Adventures in Dysosmia

[mrissa]

I theorize that my nosebleed this morning didn't actually smell like espresso double chocolate cookies from DeLice's in downtown Omaha. Still, as dysosmic events go, that was a pretty good one.

I now remember the trouble with keeping a to-do list for several days on lj like that: I forget that my productivity over time is nonlinear. Specifically, I am not an afternoon person. I am a morning person, sometimes an early evening person as well, but definitely, definitely not an afternoon person. So I get a bunch of things done all at once in the morning and go around thinking, oh, good, I might as well add four or five more things to the list, because I have the time! And then I realize that, no, what I have is the afternoon, which is not at all the same. So I am working on not adding gratuitously to the list, and on making phone calls in predicted lulls in markgritter's business use of the phone. Which use is rather confusing today. And I'm finishing Scientific American (the last periodical on the pile right now) and poking at Orvokki's war story, which is now "Scribing a Line." And I am trying to forget that I don't know how to write war stories and just write it. So.

I was thinking about some of the most considerate gifts I've ever gotten, while writing an e-mail this morning, and I think my Aunt Doris may take the prize. A decade ago at Christmas, she got me a casual fall coat, reversible, burgundy on one side and burgundy/navy/hunter-green plaid on the other. Warm, comfy, nice. And as I was unwrapping it, she curled her lip and said, "Well, isn't that the loveliest thing you've ever seen." She hated it. She bought it for me anyway, because she knew it was what I wanted and needed; she knew it would make me happy. But she did not like that coat at all. I thought that was extremely considerate, to buy something she disliked that much when she knew I wouldn't.

Also, a few years before that, when I was 15 and just getting keys, my godfather Joe gave me a little pewter castle keychain. It was the first gift my extended family ever gave me that acknowledged that I liked That Fantasy Stuff. It was the first gift that said, yah, okay, that's how you are and who you are, and we're not going to wait around hoping you'll grow out of it any year now. A keychain was for growing up, for driving and independence, and Joe, whose reading is strictly mainstream-bestseller, got something that recognized my interests when he gave it to me. It meant a lot more to me than the price would indicate. (I still use that keychain. Comes down to it, I still wear that coat.)

How about you? What have you gotten in years past that turned out to be disproprotionately considerate or important to you?

Comments

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Last year, when I was in the midst of a really awful depressive episode, a bunch of my friends pooled their funds and bought manos74 an airline ticket so I wouldn't spend Christmas alone.

Also, bafleyanne bought me a book about wool called In Sheep's Clothing which is basically an illustrated guide of fleeces and their characterstics. I find this sort of thing really interesting. She thinks it's incredibly boring, but she bought me the book anyhow.

[rosefox]

It wasn't a holiday gift, but I gave a shirt to banesidhe one year for (I think) his birthday, and after he died his wife returned it to me so that I could wear it and remember him. It was one of the sweetest things anyone's ever done for me.

Two years ago, sinboy and I were in a bookstore and I spotted Philip Pullman's little add-on story to His Dark Materials, a beautiful slim hardcover with a map of Lyra's Oxford. I squeed a lot because a) I love love love that trilogy (which sinboy had originally given me in a beautiful boxed set) and b) I love love love nonfiction about fiction: maps of places that don't exist, taxonomy of dragons, etc. sinboy gently steered me away from it, pointing out that we were there to buy things for other people, not for ourselves, and I could always come back and get it later. I never for a moment suspected that he had already found it and bought it for me. The look on my face when I opened the wrapping a few days later must have been priceless. There are so many things I love about that story: that he found it in the first place and knew that I would like it, that it followed up on an earlier gift, that he kept me from getting it for myself without spoiling the surprise. I tease him that he's set the bar impossibly high for future gifts, because it really doesn't get better than that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed at how few people are actually thinking suspiciously near gift-giving holidays. Either that or my "casual tone" is really, truly, deeply casual.

[rosefox]

I think I just trust him a lot. *) He's usually entirely guileless; it never occurs to me that he might be hiding something on the rare occasions when he is.

not disportionate

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

..and not intended as gifts, I think. It is the things people have done that have stuck with me so long.

There was a rather horrible outfit my father chose that year Mom was sick. The thing was that he thought it beautiful, and me. I knew that, and that he wasn't looking at the outside, and he is still that way. That knowing stays with me wrapped in the memories. In the reverse, the year I gave Ben a bike, it wasn;t just a bike to me. It was wings and freedom and trust, and oh, lots of things.

(Yeeps. Sappy. I must be inhaling too much Tree here. ;)

Re: not disportionate

[telophase.livejournal.com]

One year my grandfather gave me a hand lotion - the kind you get from the department store perfume counter, not the kind you get from the grocery store. It was a scent I don't wear and dislike intensely, but the women he loves - my grandmother, my aunt, my cousin - all wear it, and I honor it for that association. (Don't wear the stuff, of course, but think of it fondly :D)

Re: not disportionate

[(Anonymous)]

Yes.. sometimes the wearing can be pretty iffy, : )

Re: not disportionate

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

whoops me! from work.

And I meant to add.. the thing with Dad is that he saw and understood, thatI wanted both things, to be able to have those long intense discussions and also fun, and art and.... I take it for granted a bit now; but, back where I grew up and when, this wasn't at all common.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Wow, nobody gave you any books ackgnowledging you liked that fantasy stuff before you were 15? That seems so...unlikely.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You can be Captain Dubious all you want, but my family really didn't give me books very much when I was younger, on the theory that I would just go buy some with any allowance or gift money that came my way anyway, so I might as well have other things in my life.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I remember your frustration. You had to convince people that you really truly like books.

It seems a long way, from there to here.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It wasn't even so much that they didn't believe that I really truly like books. They just weren't geared into giving books as presents so much. For Grandpa, yes, because Grandpa was otherwise difficult.

I think part of the problem was that my parents were library people, not book-buyers.

It does seem a long way.

[pameladean]

Back in the days before personal computers, having discovered that my novel in progress existed only as handwriting in notebooks, David gave me a box of carbons, a huge three-ring notebook, and a gigantic iron paper puncher.

P.