The Oops Factor Gift

I am a horrible person. Well, not person, but horrible blogger. And friend. Horrible blogger for obvious reasons, such as going missing for weeks at a time. Horrible friend for the same reasons.

I have had multiple concurrent jobs for several years and there is no way I could do this without some decent multitasking skills. However, it seems I have a saturation point and have been functioning at said saturation point for several weeks. Here is what I have neglected in the past few weeks:

Doing my taxes

Birthday-calling one lovely friend in Seattle

Return-calling to one lovely friend in Ohio

Sending a birthday present to one lovely friend in Pennsylvania

Sending a card to one lovely friend in Maine

Replying to emails of several friends in Chicago

This is exactly five states worth of relationships that I have jeopardized. Plus my own good standing with the US government. Not that this is an excuse, but here is what I have been busy doing in the past few weeks:

Turning 29

Spending a week in Florida (minus the 33 hours spent in the car getting there and back)

Getting a new writing job for Examiner.com

Searching for a new apartment

Writing threatening letters to current apartment company to possibly screw up insure safe return of security deposit

So you can see that I have been extremely busy and important and therefore reached code red multi-task-saturation point. And for that I would like to apologize to all of my lovely, multi-stated friends. I hope you are more forgiving than the IRS.

Also, you should probably gear up for some more forgiveness, because this gift is not one given by my AND showcases another of my less-pleasant sides. Just know that aside from my low-saturation-threshold, I am a much better person now than I was in 1995. For my fourteenth birthday, my dad gave me a CD. I had gotten a CD player for Christmas that year, along with my first CD, Ace of Base's "Sign."

Go ahead, I will give you a minute to fully embrace the awesomeness that was Ace of Base.

Anyway, once I had a taste of the greatness of CDs as clearly illustrated by this seminal mid-90s band, I was hungry for more. Particularly Counting Crows and their debut "August and Everything After." (This you may not make fun of, however, as I still love Counting Crows with a reverence that smacks of angst I shouldn't have.)

As I made no secret of how much I wanted this CD, I assumed my dad had bought this exact CD for my birthday. In fact, he had bought Hootie and the Blowfish's "Cracked Rear View." Given the expectations I had set up for myself, I was incapable of hiding my disappointment or otherwise acting like a nice person not filled with brat-tastic hormones. I may have even cried. My dad, sure that this CD was going to be a hit, recovered seamlessly. He bought the Counting Crows CD I made such a stink over, plus an extra CD of my choosing. An Oops Factor gift. This is his term - a gift in addition to the make-up gift to completely erase all mistakes on the part of the giver. I think of this all the time. Not just when I hear Hootie and the Blowfish (and cringe) but when I misjudge the awesomeness of a gift or miss a birthday. I owe lots of people Oops Factors right now. (Way more so than my dad ever did for my Hootie blunder.) I just hope that when you all cash in you make a wiser choice than the Celine Dion CD I picked out in 1995. It didn't stand the test of time like I thought it would.