Gift Games

I am extraordinarily competitive. I'll repeat it for emphasis: extraordinarily competitive. For many years, I avoided any game I didn't have a good shot at winning, because persistent not-winning would make me very unpleasant to be around.

This competitive tendency has been reined in quite a bit, but it still bleeds out from time to time. The unfortunate thing is that it isn't something that confines itself to games. I'm competitive about life.

One year, I bought my brother the game Guess Who? for his birthday. It was on his list, and something I knew he really liked. Then my parents brought out their gift: a Batcave playset for his action figures. Guess what? The game was all but forgotten. This was probably more than fifteen years ago, but I still remember the rush of anger and frustration I felt at being upstaged. My gift was not the coolest, which meant I was not the coolest. I vowed never to let that happen again.

Fast forward to present day. I have practically zero imagination for gifts. I can buy off a list, no problem. I (sometimes) see something in a store and think of someone, sure. But if it comes down to "it's Christmas/my friend's birthday/some other special event, and it is time to buy her/him a present"? PRESSURE.

Because when I buy a gift, I like it to be something that's an in-joke, or something that strongly reminds me of someone, and sometimes I sit around and nothing in particular comes to mind, and I brand myself as a horrible friend because I don't know the person well enough to come up with something immediately. Or what if I buy a gift and it's cute and everything, but my friend is thinking, "Wow, I'm worth $10 to her and she's worth $20 to me. I wish I would have donated that extra $10 to charity"? And sometimes I just think, "Personally, I feel I have a lot of junk lying around already. I don't want to add to their pile of junk."

I love my friends. I do. But mostly, in lieu of gifts, I'd rather we just sat around in a room for a couple hours. Yeah, it's what my friends and I usually do, but I just like sitting with them. Doing nothing. Requiring nothing. Being together.

But what if, at least for Christmas and birthdays and other special events, my friend would rather have a new book or DVD or scented candle or something mysterious that I haven't figured out than spend a few hours sitting in the same room with me? What if I'm not a happy-sitting-around level friend to them?

Gift-giving is a risky game.