1. The disadvantage of the Amazon wish-list is revealed to me today. I get my early birthday present from Slim. The box is quite compact and heavy. I can thus deduce which item I have been gifted from approximating the weight. Either that,
or she got me a rock. Still, cool. I'm sure it'll be one of the nicest birthday gifts from someone I've dated in recent memory. Certainly the heaviest.
2. (In a whimsical moment my freshman year in college, I persuaded my next-door neighbor to help me roll a 100-pound+ boulder from outside up the stairs for a centerpiece in my second-floor dorm-room. This aggrieved my roommate when he came home upset later that night and decided to kick it, not thinking that anyone would be so foolish as to put a real rock in the middle of a room. But this may have persuaded him to move out at the end of the semester, giving me the room to myself spring semester, so it all worked out.)
3. I had a crew of maids in today, and the condo looks so nice I want to sell it.
4. In a further sign of my imminent OCD, I color-coordinated my tie-rack and alphabetized my DVDs and Xbox game cases. I'm amazed I've gone four years without organizing my bookshelves. There are pockets of organization, but I'm about one bookcase short at the moment, resulting in a warehouse-aesthetic for book display. I may have inherited this packrat trait from my grandfather.
5. The
one request I received asked what PC games I play. My PC is a pathetic 333 MHz, so not much: I've played Civilization III a few times on my Mac, and various titles from
Jim Gindin on my PC over the last few years; graphically poor, but very well designed for gameplay. (I burst out laughing in surprise when my star linebacker was suspended for the 2017 season for violating the NFL's anti-tobacco policy.) On the Xbox, no surprises: Halo and Halo 2, Madden, and Grand Theft Auto had the most replay value. None of which I was very good at. I gave up at Halo 2 in the falling elevator level because I'm not coordinated enough to handle 360-degree combat in three dimensions at close range (and had probably blown through too much ammunition in previous levels as I kept running out), and got hung up on a racing mission in San Andreas that kept me from unlocking the second city.
6. I simply don't have the time to be a dedicated gamer. I coveted the mostly-sold-out Xbox 360, and I enjoy the idea of an impulsive quest to lots of different stores to find a rare commodity, and had been frugal enough lately that I could afford $500 of impulse purchases, but Sari persuaded me that all I'd be accomplishing is guaranteeing some poor kid who wants the 360 more than I will won't be able to get one for Christmas, whereas I would likely buy it and have it sit unused. This perceptive reasoning dissuaded me from my search.
If only there were some sort of mechanism by which consumers could easily communicate to sellers the strength of their relative preferences for scarce goods.
