Christmas with my husband is interesting. Gift-giving with him is different from gift-giving with my family, gift-giving with my girlfriends or gift-giving with absolutely anyone else. I like to see people’s faces light up, hear them say, “I NEEDED one of these! I’ve always WANTED one of these! I LOVE it!” and then see them wear, use or play with the gift I got them months later. But it’s not quite like that with Cody.

To illustrate my point, I will give an example of a conversation we had while we were exchanging gifts on Christmas Eve.

But first, let me give you some background.

I had fretted over what to get Cody as I was shopping with my little brother the day before. Some nice shirts? A new sweater to replace the one I accidentally bleached? A pair of Lucky brand jeans he wouldn’t spend his own hard-earned money on? Then I found it. A coat. A charcoal gray, popped-collar coat from Banana Republic. Half-off?! Even better. That coat was awesome, and I knew it would look totally hot on my husband. I bought it.

But as we headed home, I wondered if he really wanted a new coat. Did he need it? Should I get him something more fun instead of something he needed? Would he rather have some kind of electronic toy, a new XBox game, accessories for his truck? But it was the night before Christmas Eve. Too late for second thoughts. So I went home and wrapped the gift, hoping I’d get the reaction I was looking for when he opened it: jaw-dropping excitement.

Christmas Eve afternoon we had both gotten home early from work and were just finishing lunch when my husband announced it was time for us to exchange gifts. I insisted he open mine first so that I didn’t have to stress any longer.

Here’s how it played out:

Cody tore at the wrapping paper and saw the bottom of the box. He feigned excitement.

“A white box??!”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. He flipped the box over and smiled widely.

“Ooooh, Banana Republic. Did you get me new nice shirts, babe?”

“Hm-mm,” I answered as he opened the box and pushed the tissue paper aside.

“A coat,” he said simply, pulling it out and holding it up. Not quite as excited as I had been hoping he would be. “It’s nice.”

I stared at him expectantly, waiting for the moment when he realizes it’s an awesome coat. He stood up and walked over to the mirror by the front door to try it on.

I was tired of waiting.

“Do you LIKE it?!” I asked, the pitch in my voice raising a bit. He twisted around in front of the mirror to see all sides of the coat.

“Do YOU like it?” He asked me back, his eyes not moving from the mirror.

I frowned. What kind of answer was that?

“What kind of answer is that?” I asked. “Do YOU like it?”

“Babe, just tell me. Do you like it?”

“YES, I like it!!” I tried not to snap. “I wouldn’t have bought it for you if I didn’t. I thought it was totally your style, that you’d look hot in it.”

“Then I like it,” he said smiling. “You think I look hot in it?”

Exasperated, I stood up from my spot on the floor and put my hands on my hips.

“Yes!” I said, pointing at the mirror. “Don’t you like the way it looks on you?”

“Well, if you think it looks hot, then I REALLY like it,” he said. “Thanks, babe. It’s perfect. I told you I needed a coat, and that’s what you got me. Really, I like it.”

I squinted my eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

He laughed, throwing his head back. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“There’s something about it you don’t like,” I said, looking into this eyes to let him know I could see right through him. “I can tell. What is it? I swear I won’t care. We can take it back. Really, it won’t hurt my feelings. We can just get you something else.”

“No,” he said, zipping it up. “I want to keep it. It will be good to have a nice coat. That other one looked silly when I wore it with my dress clothes.”

I didn’t speak. I just stared at him, willing him to say what he was thinking. There HAD to be something else. He thought I was being hilarious.

“Come here,” he said, sweeping me up into a big hug and planting a kiss on my cheek. “It’s a really nice coat and I like it. I promise.  You did a really good job this year.”

A little disgruntled, I sat back down. There was nothing I could do. He was steadfast and swearing up and down he loved it. Oh well, I thought. Maybe give him a day and he’ll be out with whatever it is he didn’t like about the coat. Whatever. Just let it go, Jamie.

I dragged the Santa Claus bag written out to me from under the tree. Pulling out two small wrapped boxes, I looked at Cody with my eyebrow raised.

“Open the small one first,” he said.  I tore open the wrapping paper. As soon as I caught side of a metallic, pink corner and the little white apple symbol, my hands dropped.

“No, you didn’t!!” I exclaimed, looking at him, my jaw falling open. His eyes twinkled and he chuckled.

“I did,” he answered.

“You got me an iPod Nano?!” I shrieked, pulling it from the paper. It was tiny, slender, lightweight and beautiful. “I love it! I’m so excited. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!” I unwrapped the bigger box, to find another Apple-decored package: a Nike computer chip to go into my running shoe that syncs with my iPod to record my workouts. I jumped into his lap and gave him a huge hug around his neck. I popped in the earbuds and did a little dance around the living room, very iPod-commercial-esque.

I hope Cody really does like his coat. I have a feeling him liking his coat had a lot more to do with my happiness than with his, a chivalrous and sweet thing I still haven’t quite gotten used to in our marriage. And even if I didn’t get the reaction I wanted, I am sure mine made up for it.

I’m a random sort of person. If you’ve read this blog consistently, you’ll find past entries about rehab, concerts, MP3 players, family members and cereal. In a few short but enjoyable months, I’ve shared a window into my own miscellaneous actions and ideas.

One of the most random tendencies I’ve ever had happened during my first semester of college. Sitting in a lecture hall with 400 of my peers, my mind drifted from thought to thought as I kept my eyes trained on a professor who, if you closed your eyes and just listened to his diction, sounded a little like David Letterman. He was awkward and self-deprecating, but extremely quick on the draw. Each time this professor said or did anything that resembled my dad’s favorite late night host, I wrote it down. By semester’s end, I had a notebook full of useful information for test preparation, mixed with a sentence here or a note there about a joke the professor had told or a “Hee-heeee” laugh he had used to punctuate a sentence.

I started doing it in other classes. Each class, I put more and more emphasis on the comparisons, and I began doing it earlier and earlier each semester. By the middle of my college career, I anticipated the beginning of a new course load just so I could make observations of a new lineup of professors. I even stumbled upon a new use for my observation practice: I began writing down first impressions of my professors for evaluation at the end of the semester to see if they stacked up to what I’d expected on that first day. I even doodled caricatures to serve as a reminder of their physical appearances for when I opened the notebooks years later; I jotted their memorable quotes.

There was the “History of Rock and Roll” (yes, this is a course offered at The University of Kansas, and no, it’s not as interesting as it sounds) professor who met the requirement of being just enough of a love child to teach such a course; there was Chester, the forgetful yet joyful British Literature professor who I guessed was drunk for somewhere between 5 and 85 percent of the class sessions; there was the African History professor whose love of the continent clearly outshone her love of teaching.

There was Harry, the elderly economics professor who I guessed would end up repeating the same stories all semester (correct); there was the sociology T.A. who I thought seemed nice (incorrect — she was batshit crazy); there was the extremely masculine English literature professor who I at first thought was dry but who I later found to be fascinatingly intelligent and who ended up being one of the five friendliest people I’d ever met.

But perhaps most memorable was the fiction writing class I took during the fall semester of my junior year. The professor was around 60 years old, almost always late, and called herself a “kiwi” because she was from New Zealand. She was difficult to understand and bitter as hell — but a pretty remarkable teacher. I was so intimidated by her from the first day that I never had the guts to sketch her, but I remember vividly what she looked like.

She opened the first class period not with an introduction or the distribution of a syllabus, but with a statement: “If you work for The Kansan, this class is nearly impossible.” She was referring to the student newspaper, for which I was a reporter. Apparently there had been a bad experience with a staff member and time constraints in her past, because I later realized she held an unreasonable hatred for the newspaper in general. Before I could comprehend the importance of the impending doom that was being spelled out for my GPA, I was frantically scribbling the quote. My side project of taking unrelated class notes had long since overtaken any sort of educational process. I could hardly believe she’d said it — not so much because it seemed aimed almost directly at me, but because I immediately understood the value it added to my collection.

Little did I know, she was just getting started.

During the second class session, she shared a bit of wisdom that I took to heart and helped me get through the busiest semester of my college experience.

“Writers don’t watch TV,” she said. An entire classroom scoffed. “Turn off the TV. See if you can do it for a semester. Amazing things will happen to your mind.”

That sounded like a personal challenge to me. I had just moved into a new house with new roommates. That semester, my TV was in my room but remained disconnected from cable (She didn’t say anything about video games, I guiltily apologized to myself). I doubt she expected any of us would actually unplug the tube, but every time I considered hooking it up, my mind went back to that first day and I remained unplugged.

I had been writing fiction in my spare time since junior high, but had never received any official instruction on doing so. The class was strange to me, because I was getting technical feedback and learning that there was a NAME for the boring, disorganized dribble I’d been calling “fiction” for the past five or six years.

“Crap,” she was known to tell the class when someone shared a particularly awful story. “It’s a technical term.”

On one particularly sunshiny day, she broke up group discussions when she heard a student explaining a plot line she didn’t care for. She told him it was stupid, stupid, stupid and that nobody wanted to hear his stupid ideas. She asked him to stop voicing his stupid ideas in case the stupidity would rub off on the rest of us.

It wasn’t always like walking into a buzzsaw going into her classroom. Her advice was logical, insightful and made most of us better writers. She told us to take chances with dialogue. Keep alarm clocks out of anything we wrote. Stop writing in choppy sentences. I listened to most of what she said.

Sometimes her ideas were about writing, and other times they seemed to have a deeper life meaning.

“Know the difference between emotion and sentimentality.”

She gave advice.

“Each of you has a passion. If you don’t, you should get one.”

And then sometimes her angry outlook shone through enough that you couldn’t help but wonder about her own stability and personal well-being. Like the time she told us every tale of love was exactly the same.

“The moral of the story kids, as it always is — don’t give up anything for love. And don’t use caps to describe that someone’s shouting.”

I left her class with an “A,” still on the newspaper staff and with a better understanding of fiction and how it should be written. Her challenge to give up television lasted exactly as long as she specified it should be, because I hooked up my cable after finals.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I reached into my drawer and pulled out a notebook that said “Speech” crossed out and “Fiction” written in under it. I’ve told the television story before, but I had forgotten most of the other parts. When I opened the notebook, that semester came rushing back. I almost knew which page to turn to in order to find the quote about emotion. It’s one of the only notebooks I used in college that doesn’t have doodles in the margins or band names written over and over again. Does that mean it was the one class I really cared about, with the one professor who I really listened to? I feel like that might be partially true, but I also wonder if it just means I was scared to hell of an old kiwi who knew what she was talking about.

Two years ago, I was ordering a coloring book or something from Amazon.com when I noticed that I could get free two-day shipping if I tried out something called “Amazon Prime.” It was one of those “Try it for 30 days. Risk free!” sort of deals. If you wanted to cancel, you just had to click a button somewhere before 30 days elapsed. If you liked the service, or if you forgot to click the button, you were billed $70 for a year’s worth of “free” two-day shipping. I signed up for the free trial, like a sucker, and then forgot to click the button. I made the most of my mistake and proceeded to use Amazon Prime with gusto. This year I purposefully renewed my subscription.

During the past two years, Amazon Prime has become a staple of my day-to-day life. When my roommates run out of Crystal Lite, instead of writing it on the grocery list, I check out Amazon Prime. When my favorite mechanical pencil broke, the one I used for a four-year engineering degree and a year of teaching, I didn’t go to Office Max or Office Depot or Target. I went to Amazon Prime. When I wanted a digital projector for my classroom, I researched on Cnet.com and then purchased through… Amazon Prime.

The two-day shipping is just so convenient. I order printer refills, T-shirts, movies and, of course, books and they all arrive on my doorsteps two days later. Days that I come home to find those brown boxes with the distinctive Amazon smile logo on the sides are like miniature Christmas Days — my dull gray door does not have the sparkle of a traditional Christmas tree, but it has just as much space underneath its boughs, er… on the steps.

So when it came time for real Christmas shopping, I naturally turned to Amazon Prime and its glorious two-day shipping. I found great deals on board games and books, snacks and movies, shirts and video games. I completed all of my shopping in about two hours. I never had to face Christmas crowds, and I never had to go to the mall. I never even left my house.

While I love, appreciate, embrace, applaud, encourage, laud and enjoy the use of Amazon Prime, I can’t help but question the changes it is orchestrating in me. I had zero interactions with any of the sellers, shippers, packagers, distributors, manufacturers, designers or resource suppliers who took part in the arrival of my Christmas gifts at my door. I had no ownership of the creation of these products and, as a result, felt no responsibility… for safe creation or disposal. Amazon Prime allowed me to consume without thought or reflection.

Some questions that I didn’t ask include: Was the cardboard for my brother’s board game created by child labor? Was it pressed in a plant with adequate ventilation for its workers? Does the plant use toxic chemicals in the paints or the presses? Does it use local water sources to cool machines?

I did not ask these questions because I was blissfully focused on consuming. Amazon Prime has helped me to make consumption completely ordinary, completely expected. It is as if all the things my heart might momentarily desire just magically appear on my doorstep. All I have to do is say that I want them.

I am extremely thankful that Amazon Prime exists, and that I am in a financial position that I can give gifts to people I love. I am grateful that I did not have to travel to the Galleria to shop for gifts. But I want the things I do to have purpose and thought behind them. Just because it is easy for me does not mean it is the best thing in general.

So next year, I am going to think very hard about renewing my Amazon Prime subscription. When I eventually decide to renew it, which I will, I will challenge myself to reflect on whether I actually need the things I am ordering. I will think long and hard about where the things came from, and what my purchase does to support or crush the lives of other people.

I will use the answer to dictate my purchase, taking a small amount of comfort in the fact that my buying habits will help to spur change in the products offered on Amazon. So while I hope that a lot changes in my relationship with Amazon Prime during this next year, one thing will not - I will still smile and skip when I see that smiling box waiting on my doorstep.