Have I mentioned I dislike holidays? There’s just too much stress involved for me to have any sort of enjoyment during this season.
Now, granted, a lot of the stress occurs because I’m socially inept. I don’t like all but about a half dozen of the 6.7 billion people on Earth, so I don’t tend to have a lot of contact with random ‘folk’ and due to this I’m not well versed in the social customs of the humans I share air with. Even people I know, I don’t tend to really ‘know’ – which makes this whole holiday gifting ritual very stressful for me.
For example, today I finally broke down, took a mild sedative, and headed into the teeming masses to buy gifts for my roommates. I took one of my roommates with me and by the time we made it back to the car I think he was ready to kill me…
I usually give people money. Money is easy. If you give two people a hundred bucks neither feels the others $100 is somehow ‘better’… But I’m told that giving money is frowned upon because it is the easy way out…
No kidding… That’s why I do it!
Anyways, back to shopping: My first point of stress was simply, “What does ‘X’ need?” I wanted this gift to be useful and worth-while. Something that they actually needed – which I gather was my first mistake; apparently you don’t give people things they actually ‘need’ because this might insinuate that they are lacking in something… Buying someone a tie to make a better presentation at job interviews is, I gather, not a good gift even though it is really something they ‘need’…
So I start wracking my brain trying to recall what Kalira and Max do for expression, hobbies, even basic likes and dislikes, and drew a complete blank… I honestly don’t know anything about the people I live with…
After about an hour of pondering and finally deciding (with the help of Zeze) on a few possibilities I moved into what I’m calling a comparative analysis phase; where the gifts I was giving to each had to have the same or similar conceptual ‘value’ to the person receiving the gift. This caused another hour of agonizing over far too many variables and assumptions such as how the actual and conceptual value of the item compared to what I calculated the emotional ‘gift’ value to be… And then how those two values compared to one another, being as the gifts would be given at the same time and I’m sure some sort of emotional/logical evaluation of the others gift would be calculated.
It was at this point Zeze told me I think waaaay too much.
After thinking about this for a few hours, I guess I have to agree. Apparently gifting is a mostly emotion-driven enterprise and I’ve always been a bit off in my emotional content. Everything for me is a predicted outcome based on a lot of variables that has been tested at least a few times for variations…
Oh well, I picked up a few small items and hopefully I will have chosen sufficiently for the ritual tomorrow.