In Which I Have Excellent Timing

January is almost over, so naturally I think I'll write about stuff that happened almost a month ago! Guys, writing is difficult, I swear. Well, it's not so much the actual act of writing so much as it is coming up with things to write about, and then finding the motivation to do so. Thus my nigh yearly post of "Bla bla bla I suck at self motivation bla bla bla I'll write more" AND THEN I DON'T. Fool you once internet, shame on you, fool you twice internet, shame on me (yesIknowthat'swrongshutup). Fool you three times and I'm devoured by the Nidhogg (which is a neat game by the way), or something like that. I'm bad at this, sue me (please don't I have no money oh god).

Anyway! My holidays went well, and save for a (in hindsight) rather silly, drunken walk through the back roads of Westford at 3AM it was relatively uneventful. As in really uneventful. After about the first or second week of January I was bored stiff, as most of my friends were either already back at school or back at work. As (I think?) I mentioned previously, I'm back at UML, and classes for this semester only started a week ago. I did jack shit between those two points, and hated it. But! I have something a bit more interesting to write about today, and that was the Secret Santa I did with strangers over the internet.

I don't know if you are aware, but there are quite a few "sites" on the so called "web," and one of my favorites is Reddit. Every year Reddit is host to a gift exchange of record-breaking proportions, with over 120,000 people participating in this year's exchange, and I decided to be one of them. The matching process itself wasn't that interesting; after signing up, you put as much or as little information as you want your internet gifting stranger to know, and then wait for matching day to get your internet stranger's info. Then you have to make sure you have your gift shipped by a certain date at the very latest, and eventually everyone gets their gift. Easy, right?

Having seen a few of the gifts people had done in years past, I had high expectations for what I would do. I really wanted my gift to be something interesting and creative, so I hoped to find something useful in the information I was given about my giftee. Unfortunately for me, between my high hopes and the relatively plain information given I wasn't really able to come up with much. It wasn't really the guy's fault, he probably would have been fine with just about anything. But after seeing stuff like a multiple stuffed animal dissection in order to find the real present, it was hard to not want to do something awesome. Ultimately I ended up floundering and tried to come up with something cool, only to mess up one of my purchases, and had to just send the guy something off of Amazon. Hopefully I can do something better next year.

One of the most striking things about the whole exchange was how surreal it felt at parts. I know we're in an age of information and buzzwords like "social media" and "globalization," but it's hard not to feel a little weirded out when I'm looking at some random person's house in Texas on Google Streetview, trying to glean as much information as possible from what I was given, all in the hopes of coming up with a cool gift for the stranger that lives in that house. It was kind of odd. I'm not a very good internet sleuth (read:stalker) though, as that was about as far as I got. I'm sure others did the same thing, and I'm sure others were able to find much more about their matches. I very quickly made sure to update my privacy settings on the various sites I use after that.

I'll continue this story later, in another post, as apparently I've written quite a little bit, and this is only about half of my thoughts! Apparently when I actually do things, I have interesting things I can write about. Who knew?