I think surprise parties are cruel.
That’s right, I said it.
You walk into a room expecting one thing, and get something completely different. Now, if you’d KNOWN there was going to be a party in your honor, you’d probably have fixed your hair, worn a different outfit, sucked the nacho stain off your shirt.
Hell, you’d have the opportunity to look forward to it for weeks!
I learned this lesson the hard way. I perpetrated this evil on one of the people most beloved to me in my life. My sister Beezy. It was her 16th birthday. I thought it would be “super rad” (it was the 80s) to invite her friends over for a surprise pool party. I even arranged for her best friend who lived in another state to fly in for the occasion. I was high on the intrigue and deceit. Half the fun, no ALL OF THE FUN, was keeping the secret. We dressed Ray, the aforementioned friend, up like a big present and placed her front and center in the entryway of our house. My dad took Beezy to a movie she didn’t want to go to. She had already seen it, and he made her sit through it again, putting her in a foul mood. Now, we’re talking 16 years old, here, so take it from a high school teacher: crabby 16 is worse than crabby 30 any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
When she arrived at the house and came in the front door, we all yelled “Surprise!” and Beezy looked appropriately delighted and grateful, posing gamely for pictures. You have to know her like a sister to see that the smile in those pictures is pained, forced, and fake. She hates what she’s wearing. She hates her hair. She wasn’t in the mood for a party. She just wanted to GO HOME and be ALONE after spending the afternoon with her insistent and annoying father.
I learned all of this later. I was so self-congratulatory that I’d pulled off the surprise, I didn’t even stop to think if this is what my sister would even WANT for her sweet 16. Thus follows my theory that a surprise party is always about the person throwing it, and never about the person being surprised. If you think about it, would you really want to open the door to your own home thinking, “Yay, I can’t wait to crack a beer, put on my sweatpants and watch DVRed ‘Survivor!'” and have everyone you know yell “SURPRISE!” at you? Fuck yeah, I’m surprised. I thought I could trust you people. Now I have to play hostess for god only knows how many hours before I can be alone with Jeff Probst. Happy birthday to me.
Or, you walk into a restaurant with your husband expecting a quiet dinner for two. Now I can talk to him, you think, about how we can get under this cat shitting on the floor thing. You know, hypothetically. Or maybe you’re just thinking, “Thank Jeebus I don’t have to cook, and I can just relax and be waited on.”
SURPRISE!
Oh, shit! Now I have to talk to all of my family and friends for hours instead. In this stained tank top! And everyone is taking pictures! Super.
I was only 17 when I committed this evil against Beezy, so I’m glad I learned that lesson young. We have a rule in this family now. Nay, a pact. No surprise parties.
And that includes “interventions.”
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
Conspiracy Theory
I loved “The X Files.” It was more than my nerdy love for Fox Mulder or my obsession with Dana Scully. I’m a conspiracy theorist. For example, I believe in all that Dan Brown shit. I’ve also theorized that the government is preparing us to live in a post-apocalyptic underground world where we exist on processed food and have no need to see other human beings because everyone grew up playing videogames, Skyping, and having “relationships” on Facebook. Once porn becomes 3-D and virtual reality, their work is done.
My latest conspiracy theory? That “other blogger” enjoys many small things, including a little ghost writer. Stay with me. Look back at the older posts. The 2008 and 2009 posts. She doesn’t even use capital letters. The whole thing is like one long text message from a 15-year-old. “skool sux, lollllll!!!!! ;)” The “magic” is there, as are the metaphors and the shameless love of that private beach club island paradise she can’t stop writing about. But the voice is distinctly different.
Now, read doting daddy’s comments on all of the posts. There is an identical excess to his writing that isn’t so obvious in her early writing, but is heavy handed in the recent drek posts. Maybe he taught his daughter to write. Maybe this is how they talk around the dinner table. “Filial filly of my flesh, the yearning in my heart for a certain savory saltiness sadly lacking from my lonely lamb chop spurns forth in me a tiny prayer from me, to you.”
He’s also super defensive of what is written. There is an understandable protectiveness a father feels for a daughter, but the ominpresence of the father character in her little tale is fishy to me. And I use the term deliberately, as an homage to the perfection, the magic, the millionaire’s paradise island where they regularly suck marrow.
Sidebar, a commentor wrote a while back that she went to the island and couldn’t find any public areas. She wanted to go slide on enchanted bunnies down rainbows into fairy dust puddles too! Who wouldn’t? But she was chagrined and posited her theory that this clan of unicorns must know somebody who owns a home there or something. When I’m feeling down, to give myself a chuckle, I try to picture the faces of the homeowners who occupy the island (all second homes, no doubt) as they see the carloads of middle-class, famous-local-blogger-loving tourists invading their island to spread Walmart blankets for budget picnics on the hallowed ground.
Although it’s possible that in this economy, many of those vacation homes are for sale.
“Focus, Mulder,” Scully might say impatiently. Yes, I have drifted off on a whimsy, haven’t I? And a flimsy whimsy at that.
None of this is anything you couldn’t notice for yourself. My training as an English teacher makes me more likely to “tsk tsk” over missing capital letters and dramatic changes in diction and tone. Writers change and evolve, of course. Not always for the better. I actually find the older posts more charming and real, if you’re able to overlook the “texting” quality of the mechanics.
I have to go now. It’s time for we Morlocks to go above ground and feast on the flesh of the Eloi.
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