Now that the dust has finally settled on my birthday and the holidays and I've gotten around to visiting both my parents and stuff (actually, today's my mom's birthday, happy birthday mom!), a recap of all the cool shit I got for Xmas and my birthday:
My brother Zac gets the spirit award for the totally unexpected Game Cube. I mean, even as a platform that's been out for a while and marked down a few times, that's pretty damn generous. And I'm not really much of a gamer at all, but MarioKart, which was packaged with it, is one of the maybe half-dozen video games ever that I flat out love. Plus he threw in a couple old anthologes, including one of all the classic Megaman games, which is another one that I can play for hours. And my girlfriend J.G. got me one of those little joysticks you can plug into the TV that has the game right in it, for Ms. Pac-Man, which is another favorite (I spent about an hour a day last summer playing Ms. P-M on Game Boy until my thumbs hurt, it's so nice to have a joystick). What I really like about it, though, is that there are 3 or 4 other Namco games on it. The Pole Position on it totally sucks and is practically unplayable, but I've become obsessed with this weird game called Mappy. I must've played it for hours last night while avoiding studying for my final exam (I just finished taking 3-week winter minimester course, those things are intense). I can finally kill time with stuff other than the internet!
I also got some DVDs, none of which I've watched yet: the Star Wars trilogy (not a huge fan but I found the recent TV specials about it entertaining enough that I'm looking forward to the bonus disc more than anything else), Planes, Trains and Automobiles (!), Dodgeball (haven't seen it yet), and the first season of Boy Meets World (I'm really excited about that one...best show ever, seriously). We did a 'secret santa' thing at one of my workplaces, and my manager who got my name gave me that White Stripes live DVD, which was kind of lame, because I work late shifts with that guy and talk music with him all the time, and have never had a kind word for the White Stripes. I mean, there's tons of classic rock stuff that he'd be more familiar with that I'm down with, but he got me a generic "what the kids are listening to" thing. I wouldn't badmouth his gift if not for the fact that he was totally rude and ungrateful about what someone else gave him, so I felt no guilt about returning it for store credit, although I felt a little better about it when he said it was ok if I wanted to take it back, long after I actually had.
Another big surprise was J.G. and her family giving me a George Foreman grill. I've been coveting those things forever. I cook all the time but almost never meat. I can finally make burgers! And my mom gave me a Tripoley board, which is something else I've been wanting for a while. Card games are very big in my family, especially around the holidays, and I find Tripoley about a hundred times as fun and engaging as any plain ol' poker game.
Also, got a lot of the requisite sweaters and socks. It probably holds true for most people (males?) my age that 90% of my wardrobe is acquired during the holidays. Oh, and my dad gave me a leather jacket, which I was really skeptical about because I've never been a leather jacket guy, but I really like the cut of it, it's pretty much perfect: not too short like those bad waistlength ones, and not too long like a trenchcoat or anything. I probably still don't look right in it, though, I don't dress cool enough (at least as far as the definition of cool that involved leather jackets), last year was the first time I've owned a pair of jeans in probably about 10 years. I'm probably forgetting a lot of other coool shit I got but that's only because I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to enjoy most of it. I tried to give generously and thoughtfully, and in some cases I thought I did a pretty good job, but I was pretty hindered by the fact that I didn't have enough money to do proper Christmas shopping until I got paid on December 22nd, and did probably 50% of my gift shopping in the space of an hour (thank you, Best Buy).
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on Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 1:00 PM.
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j. : 8:28 AM