Slow Shopper

When I was in middle school, my sister decided that her passion was elephants. She claimed they were amazing and she loved them. Naturally, with any good passion goes the collection. Remembering back further, I do recall my sister having a fascination with elephants, but back then it was mostly contained to certain times and events. Once at the fair a sculptor made her a tiny elephant from clay, she loved it and has kept it to this day. I once got a statue of an elephant made entirely of sea shells at, ironically, a White Elephant gift exchange which I promptly delivered to her with pride and gusto.

This brings me back to middle school where I began and which began my sister's "collection." She had collected a few elephant themed pieces in the past, but a threshold was reached in which I suppose she must have sat quietly in her bedroom one evening weighing the dilemma in her mind looking at it, as any fanatic looks at his or her fixation, in black and white, one extreme or the other. The moral moment must have had quite the weight to it, her standing on the edge of two worlds, two personalities, the split in the path. Apparently the road less traveled for her, in which she took, was the decision to jump headlong into the passion and upgrade from a simple casual admirer and observer of the pachyderm to the full fledged hunter-gatherer type collector.

She was ahead of her time the way I see it judging that the beloved "Beanie Baby" craze didn't hit until a few years later. Either way I was now related to a collector. At first, I was indifferent to this new development, yes I did give her the sea shell elephant statue, but that was a random chance and free at that. However, as time went on and as I became more self-aware, and with each passing Christmas and birthday I was reminded more and more that my role in these "gifting" events was to become more active and I would soon be responsible for attaining gifts for others, I learned a horrible truth about myself. I was, and am to this day, a horrible gift giver.

It's not that I buy bad gifts or even that I buy good gifts and become utterly shy and nerve racked with the thought of delivering them to the receiver, it's that I just simply and completely do not know what to get anyone for any occasion. Anxiety was beginning to become part of my personality as this horrible trait of mine fully developed. Christmas became a time of worrying where I could be found aimlessly wandering through department stores desperately trying to avoid the personal shoppers and "KB toys." First off, my shopping method is composed of two simple steps. Step one, decide what I need to buy, step two, go to the store to get it. At times there exists a step one prime in which I end up doing a very light amount of research in order to seek out the store that will sell me the item I have decided to purchase, but all in all that's as complicated as it gets. This method leaves room for zero browsing and when I go to purchase the item, as far as I'm concerned, the store is carrying only that.

I have also been called a "slow shopper." This expression describes those times I successfully complete step one and step one prime if needed, but then a pre-step two comes out of nowhere in which I find myself debating the metaphysics of the situation and I commit shopper suicide by beginning to wonder "why" I'm buying the decided upon object of desire. I find this gets worse with age as every year becomes one more year I can say I successfully survived without said object. "Why do I need this, I'm 25, 25 years without it, wow, that's a lot, why not one more?"

Buying for others is even worse in that since I can't get in their heads I really don't know what they're going to find maximum usage with. Then the question becomes, "would they use it, if so how much?" Even if those first two come out affirmative, the third clincher from before always, as ever, throws a wrench into the system, "WHY." "Well then why do they need this? Do they have to use it?"

So, I am brought back to why my sister's collection became important to me and true a source of hope. I discovered through her never ending collecting of a single theme that I was never without a clue as to what to buy her for special occasions. It's her birthday, buy her an elephant statue. Christmas, an elephant statue and a cool elephant calendar for the next year. The county fair, elephant ears are amazing. Life became easy just as fast as it had become difficult. I was now automatically endowed with the power and intuition of always being able to buy my sister the perfect gift. I was awesome.

This quickly became my general template for gift giving. It was so simple all the sudden, just find out what someone collected, and in those cases where they don't collect anything, buy food. At the very least they can eat it and it's not cluttering up their house or fining its way back to you at next year's White Elephant gift exchange.

As it turns out, I am not alone at the department store as I wander about with a blank look on my face. Many people are just as bad at gifting and just as slow at shopping as I am. This is why collecting exists. It allows people like me to be included and feel good at Christmas and birthdays. Some of us, as I have seen, are even clever. When faced with the occasional individual who owns no such collections these quick witted slow shoppers without skipping a beat and instead of letting that original anxiety creep in, quickly create a collection out of thin air by choosing something at random and deeming it the "starter."

Many of us are plagued with multiple "starters," those random trinkets and statuettes that have no earthly place in our home. Of course, at this point, the collection has been started and it's not that the person got you a bad gift, but that you're a bad collector and it's your fault a random item sits out of place on your mantle; of course it's random if it's lone, you're supposed to collect more.

What's With The Penguins?

My wife and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with her family in Indianapolis and as any good, cohesive family does during the Saturday following Thanksgiving, we followed suit and took a family outing to go see a movie. My wife has two younger sisters (younger as in elementary school age), so she accompanied them along with her mother to view the latest installment of the mysterious penguin craze, "Happy Feet." Apparently it's a movie about a misfit penguin attempting to find his own place and "groove" in the world, or so it seems.

I asked my wife how the movie was after letting out and she just sort of smiled. At this point, she could have let me off easy by making it simple and just saying, "you know, penguins," and that would have been satisfactory for me given the context. I saw the poster, it was more of a rhetorical question, another way of saying hello. However, once she explained what was really going on in the movie I quickly realized that not only would the reply "penguins" have been insufficient, it would have been a blatant lie. However, my wife, being the honest person she is, gave me the truth, "left-wing, liberal, environmentalist propaganda directed at ages 5 to 12."

I was broadsided by this reply at first, of course, who wouldn't have been? You ask a simple question, "how was the movie," and while you can still see the poster in the background, mind you, with that beautifully computer generated picture of a leaping penguin front and center and while you're still taking in the art and "happiness" of it the words, "left-wing, liberal, environmentalist propaganda," find their way into your ear. It's cause for a literal jolt.

I found myself confused and blindsided by the response. In the past week, as well, a few opinion columns have sprung up regarding this strange "children's" flick and with good reason. Just as my wife and I were that fateful day, people are...confused. However, it seems that the confusion does not last long before it begins to evolve and melt into frustration and then once one really begins to understand what the movie, "Happy Feet" is really about and then realize who it was directed to and marketed for, downright, old fashioned, rage filled anger ensues and all one can really think about for about the next hour is that scene from the old Frankenstein movies where a local mob of angry citizens is in hot pursuit of the monster complete with pitchforks and torches in hand, the taste for blood on their lips.

The movie begins innocent enough with a misfit penguin attempting to find his own style and way in a culture that would rather expel than accept change. Seems harmless enough, nothing wrong with teaching a group of children a nice lesson on tolerance as well as letting them know that individuality can be a good and powerful thing that should not be mindlessly discarded. Had the movie been about that, it would have been fine. The audience would have gone away vindicated in their own convictions (not that I agree with that totally, but at least it would have been straight forward and in general, a call for peace) and the children would have got a fairly decent lesson as well, a lesson which would have needed to be further explained by their guardians, but simple enough and basically positive in regards to development. However, this is not what the movie was about. Turns out it had more to do with the whiles of industrialization and the threat of pollution and human overconsumption of resources which ultimately affects the populations and way of life of many species, especially the penguins.

Any adult watching this flick sees through the smoke and mirrors immediately and had the movie been directed toward an adult audience, a metaphor such as this would have been fine. Again, those in agreement would have gone away vindicated that their message was getting out. Those opposed to the message, well, they would have simply disagreed, snickered at the metaphor, awareness may have even been spread. Conversely, children do not have the same faculties adults do, they do not and cannot reason the way adults can and when all is said and done and to put it simply, children have an innocence adults do not. A child cannot look at a movie like this critically weighing and comparing their current beliefs and past experiences in reference to new materials and opinions being presented. Children are more like a sponge in that they just take it in.

Therefore, as a child leaves a movie such as "Happy Feet," they leave believing an opinion to be a fact. Once again, if the lesson was simply, "be yourself and use differences as strengths," a philosophy that is generally accepted as good and helpful, it would not be a negative thing for a child to exit the theater believing this about the world or deciding that that was a fact. I realize that one might argue that what a child learns from his or her parents to be facts are mostly just the opinions held by their parents. This is correct, much of what one is brought up with and begins treating as fact is simply an opinion held by those who taught it, however, what a parent decides to teach his or her children is nobody's business other than the child and the parent. I suppose one would just hope that somewhere in one's upbringing one is taught to weigh and calculate information so as one does begin to develop higher cognitive ability it will then be used to further decide for the self what is fact and what is opinion.

The problem here is that those who write movies such as "Happy Feet" usurp a parent's place as initial fact teacher and ultimately weaken the family structure, especially if that which is fed to a child in movies like these is contrary to the opinions of the parent. Leaving the movie, a child could potentially find the next week of their life utterly confusing as these two "facts," that of what the parents teach and that of what was taught in the movie, collide.

At this point, I am going to break away from that last line of thought because I feel that I have accidentally stumbled onto ground that I don't feel like expostulating upon or attempting to reconcile in a blog. I feel that I have traced out that line as far as I need to for this thought and I would now like to move to the rant that originally made me want to write this all down, "why penguins?"

I am continuously confused lately as to why penguins have become such a hot item (no pun intended). It began with the hit, "March of the Penguins," there is now a children's book out entitled, "Tango Makes Three (a book promoting homosexual relationships which I feel the same way about as I do 'Happy Feet')," and the recent, "Happy Feet." From what I have heard, "March of the Penguins" was pretty sweet all around and it did well in the box office. So what then is all this propaganda about? Seems those who seek to usurp the minds of today's children think they can ride out on the coat tails of "March of the Penguins."

I guess they found something that sells well and thought they'd slap their own agenda onto it, sort of like those great trojan horse programs that get onto your computer riding legitimate programs and mess things up. Therefore, the little bastards that want to push this stuff on America's youth are not only misleading, but unoriginal as well.

This whole blog is not my tirade against environmental awareness. It is just when I see productions such as these, geared toward children, it makes me think that even these liberal minorities that are psycho about spreading awareness for their causes, know deep in their hearts that nobody really takes them seriously. They realize no one their own age is listening, not because we don't want to save the penguins, but because they're annoying (the psycho liberals not the penguins), so they have to aim lower to an audience that will agree with them but only because they don't know any better and they find CGI entertaining. As one article responding to "Happy Feet" put it, "children have been caught in the cross-fire and have become collateral damage."