avoids a complicated conversation between two people who don’t understand each other with one of those people usually trying to get me to convert to Mormonism or educate me on my gas usage. It was the mailman, turned out, and the slip in my mailbox told me my deodorant had arrived. When Mr. Dress-up-san handed me over the box, a much less complicated ordeal then shipping one out, I had to laugh. My mother had used just as much tape as I had on my parcel and funnier still she must have applied about 200 stamps to this box. It was a big, bulky thing and made for some lopsided carrying but when I got it home I was elated to find a cure for my body odor. You’d think I was the smelliest person alive with the amount of deodorant that had been sent my way. Not one but three sticks and three spray cans including a can of TAG which was added in by my daughter who cautioned me on the amount of women I might attract one it was sprayed on. That kid needs to stop watching late night television. There was also a pack of razors inside to better trim the new look facial hair. I’ve been called a biker, a dope dealer and 1970s porn star with this new look but my favorite has been Dangerous-G-San. This comes from the kids. I take it he is a cartoon villain here as I asked one of them to draw him and it looked like the Pokemon version of Snidely Whiplash. Also in the box were some gummy candies, some sweets from my dear old Gran and something I have been craving ever since I stepped off the plane. OLD EL PASSO FAJITA KITS!!! I could taste the Zesty Ranch Sauce just looking at the box. Thanks mom, grandma and Des. You are appreciated more then you know! I quickly rushed back out to the grocery store, grabbed myself some chicken and peppers and came home to cook up my Mexican feast. As it bubbled in the pan the aroma filled the room and my mouth watered. I only face one problem now. How the hell do you eat fajitas with chopsticks?