everyone should just give cookies for christmas

I like to read this columnist on Salon.com, Cary Tennis. The best thing about his advice is that I often have no idea what angle he's going to take in response to a question. Take, for example, this woman who wrote in a while back: The gift exchange in her family has turned into kids asking for gift cards and instead of putting what they want on the list, it turns into a list of what they don't want this year. It saddens her that she doesn't have the opportunity to pick out something special for her family anymore and now the whole thing just sort of really blows.

As I was reading it, I was all Yeah, what she said! Gift-giving sucks these days! Everything is all hype and commercialized! Down with shopping! But then I read his response, of which here is a snippet:

"Where, I ask you, are they supposed to find the values that you are talking about? Sure, parents can try to teach them these things. But kids look at their parents, and then they look at the world, and they go, What the fuck? They see the toys spewing out of the world's vast maws of plastic-mold technology, they see the microchips doubling in speed and know that in a year they will be faster and faster still, and tinier and tinier still, and more feature-rich too. They see the new dresses and the new videos, and they know they'll be changing faster than they can change their own clothes. And then they look at their parents, who seem to be moving in black-and-white slo-mo. How can they feel anything but pity and scorn? How can they have any confidence that their parents will even survive the acceleration? In fact it must frighten them that their parents seem so ill-adapted to the world that parents themselves have created."

Suddenly I found myself thinking about how my parents never read this blog because they have dialup and it's such a hassle to get online and then if someone calls the house, they're bumped off and it's totally not worth getting broadband for them because they likely won't use it. What also came to mind was how my dad insists on watching television "live" and won't allow us to start late and fastforward commercials, even though many of the programs are on Indian channels, which aired YESTERDAY over there, so it's really never live for us at all. And my parents aren't even old yet!

So then I was all Right on, Cary Tennis! I have way too much crap in my house, too! I don't need any more things! Everyone should just give heifers for the holidays! Gift cards aren't such a bad idea! Because if I get run down by another shopping cart at the mall I'm going to kick somebody! And people don't really like most gifts anyway! And anything I get my parents they're just going to be like, "oh you should have saved your money!" and likely it'll sit in the package for a year until I force them to open it. But then I find myself saying and doing the exact same things and I'm all pissed off that I'm turning into my parents. Then after all that, I start thinking about carving out time for one more trip to the mall this weekend to finish up what shopping I have left to do.

We got a lot of scrumptious cookies at the office this week. And there is a good possibility that I have consumed way too many of them today.