June 20, 2008
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Ungiven Gifts
There’s a magic card called Gifts Ungiven that’s totally awesome.
This entry has absolutely nothing to do with that card.
I buy a lot of gifts for people. It’s sort of my natural inclination. I like giving people interesting things that I think they will like. Sometimes I guess wrong and get people random stuff that they look at and then look at me and think “is that guy crazy? Why the heck would he get me that!” But most of the time I think I’m pretty good at picking interesting gifts.
But a lot of the gifts I get remain ungiven. I have sort of a stack of them lying in the corner. Gifts I meant to give to people. Things I was going to mail out. I bought them when the thought hit me. When It occurred to me that this or that might make a good gift, or when I knew that person’s birthday or a relevant holiday was coming up, or just at some point when I was thinking about the person. I saw it and thought, this person will *love* this! So I bought it. (or burned it, or downloaded it, or made it, etc.) But I never mailed them out.
Why not? Sometimes it’s because I come to think that the gift is somewhat lame after the fact that I bought it. I think, I can come up with a better gift than this! Something more meaningful! Something more interesting! Other times I come to think that the gift is inappropriate. That it will be seen in the wrong light or give the intended recipient the wrong idea. So I hesitate. I don’t want to send a harmful message. Other times still I think of something else I want to add to the gift and send it in a package. Maybe I want to write a personal note or I want to buy something else that would go great with it, or I want to burn some DVDs or music CDs to send at the same time. Or I want to configure it to make it more useful to the person I am giving it to. Or something like that. Only I never get around to adding that something to it. Or maybe I ordered it and I’m waiting for it to come in the mail or something like that.
And lastly of course, sometimes I just plain forget to send it. I’m so lazy and absentminded sometimes that happens. And when the occasion on which I was supposed to send the gift is long past, it then becomes weird to send the gift now. So I feel weird about it. And I end up thinking maybe I should wait til next year or the next major relevant gift gifting holiday.
Sigh. My ungiven gifts have really been accumulating since I moved out here too. It’s starting to tick me off. And then I feel a little guilty every time I talk to the person I owe the gift to for not having given them their gift. Sometimes I even end up avoiding communicating with that person because I feel bad about not having given them their gift. That’s stupid I know, but I do that sometimes.
The funny thing is probably by the time I give these people these gifts they may have already bought their own and I’ll end up stuck with a bunch of junk I don’t even really want. Ha! Serves me right.
Comments (2)
I do the exact same thing. There is no telling how many I have purchased and then forgotten where I put them and then a year later, I am all OHHHHHHHHHH here it is. ><
You shouldn’t worry about getting them a better gift anyway. They should be gracious you are getting them anything at all!
you should send them all out now! then you don’t have to think about it anymore.
for me when i see something interesting on sale i get it because i think someone will like or i might use it, and then i don’t find anyone that might like it, i did that for a year and ended up with a box of junk so i don’t do that anymore.
when i do get things for someone in mind i usually give to them right away instead of waiting till their b-day or x-mas, because i’m super bad at keeping a secret and having a gift for someone that you can’t tell them about is like keeping a secret so i just give to them. if it’s something small i don’t count it as their early b-day or x-mas gift it’s just something i want them to have.
i played magic for a little while but only against my brother so he can practice so i never really paid attention to what’s going on, he just needed me there to flip the cards and he would tell me what things do and sort of how to play so i could somewhat battle him. it probably wasn’t much help except for him to get use to the cards because i was not a very chanelleging opponet.
what i was into was pokemon playing cards, and me and my brother battled all the time with those, we even went to the first pokemon movie to get the special playing cards you get for going to the movie… i know that was pretty lame and we were pretty old.. like we were both high schoolers during that time… oh well things you do when you’re young. ^_^