If you want to be a really high-quality boyfriend, the kind who is guaranteed an Aa1 credit rating by Moody’s, you should surprise your girlfriend with a gift when she comes back from vacation. This year I chose fake lobsters.

Some disingenuous men will tell you that flowers are the way to go. These men are either A. liars, or B. illicit flower dealers. (Poppies, probably.)

I can say this because no man in history has ever thought, “Hey, do you know what would make a swell gift? Something which serves no purpose whatsoever and even then dies and wilts in three days.” Let’s consider the many reasons flowers are a waste of money:

Generally inedible
Cannot be fermented into booze
Zero resale value
Pathetic as weapon or camouflage
Inadequate as a screwdriver or lathe

I’ll add to this that buying flowers requires little to no creativity but ensures that you throw them away in a couple of weeks, so you’ve basically bought yourself a chore.

Now let’s contrast this with my new system of making my girlfriend feel special, which consists mostly of terrorizing her with stuff I purchase online. Hence the bathtub lobsters.

For the last several months, if for some reason we passed a seafood restaurant, I mentioned how sad it is that lobsters are boiled alive. And that, being a humanitarian (or “lobstertarian,” which is an offshoot of Methodism) I wanted to buy some live lobsters and let them live in my bathtub.

Naomi has been pretty consistently anti-letting-lobsters-live-in-the-bathtub, which is a little hypocritical on her end, since she’s a vegan but apparently has no desire to go out and save lobsters by domesticating them like I do. I digress.

While she was in Australia for the holidays I started subtly hinting that I might have purchased some lobsters. Here’s a nuanced text message I sent:

Now, I did seriously consider purchasing some live lobsters. But it turns out that keeping them alive in the bathtub would involve all sorts of things. Namely saltwater, and whatever the hell lobsters eat. (Cheese? Ravioli? You find it inside of them sometimes at restaurants.) So instead I ordered three plastic lobsters to place in the bathtub as toys. When Naomi came home she found these:

This ensured that my girlfriend knew I had not only been thinking about her while she was gone, but that I had been actively scheming about her for several weeks. Whereas a bouquet of roses would already be dry and smelly by now, I spent a comparable amount of money on plastic lobsters, which are forever and we can use as bathtub toys or neato wall decorations. Maybe we can use them as scarecrows to frighten away termites; if I were a termite I would be scared shitless of lobsters.

So that’s my romance advice for today. Here shortly I’ll detail how “the Remote-Controlled Tarantula Experience” worked out.

Bathtub Lobsters say 'I Miss You'