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purchasing gifts as an impersonal cop-out
Wednesday, October 6 2021
I was a little confused about the meetings I'd been invited to and had somehow thought the big company meeting for this morning had been pushed to next week. But I was wrong, and was puttering away doing the usual instead of actually being in the meeting. At some point two different colleagues (including Alex, my boss) messaged me (via Teams) to say that I was missing an important meeting. So I immediately joined the meeting (again via Teams), arriving 42 minutes late. I'd missed all the important stuff, and it was just down to talk about various uninteresting details. The important part I'd missed was that the head honcho Wil, who'd sold our company to a continent-spanning private equity conglomerate three years ago, would be retiring, probably to spend the rest of his life fishing. He'd recently come into a lot of money as a result of selling our company, so it seems the math was working for him. (I'd also gotten a slice of that pie, but for me it had only come to a little over $10,000.) The other bit of news was related to the first. The continent-spanning private equity firm would be replacing Wil with a woman named Theresa, who is currently CEO of a sister company in Canada. And Theresa would be arriving locally at some point in late October.
The original plans for this weekend were for Gretchen and me to fly to Fayetteville, Arkansas to attend our niece's bat mitzvah, which had already been delayed more than a year by the global pandemic. But then we realized it would fall on Columbus Day weekend (normally a three-day weekend for me), which would be a major loss of available time to work at the cabin. There's also the issue of Powerful being in the hospital with a failing heart, a situation so grave that even Gretchen going to the bat mitzvah was in question. In the end, we decided I would stay here this weekend and Gretchen would go by herself to Arkansas. I would be sending my niece a bat mitzvah gift of course, as I had for her brother's bar mitzvah back in 2017. That time I'd made one of my signature copper-pipe menorahs, which seemed fitting for an up-and-coming super-Jew on the day he became a man.
As you've noticed, it's normal for me to craft art objects when I need to give people gifts. This practice dates to when I was poor and had much more time than money. But those days have been over for a long time. These days, it makes more sense to go buy something. I wasn't completely joking when I floated the idea of possibly buying my niece a stupid iWatch.
But old habits die hard, and I've come to view purchasing gifts as an impersonal cop-out. My niece seems more into art and contemporary (that is, non-tribal) culture than her brother, so I thought I'd paint her a painting. When in doubt. I always paint pictures of pets, so in this case it meant a painting of her two guinea pigs using photos sent by my sister-in-law. The painting felt a little like a failure from the start, though by the end of the day it looked like a landscape of purple-pink mountains beset by giant burrowing guinea pigs. The "landscape" was actually a rumpled blanket. That really wasn't enough for the composition, so I included a detail from one of the photos that resembled a coronavirus, and I made it look even more like a coronavirus. We might as well embrace the odd times we're living (and celebrating bat mitzvahs) in. Still, I didn't much like the painting, and turned it over to Gretchen without ever getting a photograph of it. She, tellingly, never said anything about it one way or the other.
I would like to end this entry with a point or two about the generator at the cabin.
[REDACTED]
It turns out that if we could make the generator completely silent, we wouldn't want to run it all the time. As some research I did today revealed, it costs nearly $2/hr in fuel to operate. Indeed, it's probably cheaper to charge our Chevy Bolt at the Walmart in Albany than to burn natural gas to run a generator to charge it at the cabin. Hopefully the solar panels will give us enough electricity even in the winter time to operate basic equipment without the need for a generator, though I might have to implement some additional hacks, such as interim batteries (until we get the big one from our solar installer) and an Arduino-based scheduler that can turn on the generator occasionally to recharge it.
While I didn't get a picture of the painting, Gretchen got one the next day at the bat mitzvah. Her you can see our niece with the painting.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?211006 feedback
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