Generation Meh

Tis the season for…well, a lot of things, but harried holiday shopping ranks right up there. And for every consumer fretting over a list, there seems to be an oh-so-helpful guide to take the pain out of the process, especially if you’re considered one of the shopping-impaired (that would be you, fellas). And whether these handy-dandy lists are brought to you by Cosmopolitan, The Today Show or AskMen.com, they all have one thing in common – they trade in tired tropes and facile stereotypes that are no more likely to help you find the “perfect” gift than would soliciting advice from your local mall Santa. Contrary to what gift buying tutorials would have you believe, not all women are seduced by sparkles, just like not all men like gadget gifts or all dads dig golf-themed presents. And do I even need to mention how all of these present suggestion lists feature the subtle implication that your relationship’s success (or at least your prospects of having sex in the foreseeable future) depends on appeasing a bauble-hungry she-beast with appropriately-wrapped offerings? Didn’t think so.

Photo by creativeFlutter

But where does that leave a dude who really does struggle with what to buy the woman-person in his life and is in the market for some shopping wisdom that extends beyond spa gift certificates and silk camisoles? The good news is that you don’t need gift guides and the dubious help they offer. You have the ability to reason, a base of knowledge about the person for whom you want to buy and realistic expectations about the relative importance of holiday presents in the grand scheme of your relationship (Hint: If you believe its future hinges on what’s under the tree, you might want to do some hard thinking about the state of your union, or at least your perception of it). Take these assets, combine them with the three action steps outlined below and watch your hilarious sitcom present-giving panic melt away.

Ask
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? If you want to know what someone wants, why not ask them outright? Our culture weirdly conflates being able to anticipate or know someone’s wants without asking with how much you value that person. Love is never having to say you’re sorry and never having to drop a hint that you have your eye on a new iPod, apparently. But just as mindreading doesn’t work at the dinner table or in the bedroom, it’s an exercise in futility during the holiday season as well. If you can cut to the chase, do so.

But maybe you or your intended recipient thinks that this will drain all the holiday fun out of Christmas morning? Fair enough. But there’s nothing that says you can’t ask her for general gift categories (as opposed to having her lead you by the hand to the correct rack at Macy’s) or perhaps even more helpfully, an idea of what she doesn’t want. And what about asking her sisters or best friend for gift ideas or to vet potential purchases? There’s no shame in soliciting input, especially if it saves you needless head-scratching guess work. Ask and ye shall receive.

Use Common Sense + Do A Little Investigating
I’m gonna assume that if you’re planning to shower someone with presents, you know a little something about them – their clothing/shoe size, hobbies, relevant allergies (No eau de Penicillin this year, honey!), etc. And if you’ve been cozying up to someone without cataloging any of their defining traits and minor idiosyncrasies, A) first, please make sure you’re not dating a Real Doll or a coma victim and B) there’s no better time than now to start playing Sherlock Holmes. Take note of the color your giftee wears most frequently. What type of magazines and books (if any) does she read? What does her living space look like? What indulgences does she buy for herself? Where has she been disappearing to every Wednesday night between 7 – 9 PM for the last two months? Feel free to use your observations to rule out presents that don’t mesh with what you know about her. For example, if you’ve been together for five years and the only time you’ve seen her in a skirt was at her aunt’s funeral, common sense would dictate that a pleather mini might not be the best choice. If the only things in her make-up bag are three tubes of Chapstick and a pair of tweezers, that deluxe manicure/pedicure set could miss the mark. You get the drift.

When All Else Fails, Break The Mold
This approach works for both advanced gift givers and the desperate. If you’ve polled the audience and done all the detecting you can and still haven’t happened upon a great gift idea or you really want to shake up expectations, try a present that solves a problem or represents an aspiration.  Has she been clear about her desire to get more involved in your city’s cultural scene? Has she mentioned wanting to spend more time with her grandmother? Why not kill two birds with one stone and offer up tickets to Swan Lake, so that she can take in a matinee with Nana? Be sure to explain the thought process behind the present. Even if ballet isn’t her thing, the fact that you’ve demonstrated awareness of a problem/desire and used your creativity to provide a solution is a combination that’s bound to touch any non-Grinch heart (unless you really are dating one of those mythical, bauble-hungry she-beats, in which case, there’s probably a stand-up routine to be mined). As a bonus, this line of present reasoning can be applied to folks other than ones with whom you’re sharing a bed; it will also work for parents, siblings and close friends.

The difficulty inherent in this strategy comes from parsing the difference between genuine desires and off-hand comments.  Does the Ms. in your life really long to be more adventurous or was she just making conversation? If it’s the latter, perhaps those hang gliding lessons are a bit premature. Consider the context and frequency of the comments when trying to make this determination. You also want to avoid any gifts that come with judgmental or prescriptivist overtones (even if that isn’t your intent). For example, no matter how many times someone on your shopping lists mentions wanting to shape up or shed 10 lbs, the gift of a gym membership and subscription to Runner’s World probably isn’t what they were hoping to discover under the tree. Err on the side of caution and assume that if a gift’s intent could be misinterpreted or misconstrued, it’s better off not given.

Bottom line? As long as we hold up presents (especially those delivered in the context of romantic and familial relationships) as a proxy for personal worth, the process of gift buying will always be ripe for the mining of insecurities and the rehashing of tired gender stereotypes about materialistic women and the hapless schmoes who shop for them, all for the benefit of page views and perfume sales. But that doesn’t mean you have to buy in. Be pragmatic, be prepared and give yourself and those on your gift list a little credit.

N.B. This piece was originally meant for another venue, but timing didn’t work out. That explains the exclusively hetero male focus (not that I don’t love you, boys).

I remember being on a walk with a friend back in the spring. We were discussing big life-changing decisions and how we (the collective, humanity-wide we) come to them. She voted for panic, I argued in favor of desperation. Pretty similar, although the latter still lets you cling to the illusion of control, while the former conjures up visions of ungainly, flailing limbs. In either case, we change directions and course correct and set everything on fire and just walk away because it seems, at the time, that’s all there is to do. We don’t venture in order to gain, but because we feel there’s nothing left to lose.

Photo by ervega

And that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world (though it can surely feel like it). Sometimes you need the panic, the desperation, the fear that comes from being flat on your metaphorical back to finally rob you of all your reasons to resist risking. It becomes the only whip left to crack on yourself. If you’re terrified of failing, the only way you’re ever gonna chance it is if you’re standing in a place where you’ve already failed – repeatedly, spectacularly, painfully. If your life is built on hedging your bets, what do you do when all bets are off? You finally act, you decide, you look down at the ground, then up at the sky, shrug your shoulders and start walking. And you do it because your mind has finally admitted defeat. Your instinct toward preserving and safe-guarding what you have (however insignificant and unsatisfying it was) abandons you because you realize there is exactly nothing left to preserve. You’ve exhausted the palatable and what you believed to be the possible, but you’re still here and you’ve got the next 40 years to fill and you need to find somethings and someones to fill ’em with.

There’s no mystic clarity that comes from this resigned realization. You don’t suddenly see the light and start sprinting toward it (and if that does happen, you’re probably dead and no one has bothered to tell you). No, you just understand that because you haven’t broken yet, you’re probably not going to in the future. And there’s comfort in that. It was bad. I survived. If it gets bad again, I will survive again. Options 1 through 344 have failed, but you’re finally in the frame of mind to consider 345. And maybe it was the right one all along and  you’d never have gotten to it if the first 344 hadn’t withered on the vine and you hadn’t figured out that those failures weren’t terminal. Or maybe it isn’t right, but it will lead you to 346 or 401 or however many options it takes to get there (Where? exactly). You can handle it because you have handled it before and you understand that sometimes you really do leave yourself  no choice but to finally, finally choose.

“So, was there some sort of life-changing event that prompted this?”

The salon receptionist was asking about the fact that I’d arrived for my hair appointment with a bob that was close to shoulder-length and was leaving with a pixie cut. It’s short. Like, androgynous Dickensian waif short.

Photo by EduardoZ

I wanted to prop my elbow the counter and sigh, “Well, honey child, lemme tell you about it.” But I’m not Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost and I’m not even tall enough to get my arm up on the counter in the first place (it’s really high, okay?).

I suppose I could have mentioned my impending birthday (It’s Monday, so you still have time to bake me a cake or buy me a pony if you really hurry), but that wasn’t it. I’ve been purging (no, not like that) a lot of stuff lately – papers, furniture, assumptions. Think of it as a material and intellectual strip show if that floats your boat.

I recommend it. I’m not talking about the cult of minimalism or the self-actualization competition of who can live with the fewest possessions, but the need to take a periodic look at what we’re surrounding ourselves with and ask, Do I need this? Is having it/believing it making my life easier or more difficult? Could I get along without it? What could I replace it with?

Sometimes, things are well and truly broken and no amount of duct tape and sentimentality will fix them. And sometimes, they might still work, just not for YOU – who you are now or who you want to be in the future. When that’s the case, it’s okay to drag them out to the curb and leave ’em for someone else to find. When you’re overcommitted, underresourced, with a head and house full of stuff that’s just crowding you out, there isn’t a magic recipe to maintaining it all, there’s just the reality that something has to give, preferably before you end up on an episode of Hoarders or checked into Cedars-Sinai with a killer case of “exhaustion.” Maybe it’s your pride, maybe it’s your plan to repaint the entire apartment before Thanksgiving, maybe it’s the six boxes of spare computer parts that have accompanied you on every move for the last decade. Better a few hard drives than your sanity, ya dig?

Bonus points if you get a cute new coif out of the deal.

Last week, I lost my glasses. Hunted high, low and everywhere in between. Not in my purse. Not in my bedroom. Not in either of the cars (visiting the parents, I’m not fancy like that on my own). Not on my head. It wasn’t even like I was rocking Oakley or Ray-Ban shades; these cost $5.99 at Claire’s three years ago, but they are the only ones I’ve found that stay up on my face properly. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else until I located these glasses. Never mind that it was cloudy that day, it was the principle of the matter.

Photo by gustaffo89

Eventually they turned up under the couch, but not before I’d wasted a disproportionate amount of time and energy on a comparatively tiny problem. This incident started me thinking about how we view problems and how we frequently let minor annoyances take up major head space. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could refer to a handy classification or taxonomy of problems before launching the Spanish Inquisition over a pair of sunglasses? Yes, yes, it would. And that’s exactly what I’ve done below. Here are all of your potential problem supertypes arranged in a hierarchy according to their importance in terms of the resources you should devote to solving them:

Urgent
This covers things like figuring out how to escape from an ax-wielding maniac (I first typed ex-wielding maniac, which is a whole ‘nother story, yes?) or realizing you can’t find your keys five minutes before you’re supposed to leave the house to get to an interview for your dream job. These problems need to be solved ASAP and before any other forward action can occur. As a rule, we assign far too many inconveniences to this top-tier category and, on the whole, show a tendency toward classifying problems as more pressing or grave than they actually are.

Quality of Life
These are big ticket items related to career, relationships, family, etc. My current job isn’t what I want to be doing, but how do I make a change? How do I meet someone? How can I stop arguing with my mother? You get the drift.  They can’t be solved as quickly as the Urgent variety (would that they could!), but resolving them in a satisfactory fashion is integral to our personal happiness. Typically, the solution involves a hearty dose of introspection and requires a multi-step approach, the steps of which we often seem to uncover one at time using a trial and error method. As well, there are numerous ways to address these problems (satisficing vs. optimizing, for example) and no clear way to measure whether we’ve adequately solved them, other than being relatively content at a general and day-to-day level and not waking up in the middle of night feeling as if your heart is clamped in a vise.

Simmering
This is a catchall for those problems that live beneath the surface. Maybe they’re recurring. Maybe they never really go away. Possibly, they’ll come to a boil, but most likely they’ll simply keep getting pushed to the back of our minds because they don’t demand immediate solutions and we can live quite well (for now, anyway) without addressing them. Questions of faith (What do I believe? What should I believe?) and desires for self improvement (better time management, improving your eating habits, becoming more assertive) fit nicely into this category. Would we be better for addressing them? Probably. But because they’re often ambiguous and not fully-formed in nature, we don’t quite know how to tackle them or if we’d just be borrowing trouble or rocking the boat by focusing on them when the majority of our life is on an even keel.

Pesky
Often, we focus on pesky problems as a means of avoiding the Quality of Life or Simmering ones. They’re small, self-contained and usually able to be solved quickly. Unfortunately, we often mistake pesky problems for Urgent ones and devote far too much time to deciding what three ties to pack for that conference in Toledo or interpreting what it really means when our roommate “forgets” to put the milk back in the fridge for the fifth day in a row. Parsing the difference between Pesky and Urgent problems requires that we exercise a sense of perspective. What is the worst thing that can happen if we ignore this problem or pick the wrong solution? Will it have long-term consequences? The world isn’t gonna end if you don’t find a date for your cousin’s wedding (maybe there will be cute bridesmaids!) or if you can’t get tickets to Lady Gaga.

Recently, I read a post reminding bloggers of the need to have a slate of back-up pieces ready in the event that circumstances temporarily prevented you from generating new posts.  Heaven forbid that life intervenes and you get caught sans current content. That simply will not do. Think of the children readers!

Photo by texasgurl

I disagree, of course.  Being reliable and conscientious is rad (and a good way to stay gainfully employed), but putting your own needs behind those of others isn’t the sign of a superstar. Instead, it’s a hallmark of naivete and insecurity to believe that giving 150% 25/8 will win the admiration/respect/gratitude of others and provide you with that warm fuzzy martyred feeling at shouldering the seemingly impossible and living (maybe) to tell about it. That’s not how I roll. I love y’all, but I also love me. And I know that part of being the very best sophisticated sophist that I can be involves taking an occasional break from writing, bunking off to visit my family, spy on murder trials, taste-test my bartender sis’s latest concoctions, attend a wedding, focus on real-life paperwork, etc. Taking a breather and not feeling beholden to the blog is absolutely necessary. This is my outlet, not my obligation and I never want that to change.

Sacrificing your quality of life for self-imposed deadlines/expectations that no one but you really cares about (let alone acknowledges) is totally bush league. And I see so many folks subscribing to the mentality that he who gives the most (time, energy, resources, pieces of your soul) wins. But you are not a one-person service industry forced to measure yourself against ye olde the customer is always right standard. You are human. You have needs. And those needs shouldn’t be sublimated for the sake of unnecessary crowd pleasing. There’s no prize for giving your guts out.

People do care that you keep your word and don’t flake out on them when they’re dependent on you, but they also care about your humanity (and if they don’t, please get new friends) and don’t want you to be up until 3:00 AM on the day of your grandfather’s funeral baking them a birthday cake from scratch just because you casually mentioned that you like decorating stuff with icing roses. And they mostly don’t care that you hand collaged all 120 of this year’s Christmas cards yourself or that you stuck to your blogging schedule while being confined to the ICU with meningitis. It doesn’t matter to them, because, in the grand scheme of things,  it doesn’t matter PERIOD.

The only person who expects you to do and be it all is YOU.  Everyone else knows better.