With the plethora of birthdays and holidays all happening in December, I’ve been musing on the act of gift giving, in particular the rules I use to guide what and how I give. I’ve been thinking about this (on and off) since reading a post by Anton two years ago about a decision he made with Erin to always give art works as gifts whenever possible.
At first I thought how unpractical that would be for my family, what with our distinct and often capricious tastes. But around that time I started going to Mark Hewitt’s kiln openings more regularly, which left me with a raft of lovely and useful artworks that I couldn’t help but want to share. Thus giving art seemed entirely reasonable, and it offered me a way to drastically simplify the solution set for the problem, “What gift to give ___?” for all my recipients!
So armed with inspiration from Anton and a growing desire to avoid the commercial gift giving orgy of the modern American Christmas, I’ve come up with four categories I find particularly appealing.
Art
A beautiful object, can be useful, doesn’t have to be.
Food
Everyone eats, food can be given as gift in so many ways: eating dinner together, going out to a restaurant, drinking, making a meal for someone, providing someone with the raw ingredients.
Experience
Doing something with someone. I’m not sure if food or experience is my favorite, but it doesn’t matter because many gifts satisfy both concurrently. As much as I think it’s ok to value, adore, and love objects, I think for the most part we have too many. And there’s something about a shared experience (though by no means must a gifted experience be shared) which leaves behind a memory that makes all the trinkets and gadgets pale in comparison.
Things that die
This category exists solely so I can give flowers. But I think it’s really a cross between the first two categories, as flowers are both aesthetically appealing and temporal in nature (like food). Plus I like the idea of a gift not lasting forever. Other than flowers, I’m not sure what else might fit in this category. Maybe I should just call this category “flowers.”
There are probably other categories, and this doesn’t mean that I don’t wholly enjoy receiving store-bought presents (I do, I do), but I like the idea of challenging myself to work within a tighter set of constraints—maybe just to heighten my experience as a giver more than anything else.
Holiday break officially started for me when I left work yesterday night. I’ll be off through January 2, my longest break since moving from North Carolina to California in May. Tomorrow I’m flying to Austin for Christmas with the fam, including Grandmommy, who’ll be staying with us this year. Last time I saw everyone was in June, at my cousin Casey’s high school graduation. Wow, that was 7 months ago. Then I’ll be back in norcal on Wednesday, for some vacation from the vacation, hopefully traipsing around the wet Bay Area before New Year’s Eve.
I slept in today (or tried to), putting an end to many many days of too little sleep. I’ve really been thinking lately that 16 hours of wakedness is too little time into which to squeeze all the life I want to live. So I lounged in bed until noon, listening to the rain that has been falling non-stop since last weekend, futzing around on my blog, reading stuff online. Sometimes leisure seems overly luxurious, but the brain needs it, mine does at least. I feel like I haven’t been able to write a coherent sentence since the weekend when all the birthdays started.
I’ve been thinking about year end stuff a little, doing some looking back, reading my own blog, reminding me of me and where I was. But honestly, isn’t it a little too early for that? I mean, the wholly arbitrary end of year point is still 9 days away. C’mon, there’s a major holiday of gargantuan commercial proportions on the horizon. So I’ll wait to summarize until then.
I went out to Finbar with folks last night, discovered that graphic designer Troy has whipped the non-blog home of glitterponies.com into shape. Word on the street: we’ll be going public in Q2. And to think, this all started one Wednesday night many moons ago when Marcia and I stumbled into the bar and settled on the goofiest name we could think of.
What should I do next? It’s 2pm on Thursday Dec 22. Only 2 days left til Christmas, and one of which I’ll be traveling to Austin. Guess I’m going SHOPPING! But first, a shower.
On Sunday I made it back out to Annadel, freshly recovered from the poison-oak (if by recovered you mean large red swaths of new skin where the blistery rash used to be).
Along the Orchard Trail I found this manzanita tree with the richest maroon bark, and some interesting lichen and moss growth. I managed to get this shot which I especially like because of the shortened depth of field.
Of course the next day, my “healed” poison-oak started itching around my ankles, either because a) I reinfected myself, b) the poison-oak has gone airborne c) my hiking socks are still tainted with urushiol d) or the lingering poison-oak in my body got all excited about being within a leg’s brush of its Toxicodendron brothers and sisters.
Luckily, no rash has yet developed, though I went right out and stocked up on Tecnu for the post-hike detox, Domeboro, and Benedryl. I’m thinking I’m going to throw away my hiking socks and put the Tecnu in the car. In the meantime, I’m just starting to deal with being a little itchy all the time.
A little more than a week ago I went skating with Kyle, and though I wear all manner of protective gear (helmet, knee pads, wrist guards), I still managed to grind about 6-8 square inches of skin off my right leg, right below the knee pad and right above my skate.
See I was about to drop into the big bowl, and this dude on one of those really popular little bikes seemed to be coming right at me, but I didn’t catch sight of him until I was literally on the wall of the bowl, about to let gravity do its thing, turn towards the bottom, and rush down in. Except that I aborted, which means my wheels were parallel to the horizon on the edge of a very steep incline. My body fell towards the wall, which had been smoothed by years of graffiti. Once my hands hit the wall, my wheels no longer had enough surface area friction to keep me from sliding down in, and since my wrist guards consist of an external plastic bar that runs from my palm to below my wrist, I slid like I was on ice.
Now things would have been fine had I been A) wearing jeans or B) had the entire bowl been painted with graffiti. Unfortunately, right at the transition, when I was moving the fastest, the graffiti disappears, giving way to much rougher concrete, which was responsible for removing my skin. Of course this all happened in about two seconds, it was like: skate in, bail, slide, get up. I skated my way out of the bowl, sans 6 square inches of skin where I could check myself out. It wasn’t that bad, red, like any roadrash, but not that bloody. I tried to wash the dirt out with my water and continued skating for awhile.
Now in the interest of healing and not just letting my skin scab over, I purchased a new tube of neosporin, some non-stick gauze pads, medical tape, and was very good about keeping my wound dressed. I even wore shorts to work for a week (something I haven’t been in the habit of doing in the cooler climes of Northern California), luckily the weather has been unseasonably warm.
So now it’s been like 10 days. The shallower parts of the scrape have healed, the deeper parts are still red, and it all itches like hell. But this is where it gets worse. I’m breaking out in hives. I think. I can’t tell if it’s just my body’s cute way of commiserating with my healing parts, but on my non-injured leg, I’ve got a swath in roughly same area of insanely itchy raised red skin. And not just there. There’s also some hives around my sock line and worst of all, in my belly button. I mean with the legs, I could possibly imagine having brushed by some poison oak on my hike on Sunday, but inside my belly button? It’s gotta be hives.
But then I’m like WTF is a hive? Maybe I’ve just reached some level of Neosporin toxicity. In any event, I itch, it’s driving me crazy, I’ve moved on to hydrocortisone, but I’m thinking it might be time to bring out the big antihistamine guns.
