Day 278: Peasants, More Peasants

Presents are the best way to show someone how much you care. It is like this tangible thing that you can point to and say “Hey man, I love you this many dollars-worth." (Michael Scott, The Office)

I love presents.

Presents were something I discovered later in life. As a cheap person, I apparently spent much of my childhood looking sad and dark and saying things to my mother like "I don't need anything," when we went in souvenir stores on trips and all my brother could talk about were all the "peasants, more peasants."

But sometime in the last few years, I embraced the fact that I love gifts. It is a secret sick part of me I am working to rid myself a tiny bit of because it is slightly embarrassing and 7 year old like. Particularly because money in general is not something I think is very important. Enough money to live your life in an interesting way, fine. But more than that is silly and creates all sorts of problems that could most likely be solved if people just put their money in a bag, put it in the mail, and wrote the name of some particularly crap country on the bag (with the stamps to get it there). And yet gifts are fantastic. I reason with myself that the present doesn't actually have to cost anything to be fantastic.



As it was my 25th day of birth today, it was important to get good presents. Proudly, I achieved this goal with great leaps and bounds. Here is a mostly exhaustive list of the amazing presents I got:

1. Earrings Dani made me of white Jade
2. Earrings that are turquoise that someone bought from SF
3. Earrings that are shell looking that someone bought from SF
4. Earrings that are silver that someone bought from Miami

5. One thirty minute Rapid Rub body massage treatment at Bliss

6. One $50 check

7. One bag of old, used makeup

8. High quality DIMR mini bras (DIMRs are a girls BrEaST FRIEND)

9. A pair of fascinating travel underwear that dry in approximately 17 seconds. The box reads: 17 countries. 6 weeks. And one pair of underwear.

10. One new Adidas DryFit full-length running top

11. A $25 gift certificate to Kiva, the cool NGO that gives loans to specific entreprenuers in the developing world. You pick who you want to give the loan to, and then you watch online over time as the money grows in the person's butcher shop or whatever. It's like a game, only with real people's lives on the line. No, but all sick SIM-Poverty computer program game references aside, it is a great organization and a wonderful gift to give. If you're looking for other fun donation gifts, try Heifer, which is popular with my friends. We give that to our grandparents too, who remain baffled a bit by why people in Ecuador need bunnies.

12. Notecards (One of my favorite activities, according to Lara, is collecting small scraps of paper, like pamplets and brochures and fliers and things for activities I am not interested in but claim I am. Then, according to Lara, I write important notes to myself I refuse to throw out that I make Lara carry.)

13. A host of truly fantastic, well written, and funny cards. One that was the best summary of birthdays in your twenties I'd ever heard: "So, yeah, the same thing I say every year - I can't believe we're a year older, when did we really grow up, blah blah blah."

Thank you to everyone for an awesome 25!

P.S. And we are so happy that ex-Kenyan-missionary Alaskans Katie Thomas and her husband found us online! We've heard so much about you guys!