Collect ‘em, trade ‘em, race ‘em!

I’m going to go ahead and keep talking about my birthday, even though it was last week, because I’m technically still celebrating it in the sense of “anticipating opening more gifts.” I’ve pretty much fallen back on pointing people to my Amazon.com wishlist exclusively whenever they ask about an approaching gift-giving occasion, and I was told in various family phone calls on my date of birth that I should be expecting packages … soon. (Monday was guessed at repeatedly, but also wrongly.) So the wheels of e-commerce are apparently turning slowly and that’s totally fine – I kind of like drawing things out. When I was a kid my grandmother introduced me to what I still find to be a charmingly old-timey phrase: “within the octave” (with a long A sound). A birthday card or present wasn’t technically late as long as it showed up within the octave, the eight days following. I love that someone at some point felt that “a week and a day” needed its own stiltedly pronounced term, and that my grandmother employs it in conversation. “Octave” is in my opinion an even better olde-speeche word than “fortnight”.

In addition to wondering which goodies on my wishlist might be UPSing their way towards me as we speak, I’ve been thinking lately about the whole gift selection process. On the one hand, everybody wants to be able to go to their store or website of choice and pick out a gift with 100% certainty that the recipient will love it. (I’m assuming here legitimate gift-giving occasions involving loved ones like family and friends, not awkward obligatory scenarios that breed resentment and potential passive-aggressive douchebaggery.) On the other hand, a lot of people want to give gifts that will genuinely surprise the recipient, or will demonstrate that the giver deeply understands the recipient and knows their desires without asking, or something like that. The only sure way to satisfy the former element is to ask a direct question and get a direct answer, but that pretty much negates the latter element. Sometimes there is a happy medium: my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I told her slippers and a robe, and she was then free to pick out the style and color of said items and use her own impeccable taste to interpret my straightforward request. Of course, I’m a pain-in-the-ass geek and so a lot of the time my straightforward requests leave no room for interpretation – if I ask for the animated Green Lantern movie on DVD, either you’re going to get it for me or you’re not. (Leaving aside over-the-top geekery like asking for the extended director’s cut widescreen box set of The Lord of the Rings and getting a version of the trilogy that omits one of those perhaps obsessive but nonetheless important qualifiers GLURGGG! (asthma inhaler) ahhhh … yes, let’s leave that aside.)


On the interpretation tip, any stripe of collector usually provides that kind of latitude for gift-giving. If a person has amassed for themselves a large enough number of similar things to qualify as a collection, whether it’s memorabilia associated with a specific persona or aesthetic or just an all-encompassing category like ‘hedgehogs’, you generally have some insight into, if not their passion, at least their like-enough-that-they-wouldn’t-mind-one-more. There are of course pitfalls in buying someone a gift which belongs to their collection. As you might expect, I’m thinking foremost from the geek perspective, because the more hardcore the geek, the more of a completist they probably are. I collect Stephen King fairly avidly, which means you would have a hard time buying me a Stephen King book I don’t already own (and even if you go with the new one that just came out a week before Christmas, the odds are good that someone else who knows me and my predilections had the exact same thought). But even the non-geeky and non-specific have their own persnickety collection rules, and everyone’s are different. You might find yourself holding an adorable plush hedgehog, halfway convinced that amongst your loved one’s porcelain hedgehogs and wooden hedgehogs and concrete garden hedgehogs you’ve never seen a stuffed animal and that this would therefore be a welcome addition to the collection, and suddenly you’ll wonder if maybe your favorite hedgehog collector really hates stuffed animals and that’s the reason you’ve never seen any in their house. (Read “you” as “I” and remember that I am a classic overthinker.) Interacting with someone else’s collection is surprisingly perilous.

Of course, the biggest peril is mistaking a collection for something it’s not. Sometimes it really is a neat little window on a person’s inner landscape, something they started and cultivated and care deeply about and enjoy adding to. But sometimes a collection is something that was established expressly as a default gift-giving vehicle, and furthermore established by the giver, not the recipient. Asking someone about all the musical snowglobes featuring clowns that adorn their room and finding out that the owner in question is not an enthusiast (colloquially known as a “clownglober”), but rather at some point in the distant past they received a musical clown snowglobe as a gift, then another, and another, until a collection grew up on its own … that is really an awkward, inadvertent and frequently melancholy revelation about relationships that are built more on formality and ceremony than actual connections. Sometimes the first gift in the collection was something the recipient wanted at the time but grew out of (though no one noticed) and sometimes it is just institutionalized randomness, but it happens a lot and the end result is the same: if you buy that accidental clownglober one more goddamn sparkle-filled glass Big Top they will bash your skull in with it.

As a collector, I’m fascinated by other people’s collections and I usually can’t resist asking questions about them. People are sometimes less than forthcoming, maybe because they assume I’m setting them up to be mocked mercilessly (collections are things that are really hard to justify rationally to someone who doesn’t get it), but I honestly am curious about how collections get started and the stories behind the various acquisitions – it’s like a free tour of a hyper-specific museum. Plus I might get some good gift ideas. Unless the whole collection is decades’ worth of birthday presents from a weird great-aunt, in which case I’ll get a good story out of it. And I collect those, too.