Is this what we do with Cadbury Creme Eggs, children?
No. No, it is not.
WISH YOUR NIECE A ROMANTIC DEATH FOR HER BIRTHDAY
Since it is my personal mission to pester my Twilight-loathing friend with Twilight paraphernalia (stickers, candy, packs of trading cards all gussied up in polka-dot gift bags covered in skull-and-crossbones stickers and black ribbons), I strode joyfully into CVS last week to discover what new atrocity could be purchased for less than five dollars.
No, I have nothing better to do with my time. Thank you for inquiring.
I’d been beaten to the punch by a rampage of teenage Twiloonies or else adults like me who also have nothing better to do with their time, because the store had been swept clean of Twijunk. There were no stickers. There were no candies. There were no figurines. I searched in disbelief, having not been able to step into a store for years without someone from that love triangle giving me Emo Face from a rack. But the aisles were bare. Some Grinch had stolen Twilight. I hesitated at the Sorry For Your Loss cards, thinking perhaps it was time to send one to my friend, expressing my deepest condolences that I can no longer send Twilight presents to bother her, and then I turned and found a gem.
Deep within the birthday cards was this little number:
On the inside, it wishes for an eternally happy future, and contains an Emo Vampire Bookmark because if you’re going to live forever, you’ll get through a lot of reading. As I stood there with Cadbury Eggs rolling around in my basket, I wondered who would buy this card, and what exactly the message was meant to be. The well wishes are nonsensical because it was a story about a love triangle, not a friendship triangle, and I don’t recall much of the plot having anything to do with pleasant dreams or lack thereof. But I skimmed through the books, and took a shot of tequila every time Bella Swan scoffed in the first three movies, and thus I was somewhat incapacitated by the end of the first hour and perhaps missed it among all the ensuing hours while the four of us in a friend’s living room threw candy at each other and traded cards.
No, none of the four of us have anything better to do with our time. It’s an epidemic.
I don’t know why an aunt or uncle would wish for a niece to be changed into a vampire, to live forever with an increasingly tattered bookmark but to be fair, I have no niece. Perhaps it is a relationship full of strife and complication, and this card is a safe avenue for the expression of some pent-up passive-aggressiveness. Yet this explanation does not satisfy. I want to force this card to make sense and yet with every mental revolution I take, it falls apart even more. Here is the message, translated:
Dear Beloved Niece,
For your birthday, Uncle/Aunt was hoping for you to find yourself in a wordy love triangle between the undead who creeps about your bedroom and wants to drink your blood, and a werewolf that you shouldn’t get mad because he might rip your face off. Uncle/Aunt thinks that’s hawt! But Uncle/Aunt thinks that you should choose the vampire and live forever, and use this bookmark as a remembrance while the centuries trickle by.
Love,
Uncle/Aunt
I’m just going to put this card in the mail to my friend with a question mark written on the inside.
A GRIPPING CONUNDRUM
I have a $25 gift certificate to CVS.
Were it any other time of the year, this would be my grocery list of free items:
Chapstick.
Q-Tips.
Musical Twilight card to mail to my friend for purposes of torture.*
Package of Twilight stickers with which to cover the envelope.
Bland greeting card to throw off a relative about the practical joke inside.
Package of confetti.
San Pellegrino.
This morning, I woke up with the impulse to revise my list to the following:
Cadbury Crème Eggs.
Curious how many Cadbury Crème Egg Boxes of 4 I could get for $25, I clicked onto the CVS website to discover how much one box cost. Searching Cadbury Crème Eggs brought up 12 results, none of which were Cadbury Crème Eggs. My favorite was:
Cadbury Crème Egg → CVS Translation → Lice Treatment Family Pack.
It also translates to a Super Hair Relaxer, a variety of shortbread cookies, Olive Cholesterol For Moisture and Shine, and a vanilla protein drink with taste satisfaction guaranteed. I searched industriously through the site-
Industriously: /in-duhstreeuhslee/ adj. hunted for the full length of my twenty-second attention span, and then got sidetracked by email, checking site stats, and a Katy Perry song on my iTunes.
-and came up blank. But I am sure that $25 will buy quite a lot, and now I must debate how badly I want Q-Tips and to play practical jokes versus my favorite candy in the world.
* This friend loathes Twilight, so I send her Twilight gifts and insisted we see Breaking Dawn Part One over Christmas at Cheap Time in the theater. The joke was on me. That was the most boring movie I’ve ever seen, and I did not even have popcorn in which to drown my sorrows during that cinematic vacuum.
THE REASON FOR MY EXISTENCE IS IN AISLE 11 AT CVS
My high school French teacher did not speak French.
Trying to learn a language from a woman who does not speak it herself is a daunting task, and my mother, who was quite proficient in French, often flinched at my pronunciation. In retrospect, Spanish would have done me far better in life, but at my high school, there was a subtext to the language you selected.
French: you are smart, and maybe a little on the wild side romantically.
German: you are extremely smart, but you are also a closet Nazi.
Spanish: you are not very smart, and want to pad your transcript with an easy A.
Clearly, German was out so that people would not mistake me for a Nazi. I waffled between Spanish and French. But I did not want colleges thinking I picked fluffy Spanish over a more challenging course, and being thought of as a little wild was an image I was desperate to project. Pimply, gawky thirteen-year-old library nerds need all the help they can get. So French it was, with a teacher who did not speak it, and who had been removed from teaching second-year French after the parents of her students banded together and complained to the administration.
Due to this, what I list below shows you all of the French I know:
Bonjour.
Merde.
Raison d’être.
The sad part is that I knew those first two before I’d even enrolled in the class. And so we are left with my mastery of raison d’être, which means reason for being. I believe that we had to write a few sentences in French about our raison d’être for homework. Teachers have no idea what agony they cause with an assignment like this, especially when one must share the answer with a classroom of vicious teenagers. One must find something bland and inoffensive, something that cannot be tittered about, something so boring that everyone has forgotten it the second it is given voice.
But I am no longer in high school, and I feel no shame in admitting the truth here. I can say without a shadow of doubt that you have a cooler raison d’être than I do. For some of you, your raison d’être is your significant other or children. For others, it is your pets or friends. Certain people have work or a hobby or a religion that they love beyond reason. When it comes to many narcissistic celebrities, their raison d’être is simply themselves. My own raison d’être only exists two months out of the year in America, and in the remaining ten, I try desperately not to dwell upon our separation. In Aisle 11 of CVS on Saturday, I stumbled over the ultimate reason for my existence on the third shelf down from the top.
Cadbury Crème Eggs.
The Dark Time of the year has ended. Let us revel in the return of the light.
