Erin knows I hate the fact that most holidays are geared toward consumerism and gifts. In my perfect world, there would be no gift-giving holidays, and instead people would get each other thoughtful and spontaneous gifts on everyday occasions. I know at least that Erin’s father is awesome enough to have that mindset, but I wish more people did. If everyone were like us, then all gifts would be wonderfully fun surprises instead of scheduled, forced, usually last-minute, sometimes contrite acts.

But enough about holidays. I’m just going to give in to the Valentine’s thing because I know Erin likes it, and because our passion is fierier than ten thousand suns and deeper than the oceans covering Atlantis. We’re like two little stormtroopers in a vast galactic empire, joining forces to eliminate rebel scum (and mathphobia) in a manner far beyond the abilities of any single human. We’ve been dating two years, we’re going strong, and exciting times lay ahead. With Erin, my life is good.

But of course, more than just this lego-sized tribute to our love, there is a physical surprise on its way to Erin as we speak. She’ll just have to wait to find out what it is. Here’s a hint: it’s not something you want to incinerate, but sometimes you don’t have a choice.

P.S., Erin’s been getting me surprises like wildfire recently! What a great gal

Talk about waiting for the right moment . I got her some similar ones to mine. I had them shipped to me, and then hid the package in her office desk drawer. Now that she has them, she hardly goes a day without using them.

Probably the thing she likes the most (aside from their relatively good quality) is the ten-foot cord. She can use them during any activity she wants, because she can walk quite far and doesn’t have to hold anything. That includes moving around her office while she works, cooking and cleaning, and of course karate-karaoke. And as far as I know, Erin holds the only black-belt in karate-karaoke. All in all, a worthwhile surprise.

Bow in respect to Sensei Erin.

Addendum: http://www.karatekaraoke.com/. But they obviously got the idea from Erin.

It was for Erin, and the important part was that it makes her smile every time she thinks of it.

Before I get started, I should admit something: it’s going to be really really really hard to top this surprise. It was almost six months in the making: March of 2010 to August, and it culminated in a book of unfathomable depth, intellect, artistry, emotion, and puns. And of course it can’t be awesome without sufficiently many puns. So let’s go back in time four years to the conception of this idea.

When I was a strapping young lad of 18, energetic and full of dreams, I got my first technical job at a small company in San Luis Obispo called CreateSpace. If I recall correctly, it started as a company of Cal Poly grads who wanted to fill the niche of so-called “content on demand.” In other words, if you want to make an independent film, but don’t have a contract with some company to make and distribute the physical DVDs, you could sign up for an account at CreateSpace, and they would take care of all that. You provided the cover art, disc art, and the actual film, and CreateSpace made money by not actually making the product until it is ordered. 

That was the catch: the company didn’t have to burn thousands of DVDs at once and have them filling up some warehouse until a customer bought them. Of course, the only way they could do this is if they had a production line that could make any of the DVDs on record at a moment’s notice (but in this age of technology that’s not farfetched, and they got a pretty good system working). The result is a lot of really bizarre and hilarious movies, but also a lot of outdated films and DVD sets that big publishers couldn’t justify continuing to produce.

The company was soon bought by Amazon.com (before I worked there), and they extended their services to include books and music. We used to often joke about “shoes on demand,” or “toothpicks on demand,” and came up with some really neat ideas that continue to fill the niche (consider, for instance how menus at restaurants are subject to change so often…).

My job at the company is irrelevant (I wrote code to handle some accounting stuff). Working there put the idea in my head that I could publish a real book whenever I wanted! I just needed to write something, and I have been occasionally spotted dabbling in creative writing when nobody is looking. So some form of publishing is usually in the back of my head as I toss around ideas for new surprises.

Fast forward to March 2010. Erin and I were blossoming our relationship, and I figured it would be a fun idea to send her random little haikus. I supposed she’d think I was totally deep and silly, or at least smart enough to know what a haiku is. Almost immediately thereafter, I realized that I should save them all. The very first one I sent, on March 10, 2010, was in a chat:

1:52 pm me: random haiku #1:
            I like you I like
            you I like you I like you
            I like you a lot.

(Oh, be gentle with your laughter; it was my first serious love-haiku!) This was the idea: if I gave a name to every haiku, I could later recover all of the haikus by searching through my email records for the word “haiku,” (or, as it turns out, “haiku #”, since each haiku has an arbitrarily chosen number). In fact, thank heavens for Google, because since I signed up for a Google Voice number just a few months before, all of my text messages are stored and searchable! That meant I didn’t have to worry about scribbling down haikus and losing all of them. I could just focus on writing awesome haikus for Erin, and let her write back.

It took Erin a bit to find her own voice, but the first haiku she sent me was a inspired gem:

3:06 pm Erin: I am yours to kiss
              every morning when I'm a
              naked butterfly.

Of course, every couple has a “naked butterfly.” It’s just the little quirky silly things you do on a Sunday morning when nobody has work to do and you don’t bother to get dressed.

So this went on for days and weeks and months. I’d be bored in class and send her a quick haiku about hugs or tigers or topological spaces. At the time, we were both taking a second course in topology, and so the jokes were aflutter about and homotopic homies. We had sent about thirty haikus when I decided on publishing a book. The title came to me more or less naturally, and I envisioned it Hollywood-Sign-size, embellished with dazzling lights, and suspended in midair:

Naked Butterflies

A Collection of Haikus Between Two Star-Crossed Mathematicians

Perhaps, however, the gaudy billboard version will have to wait until someone turns it into a Broadway musical (any day now, by my count). And don’t worry, I know the plural of haiku is “haiku.” It’s called artistic freedom. Get over it.

With the decision to publish firmly embedded in my head, the race against time was on. You see, I had just been accepted into a very special semester-long mathematics program in Budapest, called Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (it was by far the best thing I ever did for my education). I was due to leave the second week of August, and I had mentally committed to collect enough of our haikus by then to publish the book and give it to her as a token of confidence for the long-winded, long-faced, long-distance longing that would ensue.

By my initial calculations, we needed at least a hundred haikus to fill the minimum page count for a book. Ideally I would have had enough to publish a thousand-volume collection requiring a truck to deliver. So every free moment, and every evening as I fell asleep, I thought of haikus to send her. I thought about our relationship, how I was leaving for the Fall, and how we were apart during most of the Summer while I worked at Adventure Day Camp. But it seems Keats’s ghost evaded me, because instead of flowr’y romantic timeless poetry about truth and beauty and urns, I ended up with haikus about ducks, donuts, dogs, Erin’s Mini Cooper, Battlestar Galactica, and six year old boys playing with their wieners in the bathroom when they’re supposed to be changing for the pool. Every now and then I got a heartfelt one across, and I’m proudest of those, but the crass ones give me the most laughs, and that’s got to be worth something, right? I kept mysteriously encouraging Erin to write me more haikus, too, and luckily by that point she enjoyed it enough to not be suspicious of my clandestine operation.

With two weeks to go, we had a whopping 103 haikus (a prime number, how fitting!). I was ready to publish. Of course, the book just had to be purple (both of our favorite colors), and while I wanted to put three haikus on each page, I decided on two so the book wouldn’t be too ridiculously thin. I also chose to include the time at which the haiku was written/sent, so that she could see the difference between depressing, go-to-bed-without-my-love-beside-me haikus, and the silly, teasing, daytime haikus. I got to learn all about the differences between white and cream paper, pick the best trim size (dimensions of the book), and design the cover. It’s simple enough: a small black butterfly above the title in an elegant, white script.

Naked Butterflies: A Collection of Haikus Between Two Star-Crossed Mathematicians.

I ordered a proof copy to make sure it turned out right (“Proof” was written on the last page in giant letters. How awesome is that for a math guy?!), and then I shipped one to Erin as fast as I could.

Unfortunately, she didn’t get it for a few months. It turns out that Erin planned a trip to visit her family in Costa Rica, and she left right before the book arrived. So it was sitting there, in her mailbox, waiting, for perhaps an eternity or three. Finally when she got it, we video chatted about it for a while. My only regret is I didn’t get to see her immediate reaction, and be there to catch her upon jumping into my arms. Instead I was counting irreducible polynomials over finite fields and classifying Euclidean isometries. Don’t get me wrong, I love math with every fiber over my base space. I just waited a long time for that moment, and between the video camera and the eight hour time difference, the conclusion to my carefully crafted tale was not what I originally envisioned. But alas, such is life. It was for Erin, and the important part was that it makes her smile every time she thinks of it. I’ll take that one for the team any day of the week.

A clean, straightforward way to say “Hey, I want to lick your face.”

So as you might already know, Erin and I have spent the majority of our relationship long distance. It sucks like a black hole, I know. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t miss the morning snuggle or the evening reading with mint tea. In fact, my bed is probably the loneliest place in the world right now. It’s just got a single pillow compared to the Pillowan Empire of Erinia. Heck, my bed is on the floor like a monk, and I’m still too lazy to put up any decorations. It’s like I can’t settle in because Erin hasn’t arrived yet.

The loneliest bed in the world.

Erin's veritable Pillowtopia, with Bearemy and Babar, the royal Queensguards.

So she arrives in June, and one evening in perhaps mid November, I ran across my office-mate Alex’s website. See how the page slides up and down: cool! Being an amateur web-designer myself, I decided it was about time I learned to do some Javascript. I looked up a bunch of random JQuery tutorial videos, and remembered my motto: the best way to learn is to have a project. Suddenly I realized, it’s a primo-pronto opportunity for a surprise! Seeing as Erin had just taken a beginning class in HTML5 and CSS, I could learn a new skill, make a super-awesome surprise website for Erin, and then get her interested in learning the next level of web design!

The game was on.

At this point it was around 11pm on a Wednesday, and it was obvious I wasn’t going to bed until this was finished. I started searching for a good background image; one that screams “ERIN!” but still meshes reasonably well with a website. I decided on elephants. Erin doesn’t just like elephants, she adores them. Elephant teapots, elephant lamps, elephant necklaces, elephant salt and pepper shakers, elephant everything! I don’t get it.

A few clicks through DeviantArt later and I found my background. I browsed around for some other pictures that seemed to sum up our relationship: a cup of tea with the handle making the shadow of a heart; two tigers snuggling (I call her a tiger!); a cheetah licking another cheetah, very similar to my smooches; and a heart-shaped bunch of flowers. I don’t feel bad stealing from these people who create cool art on their own time for no profit. As long as I don’t assume credit and I’m not making profit, they shouldn’t complain. Anyway, a few quick Photoshop edits later, a super-quick HTML mock-up after that, two hours of experimenting with JQuery animations slipped by, and I had my website.

Luckily, UI Chicago gives its graduate students free web space, so I hosted it in a hidden directory on my teaching website, and as of this moment I’m officially opening it as a public exhibit (click on the letters in Erin’s name to see the animation). In case you’re too lazy to click a link, here a screenshot:

A screenshot of Erin's surprise website.

It’s nice and simple. No love essay, no lame vague self-pitying Facebook status quotes, no crap to muddle the point. Just a clean, straightforward way to say “Hey, I want to lick your face and snuggle you like a tiger, and I’m okay with you liking elephants.” Because that’s what love really is: accepting her elephants, needing her snuggle, and having the occasional urge to lick her face. Wrap it all up in the intellectually-demanding task of sorting out JQuery, and you’ve figured out life.

Of course, how else to present the website to her but to hack into her Gmail account, and add an event to her calendar with a reminder to be surprised! (We hack each others email accounts way too often… and by hack I mean we tell each other our passwords) Of course she very nearly missed it, but then called me when she found it. As usual, I was right in the middle of an extremely important math problem about the free resolutions of integral domains, but I took a break to giggle about it with her.

And for the record, this blog isn’t for you. You’re just a capricious reader. No, this blog will be an everlasting testament to our relationship. Our quirky, unique, often-times ridiculous but always growing relationship. So as I detail each surprise (starting with those past, going on to those presently in the works, and continuing with new ideas), you’ll hear about the conception, the irony, the suspense, and the usually-flawless execution of each gift. And, of course, you’ll get to know Erin and me.

So keep your eyes peeled. You might just bump into something you never expect.