Everything In Between

For posterity, this year I got:

• One crossword puzzle book.
• Two small, uh, novelty book things? A Zen rock garden one and an office voodoo kit.
• One book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• One palmOne Treo 650 PDA Phone case, belated, the Mobi CrystalCase.
• A black T-shirt imprinted with an old Russian cold war propoganda advertisement.
• I think that’s all.

More interesting than gifts, I found it interesting to watch my younger brother’s reactions to Christmas in general. It’s been many years now, but he’s been growing up and it shows. I’ll admit that I dislike family Christmas tradition, but that should be little surprise as I dislike most family traditions. I don’t really put a lot of effort into anything I don’t truly enjoy wholeheartedly. (A weakness and a strength, if you ask me.)

By the way, for the interseted or just plain curious, here’s a collection of clips from this year’s Christmas.

Post-Christmas gifts lead to a huge amount of fantastic conversation with my nearest-aged brother, who suffered through my prophetic evangelizing on my soapbox. It was one of those discussions where everything I said made sense because he (and later my mother) let me make my points without fighting against them until they had been made. By the end, I felt like my brother and my mother for the first time truly understood why I am so much the way that I am. That was the best thing I could have asked for for Christmas, if I’d ever think to ask for anything like that. Telling that it’s not a physical item.

Shir’s right in saying that I should probably find a way to write down most of what that discussion entailed, which I’ll certainly do but probably not as succinctly as I talked about in that discussion. I’m not concerned, however, because that stuff is so integral a part of me that it oozes from my pores whether I like it or not. It’ll get recorded, in time.

And, call me crazy, but I still don’t really feel that comfortable saying these things to people who aren’t my family and that I care for on some level, because, like Galileo, it has the potential to utterly destroy your world view if you don’t take it constructively. And things that destroy your world view are very easy not to take constructively. Afterall, who wants to create a new world view from the shattered pieces of an old one?

That’s no fun at all.