I have now orbited our local star twenty three times, as we regard it. However, I almost didn’t remember until just before. At the start of June, both my parents went on their respective trips with their partners. My father went to Florida and the Bahamas for a week. My mother left to Spain and a Mediterranean cruise including Italy, Greece, and Turkey. She returned two weeks after my father. This was a long, peaceful time for me. Even better, my friends and I managed a D&D session each weekend. There were ample distractions (and lack of reminders) about the pending Holiest of subjective Satanic holidays.

Describing her cruise would make a nice transition, but that isn’t possible. She told me about it, but as a summary and highlights only. (Writing this has been a good reminder that I need to ask to copy their pictures.) Any vacation longer than a week subsumes so many events and minor surprises that describing it to another is hopeless without extensive documentation. I have tried keeping travel journals twice (in Europe and Australia); but after the first days, my interest flags. We pack our days and arrive to bed tired and in line for the shower. Spending an hour hunched over the uncomfortable escritoire – often in the way of the television – can’t compete with vapid relaxation.

Nevertheless, my mother always brings back curios, perhaps for us to remember her trip by. Both my parents bought shirts, which is nice. I had been putting off buying more for a while because entertainment > clothes. But, shirts don’t satisfy my real request. This is a cafepress era. I can buy a shirt that says Harvard without graduating high school. I can buy a jacket that says FBI in official colors despite working at a crooked gambling parlor. And, anyone can buy a shirt that says Costa Rica, Greece, or Red Dirt Hawaii. Still, the shirts my mother brought were thankfully better than I expected. The Istanbul shirt hides the word in a letter grid that also has other (anglicized) Turkish words. The Barcelonan shirt says Barcelona, but over a matte web of its city layout.

So, when my mother asked me the day after I brought her home from John Wayne what I wanted for my birthday, I gaped in surprise and stammered that the shirts would be just fine. She said no, so I had to work. Any year where she hadn’t left, she would have reminded me during late May or so and I would have made a list of prospective gifts. During April, I even noted an improvement to submitting the list. Normally, I send an unedited version of my personal buying lists to her with updated prices. Unfortunately, she runs into trouble when I put, for example, a Sandman trade paperback. Amazon has the weird compulsion of only listing outdated editions of the graphic novel, no matter how you search for them. Of course, if she opened the product page for one, she would see the link to a current printing under the ‘different binding’ options (hardcover, mass market paperback, library binding). To ease her frustration, I planned to link directly to each item as I updated the price. It isn’t an amazing change, but I had never thought of it before.

Here is a snippet from my book buying list. It is toward the upper middle because my favorite authors dominate the top with little variety (just science fiction and some fantasy). [Amazon; Barnes & Noble; library]

Ubersleep           15lulu

Alphabet of manliness   10am/12.8bn/-lib

Getting Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks               11.7am/-lib

Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar            <am/-lib

Watching the Watchmen              26.4am

Bitches, Bimbos, and Ballbreakers: Guerrilla Girls Guide to Female Stereotypes  18.3am/-lib

The Encyclopedia Of Tarot           22.8am 1-4 105.4am/  II  26.6am  III  34.2am  IV  45bn

Revelations of the Dark Mother                <am/-lib

The hero with a thousand faces                t lib/10.7am/13.5

Will to Power 11.6am/17bn/5bkmn

In the end, I didn’t submit a list to either and ate the consequence. Not directing my father held more significance. He bought me a shirt and a Barnes & Nobel gift card. In light of amazon, that retailer is neigh worthless. Sure, I liked to visit when a minor without a credit card. It was sort of like a browsing the library with more variety and the spice of a potential impulse buy. Now, I know – absolutely – that retailer prices everything five dollars higher (or more) than amazon does.

They offer only one saving grace: sparkcharts only sells through Barnes & Nobel. I consider them worthless, in principle, for any class I am studying. Without writing and relying on personal notes, I would do abysmally. However, the breadth of their offering suggested I could use them as a tiny introduction into a subject I don’t plan to study. For example, I bought Music Theory and Marketing to this end. They are as superficial as I expected, but good enough to quiet my interest. Further, I can return to ignoring the retailer in perpetuity.

I made sure to direct my mother’s gift more, despite dithering. In the end, I decided that she could buy me a pair of everyday shoes. Mine are scuffed, but have no holes. However, she had made a little fuss about them earlier in the year and during year 8, so I knew it would please her to buy me them (rather than committing to a block of cash). I had counted on the good will to reduce her input. When my father bought me a new pair of work shoes, I used the newbalance (one of the few major brands that sells 4Es) website and chose velcro straps. These are much faster. Yes, the time is small but not trivial. Consider the comparison between pants with a zipper and pants with buttons. I happen to have one pair and know that it is an annoying extra effort.

Unfortunately, nobody buys shoes with Velcro straps and manufacturers severely limit their color selection. During my dedicated research to find one dashing pair my mother could agree to, I saw the same colors over and over: white, boring American; black, work shoes; and ‘bone,’ a light brown/grey. The most daring was a white shoe with silver streaks. In the end, my mother sidestepped color and declared Velcro straps are for old people. (I admit all diabetic’s variants have straps.) I dropped the issue (it’s her money after all) and agreed to typical navy running shoes. I toyed with ankle boots, but she reminded me they will look silly since I wear shorts all the time. I know my leg hair presents a brusque and unkempt front, but these months (and even a third of every California winter) are too hot for pants.

But the best came from aggregated money (mainly my grandparent’s). I am using it right now and had considered it for a long while. I bought a corner desk.

Prior to yesterday, I kept that red chair in the corner for storing my backpack and (occasionally) clothes. I used my laptop in the communal bonus room with the television to my back. I have typed for an hour and one half and not been interrupted in any way. If this were a weekday afternoon, my sister would be watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey or something similar. In that case, I often resorted to putting on headphones and listening to a series of white noise clips I recorded for the purpose. Music could cover it, but that is just as bad as prose English dialog calling out to me. So, I lifted the sound from four youtube clips of waves, rain, a river, and someone driving a stick shift car on the freeway. It throws a blanket over the ambient voices but grates and dilutes my concentration anyway. Now, I have near total privacy even with my door open.

I am very glad I chose this type. Officemax had tempted me intitially with cheap ‘L desks’ (two shoved together with a little round connector. As you can see, I need a deep desk because I use a separate, ergonomic keyboard with my laptop on a homemade stand. I put the towel on the lip to protect my elbows. I could go on about the trivial details, but it isn’t anything you can’t guess. The white sheet is a map of the world I drew (Winkel Tripel projection) but discarded. During writing, I hung it up. It serves nicely as a dust cover, but I have better and my work is nicer than a bare wall.

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