I Want To Keep This Feeling, Deep Inside Of Me, I Want You Always In My Heart, You Are Everything

--"Halo", The Cure

I wasn't angling for it. I neither dropped any hints or let it slip that it would be nice to possess one, but I came away from my trip to Louisville a few months ago the proud owner of a genuine Louisville Slugger with "mojo shivers" emblazoned across its sweet spot. It's a thoughtful gift, considering how big of a baseball fan I am. More than that, it's a gift that I didn't have to work hard to attain.


you hold my eyes in yours
and open up the world

Here's the thing.

I'm probably the worst person to get birthday or Christmas gifts for. I've repeated it a thousand times, but most folks don't seem to get it. If there's something I want I'll eventually get it myself. And if I don't have it already and you perchance would like to give it to me, then I don't see the point in waiting for my "actual" birthday (or one out of the three). More than anything, if you do wait to give it to me, I'll probably end up buying it before I open yours or, worse yet, I'll have fallen out of enamoration with it by that time. Or if I just don't need your gift, I'll flat out tell you that I don't need it. It's happened more than once. Case in point, DeAnn's sister gave me a subscription to the official WWF magazine for Christmas... about three months after I stopped liking wrestling. And when I told her that upon receiving the gift, it made her cry. Or, worse yet, Mrs. Holins, one Jean Holins, otherwise known as Breanne's mother, for my graduation from USC gave me an expensive Hublot watch. When I told her, thank you, but I don't really wear expensive watches, she hung up the phone on me.

I have this weird paranoid view towards gift-giving, which I've explained before. But, stranger still, I have an even weirder hesitation about receiving gifts. About the only people who are cleared to give me gifts of any sizes and shapes are my family, Breanne, whomever I dating at the time (but curiously not their family), and, I suppose, whomever my current boss. Everyone else is pretty much S.O.L. I think it stems from the fact that I still think people have an angle to anything they do. Gift-giving is just a reinforcement of that paranoia. For instance, I've been in situations where somebody has bought me two or three shirts because they "thought it might look good on me" and then expected me to pay her back twenty dollars for each of them. Granted, they didn't qualify as gifts, but the idea is the same. Whenever I receive a gift and accept it, it's like I'm signing a non-verbal contract to reciprocate. And, frankly, that's a deal I mostly never want to make. There's only a few people who ever knew how to shop for me:

1. Lucy (natch)
2. Francis (most of the time)
3. Either one of my cousins
4. Jina (when we were close)
5. Tara
6. DeAnn

Everyone else buys crap. It's that simple.

Well, not that simple. I will go as far as saying that Breanne's parents have given me a nice gift now and again, but it's uncomfortable because sometimes they're too nice. And my parents have given me awesome gifts now and again, but they've always been the huge kind--my car, a few of my trips across the country, my cool-ass pocket watch during my Avonlea phase. Anything small or meant to be thoughtful has failed miserably. It's too difficult to explain what I'm into at the time people want to get me a gift and that gets doubly hard when you want to delay it for a few weeks or months just so it falls on my birthday or Christmas.

The main problem I feel is that there are few people I truly want to buy gifts for at any one given time. The list as it stands now, stands at five. B, Marion, Tattie, my brother, and my two cousins. And one of my cousins doesn't even like getting gifts. Everyone else--EVERYONE ELSE--I could take or leave ever having to buy another gift for. For instance, I balk at every time I have to give my parents gifts. I've reached that age where there's nothing that they can give me that I'll want so I feel I don't really need to return the favor. That's not to say I wouldn't want to give them anything, but buying them stuff because they need something new (a new DVD player or a new camera) is vastly different than wrapping something up and waiting for a special occasion to present it to them. They know that if they want something that I have some expertise on they can ask me and I'll pick it out for them. But I call shenanigans on the whole "here's something I hope you really enjoy" aspect of appeasing my parents with gifts.

The five people I mentioned are the only five people where I ever get the urge to spend money on them just because they might like something. And those are the only five people who I feel honored whenever they spend money on me because most often than not it's something that's catered to me and they've taken the time to find out I'll like--be it music, movies, games, sports-related, clothes, or something else.

----

And yet, there's the question of the bat. Delfty got it for me because she said I'd spent enough on her and her sister while I was out there. The least they could do is get me a souvenir that they knew I would really enjoy having. And, even though it was two people who have unquestionably good taste in picking out gifts for me, it still made me feel uncomfortable accepting it from them. Normally with most people in that inner circle of mine I'm all for, "when's my time? When does mojo shivers get his?" LOL But this time it felt like I would be accepting too much.

I think I'm just starting to feel what other people have always felt like when they've received something nice. I guess you could say I was feeling a bit of gratitude. I mean--call me crazy if you want--but I've never been all that grateful of a person. I always tried to portray myself as being capable of getting by mostly without any generosity from anyone else. Yes, I don't mind if you help me, but I've always had this big pet peeve of people who want me to be grateful to them for doing something. When you do something for me, I'll say thank you, but I've never been one to be overly flattering about it. When you do something for me, you can expect me to pay you back someday for it with a similar favor or way to make up the difference. I just hate it when people stand there waiting for all the curtsies and bowing just because they did one thing for me. That really upsets me. That's also why most gift-giving bothers me... because as soon as I receive one, the next question always is "where's mine?" Funny, I think to myself, I thought the whole point was to give because you wanted to do and not because you wanted one back.

But now I kind of get it. The bat was totally a surprise, totally something I wanted, and it was given without any strings. They didn't want a bat in return and they refused to let me pay half. Before, when somebody did something that nice for me--like when Breanne flew me out for Christmas or Nancy got me that job interview, I would say thanks and move right past the uncomfortableness. That time in the Louisville Slugger Museum I really wanted to return the favor right away.

I don't know what's different. I don't know, if as Lucy says, I'm starting to finally grow a heart after all these years, but I'm starting to see that there really shouldn't be a quota about how many presents I should give out each year. More importantly, I'm starting to see that just because somebody wants a present in kind when they give me a gift doesn't make them a horrible person. Mostly it just makes them a normal human being, someone who sees the joy in giving to as many as possible and can't quite understand someone who is as miserly as I've been known to be in the past. I always thought the point was proving to myself and others that I wasn't beholden to any tradition of returning tit-for-tat. I always thought my stubbornness in this regard was my right as an independent individual.

Now l think it isn't about proving that I don't need to give something away to everyone I know... it's more about getting to know people enough and wanting to make them happy enough to give each and every one of them that bit of a smile that they seem to give me year after year.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers