Coldplay For Christmas

One year all I wanted was Coldplay for Christmas, but let’s go back to where it all started…

My Mom likes to tell the story of lugging all ten pounds of me around for an extra month of pregnancy. Apparently, I wasn’t interested in moving. Multiple times, she thought I was dead in there, because I didn’t kick, poke, turn cartwheels, prod, practice my jazz hands, or whatever it is fat unborn babies do to torture their mommies. Heck, I didn’t even care to go through the trauma of labor enough to engage. The doctor ended up having to pull me out with forceps and held me upside down by the ankles. I thanked him for rescuing me with loud emissions of gas along with my tears.

Mom loved me in spite of my multiple ejaculations.

Still, I wasn’t in any hurry to move. I didn’t walk until eighteen months. Today, that would put me in the zero-ith percentile or something, but back then, it didn’t matter much. And I excelled in other areas.

I could whup four-year-olds at talking. I talked all. The. Time. Real words. Complex sentences. From a tender age, I could even ‘read,’ code for making my Mom plow through the same book hundreds of times in a row. Arty the Smarty and The Saggy Baggy Elephant were the Disney movies of my era, and I memorized them down to the turn of every enthralling page. I could never, ever get enough of those stories. We read them over. And over. And over again.

Children morph into adults and leave maddening traits buried in the past. Not me. Nope. I am the Peter Pan of maddening traits, and my most obnoxious one, according to dear MTM, is my repetitive tendency to play certain music. Over. And over. And over again.

Specifically, the British band Coldplay [for Christmas].

For Christmas, I bought Mylo Xyloto, Coldplay’s latest CD, and stuffed it in MTM’s stocking with tingling fingers and ringing in my ears. It was HIS gift. Yet, I coveted it. Could I open it and listen to it and then somehow force it back into the shrink wrap without any obvious evidence of tampering? If I bought two copies, how would I listen to mine a million times in a row when I could never be sure when he would come home and catch me in the act of cheating on him with HIS Christmas present?

I controlled myself. Now, he’s paying for it. The other day, he drew the proverbial line in the sand. Andra, we cannot play Mylo Xyloto for the twentieth time in succession. Stop the insanity. Pick something else.

Parachutes. Coldplay. That’s what I picked.