White Elephant

I bought my wife a white elephant gift this past Christmas. The perfect white elephant gift--strange, useless, absurd . . . yet all of those qualities somehow eluded me when I made the purchase.

You see, there is nothing like inadvertently buying a white elephant gift. It all seemed reasonable and perfectly sound at the time.

But then again . . . when I opened the box (I had been awaiting its arrival for several days), a strange feeling started to fall over me . . .

. . . I had been taken by a huckster.

Worse: I swallowed it . . . hook, line, and sinker.

This changed the barometer of my short drive home. Instead of bringing my wife something beautiful, exciting, and useful, I fully realized that I was delivering a manifestation of absurdity.

There's nothing like having a lot of pride in your overall intelligence and worldly wisdom, and then opening up a box and realizing that you are just a pitiful fool, like everybody else. Yes, it's painful. But it's a good pain, like a root canal. There was something rotting beneath the surface that needed to be re-routed or extracted. Or maybe I just stepped on a thorn that made me stumble off my path enough to ensure that I didn't fall into a hole. God (or even the natural law of the universe) has a way of prodding us so that we may avoid destruction. Something about life always struggles to keep us alive.

But let's be real: I will inevitably fall into that hole, limping and cursing the thorn in my toe.

Anybody who buys for their wife a shiny new set of yoga toes will surely not be astute enough to avoid such a calamity.

Yeah, you heard it right: yoga toes. Go check it out for yourself. They have their own domain. Go . . . and don't be afraid to buy your wife mini-vibrator up-sell.

http://www.yogatoes.com

Wow.