Gift Ideas

My most common advice to people looking to give me a gift is to refrain from doing so. The most common response I get is disbelief. Sure, I can say I don’t want a gift, or would rather not receive a gift, but I couldn’t possibly mean it. But the truth is, I am quite sincere. I guess it has to do with a couple of character traits that I have. To me, for a gift to have value, it must serve some purpose that the recipient—me—wants to have served. And that’s the trouble. Most gifts are thoughtful, or pretty. Sometimes they’re funny. But often it’s hard for me to find a real use for them. Those kinds of gifts end up cluttering my living space without being useful and sooner or later have to make way for additional such gifts and be thrown away. That just doesn’t feel good, and so I’ve come to appreciate receiving a short and heartfelt phone call, a hand-written card, or a plain simple e-mail as a way of connecting far more than receiving gifts.

Nevertheless, there are those of you, who still wish to send me gifts. To you, I devote the remainder of this entry. If you really can’t be dissuaded, please do me the honor of carefully considering your choice of gift.

General Suggestions

So that you can get a sense of the type of things I might tend to enjoy (or not enjoy), I am including a couple very general suggestions. You might consider them as a statement of values. But be sure to read my remark under Specific Suggestions as well.

  • Things that I can eat or enjoy while using up some other way are often good alternatives, as they won’t need to make way for new stuff later on.

  • I like natural materials like wood, glass, ceramic, metals, stone, cotton, etc.

  • I dislike synthesized materials like plastic, laquer, nylon, etc.

  • I like foods and beverages that are filled with natural ingredients (including sugar if it’s meant as a desert).

  • I dislike foods and beverages that contain artifical ingredients, especially artifical coloring or flavoring.

  • I prefer plain and simple things over more expensive and fancy things.

Specific Suggestions

I think I should remind you—or perhaps warn you—that I am very specific about what I find useful. For example, let’s say I could use a sander. I would want a very specific sander that is in a specific power range, is compatible with a specific type of sanding paper, is either battery powered or has a power cord, and very possibly other factors that you couldn’t possibly know about. If you were to go out and buy me the best sander you could find, it may be the most powerful, or the most convenient, or the most dependable, or even all three. But if the biggest and the best is not what I want to use, it won’t be very useful to me. That is the primary reason it is always safer to refrain from sending me a gift.

But from time to time, I will list some items here that I would enjoy receiving. Those items must be precisely those, and no upgrades (links included when feasible)! Nana and Mama might remember the kindle I asked for Christmas years ago. I wanted the pocket sized black and white kindle without touch and including advertising. Nana wanted to give me an upgrade. A big letter-size kindle, the kindle fire (color), or the kindle touch, whichever I wanted. I had reasons for not wanting those “better” kindles that were very important to me: I wanted to be able to take it with me everywhere (pocket sized), I wanted it to have an e-ink screen so that I could read it using ambient light like a book (the kindle fire has a backlit lcd screen), I wanted the extremely low power consumption possible with an e-ink screen (which also speaks against the kindle fire), I wanted it to be as slim as possible (the kindle touch is 1mm thicker), and I didn’t want to have fingerprints on the screen (which also speaks against the kindle touch). So I was very happy when I did in fact receive the plain and simple kindle ordinary.

With that out of the way, here are some specific items I would enjoy:

Some items that are only (reasonably) attainable in the US: