Better to receive

Alex Dezen keeps a blog that's vastly superior to mine. His band is also better than mine, mainly because I have much more fun naming my band with nonsensical word combinations - Vintage Twix and Equine Ambulance were early front runners - than I ever would writing songs or performing. And because his band actually exists.

After spending an evening with an old friend, he made the following observation:

She tried to refuse my money but I insisted. That's what we do sometimes. We insist on giving our things away to other people because we can't give them the world.

Two years ago, my grandmother suggested that, in lieu of the rampant, overindulgent gift giving we generally engage in for Christmas, we all draw names and only buy one or two things for our assigned recipient. This went over slightly less well than the time we tried to establish family Scrabble night. My grandfather spent 30 minutes arguing that "thusly" was so a word, and he didn't care what the goddamn dictionary said since he speaks goddamn English just fine. We hid the wine in the vacuum box and put a temporary ban on board games.

It's worth pointing out that I don't have a particularly large family - in fact, my genus is likely to be extinct in roughly one generation. It's not as though there's an abundance of small children that we must placate with large quantities of disposable plastic. We may not be breeders, but we're all givers. Christmas in particular is our license to run wild like fat kids at McDonald's. We gorge on shopping, demanding to know each other's wish lists. The problem, though, with a family of givers is that none of us is especially good with receiving. "You bought too much!" someone always mutters, shifting awkwardly beside their mountain of packages. Every year we sit around the living room and stare uncomfortably at each other, unwilling to make the first move.

"Open your gifts, Mom, " I urge.

"I just want to watch you," she says.

Maybe the idea was to save as us all some money, but it was more like being told that we weren't allowed to eat for a week. Unacceptable. In the end, there was an ugly argument between my grandmother and my mom, Christmas was cancelled, and I nevertheless bought more gifts for everyone than I was fiscally able, as I always do. We've all since resumed our wallet-crippling spending for the holidays, and my mother clucked disapprovingly over the TiVo I bought her.

Being a giver is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it's a self-sustaining industry. It needs no willing audience, unlike attention-whoring. It becomes a code of sorts in how we deal with the people we care about the most. We get the next round of drinks to say we know you'd have our back if someone was talking shit. We loan you $5 for a cab to say thanks for listening to our sad story over dinner. We buy your lunch because it seems more socially palatable than actually saying "I'm glad we're friends." Sometimes that upsets people. It's easier to pick them up a coffee since you're going out anyway. No, it's cool, whatever.

Every year that I've been at my current job, I've bought a gift for everyone in my office before we all disperse for the holidays. I do it because I enjoy it, but also because I would feel remiss in not doing it. These people are, for better or worse, very much an extension of my family. And like my family, the $10-limit Secret Santa feels insufficient. "People like you just make everyone else feel bad," Leslie told me this past year. She had received a rather generic bath set from a secretary in her office that she didn't know very well.

You can talk yourself into a certain noble victimhood, if so inclined. But the truth of it is, being a giver is as much a pathology as being anything else. We feel like we're getting away with something. Not because we expect returns - we'd prefer there weren't any, actually - but because we're scratching an itch, secretly feeding our own need. We're the one drinking Wild Turkey out of a Pepsi can at the family picnic - who's it going to hurt? No one needs to know. But in our heart of hearts, it feels selfish, which is ultimately at odds with our very nature. Walking paradoxes, all of us.

Sometimes we come face to face with the fact that what we're offering isn't so tangible after all. There's really no limit to what we can give away, contrary to how it might seem. We always find more. There is no bottom, and there is definitely a point where we start to wish for one, if only to save ourselves.

"I wish I wasn't this way," I complained recently, realizing that I had been yet again throwing good money after bad - among other things, like time and patience - toward something that was a essentially a black hole. "The alternative doesn't hurt as much."

"It hurts differently" was the reply.