I don't think I like Christmas much

Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas, I just hate being involved in it. Despite my pro-social attitudes, I'm not really a people person. Social interaction beyond more than a handful of people quickly tires me out. Guess what Christmas has a lot of? Yea, family parties. Then there is the gift-giving. At times I wonder if it exists solely to remind people like me just how bad we are at thinking of other people. What is this person's life? What else do they want? Need? That I can afford? Sadly, paying off mortgages and law school loans are not within my means.

Sometimes I feel like an alcoholic who's been asked to stop drinking and gets that ultimatum: If you loved us you'd stop. Yea, if I loved my family I'd get them gifts they'd love. But dammit, maybe love and buying thoughtful gifts don't always go hand in hand. I'd love it if I could just "stop being bad at buying gifts". But that's just not how my brain is wired. I do the best I can, but please understand that the itunes card isn't because I was lazy, it's because I don't know much about music and have no ability to pick out CDs.

There's always the sociopathic/loner route, but fuck that. What's a world alone, without family, without friends? At that point a person might as well just die and save some time in being forgotten. That sure was cheerful.

On the flip side, I often can't fully enjoy gifts. I tend to just feel bad that the exchange was clearly unequal. In my favor, but that's not the point. In some imaginary world, by now I am fully capable of affording and finding the nice gifts that people give me. Which on that note, all I really want this year is either a job or to be young enough to play with legos again. Obviously not everyone can get me a job, or possibly anyone, so said list would just be one of those irritating ones that offers no help at all to lost searchers.

Actually the other day I got very mad at WoW and did a rare and regrettable ragequit. Not even on a PUG, but a guild group. That was a few days ago and since then I've logged in twice: once to empty my bank alt's mailbox of failed auctions and another to send a couple Christmas gifts to friends, who happened to have been in said run.

But the point was the legos. I really miss playing with them. Creating directly from my imagination. That didn't happen this time. Instead I was confused, because I had forgotten my organizational system and because last time I touched them I had slightly changed it to fit all the creations I was deconstructing. So I was lost. But it was a good system, so I figured it out (Resume: strong organizational skills: check out my legos, I had those organized even when I was a kid). But then my mind was just blank. Well, not fully blank, I had some vague, ethereal idea for a heavy fighter. This wasn't uncommon back when, but it was usually enough. Ideas would grow in my mind, shaping and becoming more certain as I built. That didn't happen. Instead I stumbled through a half-built fighter that I had to partially deconstruct to make the cockpit close fully. It had no elegance, but it did not have any blocky utilitarian theme either. It was just a bunch of crap stuck together with a dusty lego guy jammed in the cockpit with no control panel.

Not much like a bicycle, I suppose.