things and activities and presents

I spent an hour hunting for a keyboard replacement.  For years I used the Logitech K800 wireless.  It’s breaking down and I need a replacement.  An hour later and I find the Cherry Stream Wired is about the same.  It has a similar “scissors” switch mechanism that allows a low profile on the keys while still being just raised enough that each key feels independent and unique.  I was astonished at how particular I’ve become when it comes to keyboards.  I looked at dozens and rejected them for all sorts of reasons:  No number pad (disqualified because it is then difficult to do finances or inventory at work), no wrist rest, chiclet style keys, undersized keys, too noisy, bluetooth connections (I will not connect to my Windows PCs via bluetooth, it is a pain in the ass, I want to plug the thing in and have it instantly work).

Then I thought about how much time this week I’ve spent looking for things online and felt lousy because the answer is:  A lot.  Too much.  For the right christmas presents for various people in my life.  For the right prices.  For the right features.  This website and that website and google searches and Top 10 lists of Best Clutches for Women and pro/con lists of iphone 13 versus iphone 15 (J needs a new phone, she’s still on the 8), and on and on and on.  Somewhere in my life I became an expert level consumer and I spend a lot of time trying to get just the right thing for this purpose or that purpose.  And while it’s nice to have good quality stuff, and give good quality presents to people, I also can’t help but get irritated with myself for caring so much about this kind of thing.  When I was, say, fifteen years old, my preference for a keyboard was simply to, like, own one.  Any one.  Because that would probably mean I had a computer, which I did not, until I went to college and somehow managed to save the $1100 required to buy a Compaq piece of garbage that followed me around for the next five years.

I am still struggling to complete J’s present list and it’s beginning to stress me some.

I wish it didn’t stress me.  I drove into the office this morning because there are new crackdowns and mandates about being in the office.  Higher ups want us here.  I think I can get away with coming in once every other week even though my manager wants me here every single week without exception.  My plan is to, when I am in the office, make as much noise as possible, talk to everyone I see, mess up my desk — leave paperclips strewn about everywhere, put up post-its that say obtuse things like Firewall Policy 84741 Open Port 5800, add or subtract things to my whiteboard — and rearrange the tech stuff so it is super obvious that someone was there.  I have this theory that if it looks like my desk is chaotic and well lived in that people will assume I am around more, even when I am not.  Like most thoughts that I have, it feels completely right and true so I will do this thing.  Anyway on the drive in I wanted to pay attention to the world around me, to try to enjoy the change of pace that comes with heading down Route 9 to the University — wanted to absorb the pale winter sunlight coming through the windshield, wanted to look at the skeletal trees that shed the last of their autumn leaves in the intense gusts of wind from the hurricane we got a couple of days ago — wanted to think about fiction or ideas or philosophy or even just chill — but instead I kept thinking:

Did I get her enough stuff?  What else do I have to do?

And I think the answer is no.

One of my ideas was to give her a 4×6 framed photo of the two of us — I know which one from the last year is her favorite — so she can put it in her office.  It’s the kind of cheesy thing that she would like, I think, and might also serve as a reminder to her co-workers that she’s married and has a life outside of work.  Which her co-workers often forget.  Because most of them are single.  And because she was single for so long.

So I still have to get the frame and then adjust my printer and print the damned thing and it has to be the right size so there might be some amount of scaling and cropping and re-trying until it comes out okay.

That’s one present.

Another is some random chocolate treats that go into her stocking that hangs on the mantel.

Another is a book written by the Rifftrax / Mystery Science Theater 3K people called the Naked Clone — it’s kind of like a comic book about Nick Nolte and it’s supposed to be funny — I mean who knows.  We watch a lot of MST3k so I feel like it might be a fun rando present.

And that’s it.  My other idea was to get her a phone but I can’t really do this without her.  She says she can’t afford a new phone with her own money — her salary is lower than mine we split all bills 75/25 me/her and she has some money left after that to herself but she’s been blowing her extra cash on supplements for our IVF Science Baby Project leaving her with not much left.  So what do I do?  Get her a $600 apple store card?  What if she thinks it’s too much and gets upset?  Or decides that she doesn’t want to buy the phone at apple, wants to get a new contract with a carrier and have them subsidize the phone?

I get stuck.  I can’t make a decision.  I switch to another present — adding a year’s worth of photos to our scrapbook.  One photo per trip or experience.  So she has something to look at when she is feeling like “we don’t do enough.”  Which she feels sometimes, because she looks at Facebook and sees people posting about their vacations and whatnot.  This would be ten or fifteen photos.  I would have to work to go through old camera pictures, curate them, print them.  I need time and energy.  I am currently using my time and energy to type an OpenDiary entry while in my office instead of doing anything Christmas related.

I also got Peter Gabriel’s new album, IO, on vinyl.  We saw him in concert back in September and the new tracks sounded pretty good.

That’s it.  It seems like … not enough.  I don’t know.

I’m not giving anyone else anything.  Except my friend R, who really likes Legos.  I bought him a $5 off-brand lego set of Hello Kitty’s Diner, all pink, complete with a cute hello kitty cat figurine.  A joke present.  He will probably laugh and I’ll insist he puts it up next to his $300 fully assembled Millenium Falcon.  My mom would probably accuse me of “buying junk that will end up in a landfill” if she knew I did this sort of thing — where this sort of thing is buying joke presents.

I did not get my mom a present and I don’t know if I’ll see her for Christmas.

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I finished reading Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs.  I started reading this because I thought it might prepare me for becoming a father — this was six months ago when I felt more optimistic about our chances to become parents.  I no longer feel optimistic.  I feel more like I have been conscripted into service on the Science Baby project which is run and managed and driven by my wife J.  The Science Baby project is now way behind schedule and dreadfully over budget.  Multiple dates have been missed, failures abound, morale has been reduced, and yet we march on.

There is a chapter about Chabon’s fifteen year old boy.  The boy makes comments which indicate that he does not believe the world will be around in another fifty years.  Chabon realizes, at some point, that no one in his generation thinks the world will be ok in 50 years.  They all take it for granted that something will have done us in by then:  Nuclear wars, Pandemic (still possible despite Covid’s failure), nanotechnology, AI, or the most unstoppable force of all, Climate Change.

Chabon makes a simple statement related to this.  Part of choosing children is an optimistic bet on the future being OK.

When he and his wife decided to have kids, embedded in this decision was a faith that the world would be more or less as habitable during their lifetimes as it is, and was, for themselves.

I realize I am closer to Chabon’s kid’s viewpoint — I do not think the world will be OK in fifty years.  I’m in the Climate-change-will-destroy-us-all camp.  Not by choice.  But because I believe in science.  I would like to have blind optimism and hope that mankind will figure a way out of this mess but I see what is happening — almost no serious efforts by governments to change course — and despair.  Other problems seem to have solutions to leverage, or, at the least, enough wiggle room around the borders that we can use the space to twist our way out of them.  In same cases even blind dumb luck could potentially create a fix.  Look at covid:  a vaccine was invented.  Numerous treatments.  Maybe we can prevent AI from becoming Skynet.  Maybe Putin will die from a meteor chancing to crash on him.  And so on.  But it doesn’t appear that there’s any solution for the constant warming of the planet.  As a species, we can’t even agree that this is a Real Problem.

And yet J and I are driving to Albany tomorrow to CNY fertility clinic to begin another chapter in the Science Baby project.  They will take a map of her insides.  My understanding is that this is the uterine equivalent of those computer-generated topographical images that you sometimes see of mountains, or the ocean floor.  They want to see what her fallopian tubes look like alongside the grand canyon and the cervix.

 

J told me I didn’t have to go, didn’t have to take the day off work, she could do it herself, but I couldn’t imagine her doing this by herself.  I pointed out that it would be good for the doctors and nurses to see that you have support.  And good for me to meet the new team.

Maybe we will have more success this time.

Maybe we’ll have a kiddo after all.

And maybe the future will be OK, too.  Maybe continuing to try to have a child with J is my way of allowing for some hope when it comes to thinking about the future of humanity itself.

 

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I’m still reading the handbook on witches.  J and I are also watching a show called Midnight Mass, about priests and angels and the devil.  It’s also about Faith and spirituality but the plot has sort of devolved into vampire tropes, a need for the cursed to drink blood, an affliction to light.  Tis the season for being interested in the Occult.

We only have one episode left and we’ll probably watch it tonight.  Jennie asked me what I predicted would happen and I said I’m not sure but the main character, Father Pruitt (he became sort of a vampire — cursed), well I think that we’ll find out why he became cursed.  They haven’t revealed it yet.

She said what do you mean and I said well, there must have been a reason that this man of God was targeted by a Dark Angel and became corrupted.  I think the reason is that he sold his soul for something.  So that will be revealed, and it won’t be all that interesting, and the show will come to a close, with most of the people in this village dying one way or another — maybe everyone!  why not everyone!

J asks if there is anything I would sell my soul for and I said I can’t think of anything offhand.  Then I realized, that isn’t true.  I would consider it if I could be granted, in return, the following:  A graceful, painless, instant death for the following people:  My mother, both of your parents, my brother M, and five or six politicians and business leaders that the world would be better without.  Heart attacks in their sleep, hit by falling pianos, brain exploding aneurisms, stuff like that.

Being that we are driving to CNY on Thursday to begin IVF Cycle 9, I didn’t have to ask J in return.