In general, I'm a terrible gift-giver and the Christmas season is always a little embarrassing for me. I can rarely think of a gift I'd like to give, and I'd much sooner give nothing than resort to a gift card or sommat. I'd rather be thought a miser than uninspired or generic.

Once in a while, however, I do find something that I want to share with another person. An Awesome Book was such an item, and I purchased one for each of my nephews. I also enjoyed the author's short description of his book.

Something that brings me to despair very quickly is those moments where I feel very alone in my convictions. It's fitting that I should feel this way after the events detailed in my previous post, but depending on which corner of the internet that I lurk in, the situation can feel very hopeless. Between the hum-drum catastrophes of every-day news and the endlessly pessimistic and self-righteous commentary that follows, it's hard not to feel helpless and unimportant. A popular decision is to embrace that feeling, too, that one person truly can't make a difference in light of such ridiculous circumstances. This resignation, of course, is a verbose excuse for laziness.

This is the attitude I was attempting to address in scones. It's a common scene to see people complain about the status quo without recognizing their part in creating it or contributing towards the solution to the problem. If this weren't already bad enough in real life, these tendencies are amplified by a factor of ten on the internet. I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise when we value independence as highly as we do. If we are as independent as we believe we are, then we cannot influence each other as much as would be necessary to drive the change we wish to see. It's a good thing, then, that we are wrong.