Christmas Shopping and Dangerous Fish

As usually happens, the Mrs. HTF has done all of the Christmas shopping.  It's not like she doesn't try to involve me.  She asks me what I think we should buy for certain people and my responses, while often lengthy, can pretty much be summarized in one word:

"Uhhhh . . ."

I'm a guy, so my idea of shopping is that you go to a store, THEN you decide what to buy.  All this "planning" seems like a huge waste of time.  Granted, I certainly overpay, and sometimes I find myself in a sporting goods store looking for gifts for my grandma who can barely walk.  Often I will just buy the first shiny object I see and call it a successful day.  (my wife didn't like the aluminum foil I bought her last year)  See shopping is literally painful to me.  I have the attention span of a 3 year old reading War & Peace.  So speed is key.  One other thing - I am scared to death of intense female shoppers.  I respect them in much the same way I respect sharks (cool to observe from a very safe distance, but no desire to come in contact with them).  Several years ago I made one of those Black Friday ventures at 5 AM to a Walmart (at my wife's behest) and I'm not making this up - I came out with bruises from the shopping carts of obsessed women.  So in addition to being a bad shopper, I'm also kinda scared of it. 

And now you can see why I'm not in charge of the gift buying.  (I pretty much just get consulted after the gifts are purchased so I'm not the one acting surprised when the kids open things up and thank me.)  So if you happen to get a gift from me this year - thank Traci first and then let me know what I bought you.

It may not be an afro, but it's clean!!

Last week I had to drop by the store to pick up a few things.  I chose a Target since it's a place I'm kinda familiar with. This is important since I still have a big fear of shopping.  I grabbed everything on my abbreviated bachelor list.  But there was one item that I should've easily found, but couldn't seem to track down.  This was something I hadn't bought for myself in well over a decade, so it wasn't a shocker that I couldn't locate it.  And that item was . . .

shampoo

Now if you know me at all, you'll know that my head is a lot more like a cue-ball than a chia-pet.  Still, there is a bit of hair on there and I burned through the tiny bottle that came with the apartment I'm living in.  It took two whole months to do it though.  I kinda have the George Costanza thing going on just a little.  My kids draw pictures of me and the top is always totally bald, but there are these little patches on the sides.  Male-pattern baldness is a beautiful thing!

Back to my search - I looked everywhere and spent a large bit of time walking up and down the "body-wash-aisle."  Who knew there were 8,321 types of body wash?!  I thought the shampoo was gonna be nearby, but wow was I wrong.  After the long search I finally fought off my guy instincts and asked a "red shirt with khaki-pants-wearing" Target girl where the shampoo was.  I TOTALLY caught her glancing at my head and asking herself internally why in the world I'd need shampoo.  Nice.  I let her off the hook and told her it was for my wife.  She showed me to the aisle and I scored a small 87 cent bottle of Suave.  How did I celebrate my find you might ask?

That night I shaved everything off my entire melon with a razor for the first time in my life.  (I"m not entirely sure why I did this)

So if anyone needs shampoo, you can borrow mine - this bottle's gonna last me a while.

My Mad Shopping Skillz

I've never been a shopper. Just isn't something that I can tolerate well for more than 2 minutes. I'm extremely lucky that the Mrs. HTF does 102% of all the shopping and my spending is mostly limited to work lunches and iTunes. I also have this "disability" (for lack of a better word) that makes me ALWAYS screw up the shopping when I do end up buying stuff. A few of my more common shopping errors:

- Buying the wrong size or quantity of whatever
- Searching for one item in a store for several hours before asking for help, at which point I'm informed that they don't have eggs at the sporting goods store
- Listening to shopping advice from the four-year-old I brought with me
- Failure to use coupons the right way or to swipe the "loyalty card" so I get a better price
- Buying the wrong brand or flavor of whatever
- Having a well-written shopping list, but mysteriously being oblivious to several of the items listed. This always ends with me saying, "How did I miss that?!" when I get home.
- Buying what I will generically refer to as "treats" when they weren't on the list - often at the urging of the lucky (and persuasive) child I brought with me

I could go on, but I'm well aware that most of you readers are married women so you know exactly what I'm talking about. And for the guys out there, I'm pretty sure you get what I'm saying too. There's no real cure for my shopping problems - and in this case practice most definitely will never make perfect. And it could get pricey over time. I could be accused of screwing up on purpose so that I don't get asked to do it. While I could give college courses on that particular strategy, I guarantee that I don't need to TRY to screw up the shopping thing. So on behalf of most guys out there I ask for continued patience. And if you ladies are asking yourselves, "is he this clueless at work" - (to which the correct answer is "he fakes it better there") rest assured that the stupidity only sets in when there's a large, rolling, metal cart at his fingertips.