Uncategorized

1. What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year? Christmas and New Years, although Christmas is definitely the bigger deal. More likely than not, I’ll be spending New Year’s Eve by myself.

2. What was the best gift you have ever received? The car my parents bought me last year definitely ranks right up there, if only because it’s changed so many things and made so many of them easier. But, above all, I like to be surprised by gifts. I like to be given things I didn’t know I wanted. I don’t like coming up with a list and saying, “this, this, and this.” I mean, I have a wishlist, and my parents did insist I share it with them, but it’s there mostly so I can remember, “hey, these things are cool.”

3. What was the worst gift you’ve ever given? That’s difficult to answer. I know there have been gifts that I’ve returned that I wish I had kept. And while I understand that some relatives don’t know what to get me besides money, there’s just not as much fun to cash in an envelope. But really, the only way to disappoint me with a gift is to put no thought into it whatsoever. I appreciate simple, heartfelt cards just as much as silly gizmos and toys.

Oh wait. The worst gift I’ve ever given someone else? Nah, they’re all good. Or I have very polite friends. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t buy a lot of gifts for other people.

4. Where will you be celebrating the holidays? Are you hosting? Going away? I am headed back to New York, probably on Sunday, for about a week. We’ll go to my grandparents’ house on Christmas Eve like we’ve done all my life, and then I think my parents are hosting Christmas for the rest of the family.

It’s like Wil Wheaton said yesterday:

I am ready for the “sitting around the fire with friends and family while drinking egg nog” part of Christmas to begin.

Are we there yet?

Do you wear a lot of hats? I know I do. Too many, some might say, although I’ve tried to never let public opinion dictate my behavior. It’s not like I need a special room for all my hats or anything. It’s just easier that way. I was starting to run out of boxes.

I think, all things being equal, the fedora is probably my favorite type of hat. Famous people around the world have worn fedoras, and although I can’t think of any of their names right now, it’s comforting to know that they’re out there. Hiding. In the dark. Probably with knives. Incredibly sharp and comforting knives.

Hats, too, should be comforting, and they should fit snugly atop your head. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I see it. Whatever else you might say about them or whatever plots you might secretly suspect them of hatching late at night in the closet when you aren’t looking, even if they are just hats fedoras are certainly capable of that much. They can fit easily atop a person’s head, as if they were designed for that very purpose. I don’t know much about the history of hats, or of fedoras in particular, but I’ve seen people wear them and I’ve even worn a few myself. So believe me, I know what I’m talking about here.

You can walk down the street wearing a fedora and people will say, “there goes a man (or a woman) who knows what he (or she) likes, a man (or a woman) for whom comfort is important, a man (or a woman) who even now is wearing a soft felt hat with a fairly low crown, creased lengthwise, and a brim that can be turned up or down, depending upon his (or her) mood.”

And that’s just nice to know.

Also nice is the pith helmet, but I seem to run out of room.

The other day, I saw an ad in a magazine that said, “The future is here!” And I thought, oh crap, maybe I had better put on some pants.

As it turns out, the future isn’t here just yet. It is, as they sometimes say, yet to come. But while we’re on the subject, this week marks the end of Daylight Savings Time, invented long ago for reasons I could probably look up, but which, quite frankly, I find quite boring and therefore best left to people who never got any dates in high school. Not that I dated much myself — I spent most nights throughout high school happily chained to the radiator in my parents’ basement, begging for scraps and occasionally barking like a wild dog when company came over — but I think my underlying point, whatever it was, is still valid.

Whether or not Susie Jenkins, the homecoming queen, took a restraining order out against me our senior year is no longer strictly relevant, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by constantly dwelling on the past like that. My wife says that I’m just avoiding the issue and that my barking is starting to frighten the neighbors, but I’m a little confused as to what that has to do with Daylight Savings Time in the first place, and so I tell her she’s just being silly.

The upshot of all this, however, is that, because of Daylight Savings Time, you’ll be reading this column an hour earlier than you would have last week. If you think about it as much as I have — since, chained to a radiator, one has plenty of time to reflect — this is a little like time travel. Except of course it isn’t. With time travel, I’m sure there’d be flashing lights or glowing things or flying cars. There would be some sort of physics or weird-ass, complicated math out of a book or something, and it would probably involve more than just turning your clocks back an hour once a year. Call me crazy, but that’s just how it seems to me.

After all, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary on my desk defines time as “a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future”, so you can imagine that travel through it would be more than a little wacky. Probably not Three’s Company-style wacky, but pretty wacky nonetheless. Daylight Savings Time, on the other hand, is pretty boring stuff, but at least it means we get to sleep in an extra hour once a year after all those late nights of barking at the neighbors.

Oh, and Susie, if you’re out there — call me, okay?