Attention, All Husbands

I hate to point out the obvious, that it’s my birthday. I’m sure you’ve been thinking about what to get me. It was so obvious you spent a lot of time thinking about it last year. The way a mayfly spends a lot of time living. I don’t want to be one of those people who expects the whole world to sit up at attention and throw me a goddamn ticker tape parade and cast a bronze statue in my likeness while hot, sweaty people wave flags with my face on it and eat $15 empanadas named after me because it’s the day that I became a piece of data to be captured by the U.S. Census. That said, when I wrote my wedding vows and then wrote yours for you, I included a whole section about honoring my birthday, and I sort of expected that you’d internalize that point till death do us part. Or till I am REBORN as some other life form at which time the duty of celebrating my birth will fall to some other organism. I’m not even going to think about the possibility that I may be reincarnated as something that doesn’t recognize birthdays, like a Jehova’s Witness or some species of marlin, so I hear. Speaking of fish, you could take me out for dinner. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot of brain power to recognize that I’m no Barefoot Contessa in the kitchen. I’m really more like that waste-of-space husband, Jeffrey, who must believe his testicles will dry up into a heap of dried mustard powder if he even steps foot in the house before an entire Roast Capon has been plated and brought to an outdoor table overlooking the ocean. No, I don’t want to go to the ocean. I just said the word ocean. Going to the ocean involves wearing a bathing suit, which I haven’t done since the birthday I turned 14. That was the last documented moment I have been glimpsed in a bathing suit, and I appreciate you realizing that I have that discomfort and that’s why you bought me that sarong printed with palm trees and people sitting in hammocks for my birthday 3 years ago, but I never figured out how to use it. It ties 50 different ways but I couldn’t find a single way that made me look like a human fucking being in a piece of fabric instead of a beluga whale who swam headfirst into the sail of a windsurf. I realize that I made a lot of marine references just now, but I do not want to go the aquarium. I’m not in the mood to de-suction the kids’ mouths from glass spattered with penguin shit nor to bribe the security guard to let us leave the facility through any exit, even through the drain of the tank containing the orca that became deranged from swimming in a circle day and night, just to avoid walking through the gift shop. If we could stop by one of the ladies’ department stores – one of the expensive ones that I don’t normally go to because the sales staff looks disapprovingly at the kids because they’re not wearing shoes or pants – because they sell the anti-aging creams that they actually call serums and put in glass bottles with pumps. I can’t be sure if they are why Cindy Crawford’s face looks like the new drywall in fancy subdivisions, but it’s certainly not because of those fucking mutant melons that doctor in France harvested.  I just want to pump that serum onto my face and neck and sit alone in the bathroom and read this magazine that I bought from the grocery store instead of just flipping through the whole thing as a man buying beef jerky and sour cream dip breathed sour air on my shoulders. I want to read every page of it and study the pictures of this woman wearing a sarong in all 50 ways that it can go while somehow not looking like an asshole in 48 of them.