Road Trip: Blogged (Day One)

Hyperopic. That's what Tiffany and I are. Do you know what that means? It means that on the day we started the drive for our move from San Francisco to New York (today), we had literally dozens of gift certificates for amazing experiences that we had to gift to friends. Facials. Movies. Seafood. You name it, and we had an unredeemed coupon for it. We so delay our gratification that we actually never get gratified.

Despite promising ourselves that we would use each of the freebies on various special occasions, they remained, untouched for... I'm embarrassed to say how long. Literally years in some cases.

"Babe, don't you want to use that massage to celebrate the end of your class?" I'd ask, every so often.

"Nah," Tiffany would answer, "maybe next time."

Likewise, I always found a reason to skip cashing in on the ice cream gift card I was given back in 2008.

"Let's save it for when we're really in the mood," I'd say, as if one needs a special mood for a scoop or two of dairy product.

We've both apparently been suffering from the condition of hyperopia for...ever, but we only just discovered the word for it, in a book about willpower Tiffany was reading.

It turns out that there is such a thing as too much willpower, according to the book, "The Willpower Instinct." The ability to continuously refrain from indulging in... anything, in our case... is just as unhealthy as the continuous inability to refrain from indulging in everything, I guess. This is hyperopia, and Tiffany and I are sick with it.

I was amazed as Tiffany read the passage out loud to me while we were lying on the beach in Mexico enjoying a vacation we had put off for two years.

"There's a word for us?" I asked. "Meaning there are others like us? Weird."

Anyway, the point of this blog post (besides kicking off Road Trip: Blogged) is to warn all of my dear readers against such behavior. Here's what happens when you postpone wonderful things for too long. They don't happen. See how:

After Tiffany and I booked our Mexico trip, we booked a two-hour massage she'd been given many birthdays ago. We were so smart we asked the spa to split that two-hour chunk into two one-hour massages, and they agreed! We planned our massages for the 18 hours between our arrival back in the States and the time we needed to be at our friends' rehearsal dinner in Sonoma. So of course the gift certificate gods laughed at us. They cancelled our return flight from Mexico by giving us a leaky engine. By the time we arrived, we had four hours to spare instead of 18, and each of those four hours came well after our scheduled massages, which we had to cancel.