Gift Shops

The whole idea behind a gift shop is that people want to buy presents for their friends and their relatives and the high school girls they're stalking, but they won't bother to shop for said presents in a store that sells anything they'd actually want to buy themselves. Gift shops, then, exist only to sell stuff no one would buy on their own. Then why does anyone shop there at all? "Oh, thank you so much for this bag of potpourri whose only purpose is to sit on an end table and smell. I've always said I need more olfactory stimulation while I'm sleeping and therefore am unable to appreciate it!"

The initial idea behind gift giving died decades ago. It was replaced by a new idea: If it serves a purpose or performs a function in any way, it is not an appropriate gift. The new mantra of gift giving is now "Give someone something they wouldn't buy themselves." Now, I'm willing to admit that the spirit of that mantra is one of... shall I say... whimsy. A decent theoretical re-interpretation might be "It's only a good gift if it's something the receiver enjoys but would consider too flashy or expensive to buy on his or her own."

That's all well and good, but it has nothing to do with reality. If a gift shop is sticking to its title in spirit, then a gift purchased there is, by definition, utterly useless. If they sold stuff that could be used as anything but a gift, they would cease to be a gift shop. They may as well sell hugs.

Thought of the day 12/27/08

I finally had to admit that I'm getting old when I became genuinely excited by the prospect of receiving new socks for Christmas. When I was a kid, I never realized just how awesome new socks can be. They are precisely twice as awesome as not getting picked last for dodgeball, and they're three times as awesome as getting out of jury duty. They are, however, slightly less awesome than merely seeing a black-and-white picture of Scarlett Johansson. The feet are really the hands of the legs, and who doesn't love a good pair of gloves?

Thought of the day 12/23/08

I never fully conceptualized it until this morning, but I am fundamentally unfamiliar with the concept of having to buy Band-Aids. They were always there when I was a kid because, let's face it, kids are stupid and uncoordinated, and they tend to fall down a lot. Now that I'm all growed up, I have fewer reasons to ever need a bandage, so I've never had to buy them myself. I'm not even sure where they're sold...

Thought of the day 12/21/08

I find it very difficult to gauge exactly how much interest I'm supposed to feign whenever someone tells me about their day.

Thought of the day 12/17/08

One day, I want to walk around a public place like a mall or another mall, and I want to push an empty wheelchair around. If anyone asks me, "Hey, where's the person whose wheelchair that is?" I'll say, "I'm sorry, but that's an extremely awkwardly worded sentence." And then I'll kill their family.

Thought of the day 12/13/08

The primary negative effect the success of the Harry Potter series has had on the world is that it has caused millions of children and teenagers all around the globe to buy into the mistaken belief that they are, in fact, special. Of course, that's no different from what the federal government is doing for the UAW right now...

My Civic Duty

Like most Americans who were stupid enough to register to vote, it came to pass that I got picked for jury duty. Initially, I got called up by El Paso county, but since I'm currently living, well, not there, I told them they could go fly a kite up their butts, or something like that. Instead of merely lying down and taking my unprovoked verbal abuse like they should have, they just told their Boulder counterparts that I'm living here now, and as a result, I got a similar summons to appear at the Boulder County Justice Center about a week later.

I showed up bright and early at the crack of 8 a.m., and I was herded into a room with approximately one million other people. It smelled like a musty old library in desperate need of a few spritzes from a bottle of Febreze. I was given a questionnaire that included a brief summary of the case for which I'd been selected. It asked me how I felt about the American legal system, and I responded that I felt it was "slightly less meritocratic than that of Escobar-era Colombia" and that I'd "rather fellate a curling iron than spend another minute in this stank-ass hell hole." It then asked me if I could think of any reason why I wouldn't be able to serve as an objective and impartial member of the jury. I saw the question not as an attempt to weed out potentially biased jurors, but rather as a personal challenge to see how frank I could be about the whole experience without getting into trouble. This, I swear on all that is holy and sugar-free, was my answer: "Honestly, I simply don't care."

My fellow potential jurors and I were then led into an actual, real-life courtroom (just like in the movies!), where we each proceeded to whisper to ourselves, "I want the truth! You can't handle the truth!" and "This whole courtroom is out of order!" Or maybe that was just me. The judge (oh, that reminds me: Did you know that women can be judges now? Next thing you know, they'll have the right to own property!) explained to us that since the trial was for first degree murder, she expected it to last about two weeks. Because there were so many of us, they'd split us up into groups of ten to fifteen, call each group in one at a time, and then interview us to determine our eligibility to jur (I presume that’s the verb form).

I'm fairly confident in my assumption that I was the only person there with a job, and was therefore the only one who absolutely had to ensure that I would not be selected to serve on the jury. However, I also have a crippling allergy to getting prison raped, so I needed to make sure I wouldn't perjure myself. I figured that since I'd been taught my whole life that honesty is the best policy, it might not hurt to try it in front of a judge, a bunch of lawyers, and an accused murderer (yes, he was sitting right there, entirely unshackled, across the table from my own terrified self). The only thing the judge asked me about was my statement that I simply don't care, and I told her that I'm more concerned about working during the holidays than I am about some silly murder trial. That's when the defendant laughed. That's right: I made a man who was most likely worrying about spending the rest of his life in prison laugh. It was a good day.

I was immediately excused from the jury, and since it was nearing the end of the business day, none of the rest of the trials were still in need of jurors, so I was told by the clerk that I'd just officially fulfilled my civic duty. I didn't say anything, as I was afraid I would accidentally say the only response that I could think of: "I guess this is what I get for voting."

If I'm being honest, the part that really annoyed me the most wasn't the possibility that I could have lost two weeks of my life pretending to care about the fate of some guy who totally shot some other guy over an ideological dispute about whether or not the former had the right to rob the latter at gunpoint. No, what annoyed me most of all was the fact that I had to get up at six o'clock in the damn morning on my day off.