The Season of Giving is already weighing down on me something fierce. I hadn’t even started really thinking about Christmas gifts before the websites started giving me more deadlines I had to meet to guarantee shipping by December 23rd. Apparently I’m already way behind. So I went out tonight to do a first pass, hoping that the perfect gifts for everybody would jump out at me. It took a little over two hours and I didn’t get anything but discouraged.

People have told me that I’m hard to shop for, because although I’m not quiet about stuff I think is cool, I’ve usually already bought it for myself. All right, I’ll give you that, but look at it from my perspective. Being a shallow consumerist whore makes it really difficult to buy stuff for other people. The stores are filled with stuff that I want to get; they stand out. And nobody bothers meeting me halfway — when I’m going on about some DVD or the Apple store or whatever, they just nod and wait for an opportunity to change the subject, never doing what conversation dictates and interrupting me to talk about what they want.

It’s even worse now that I don’t really talk to people anymore, but just make long blog entries and then read occasional comments in response. Nobody bothers to say, “Yes, that’s a fascinating point you make about Wikipedia and online news aggregation sources, but have I mentioned how my favorite movie blank was just released on DVD?” Or “Another gripping and insightful commentary on ‘Alias!’ It reminds me of how much I want to read Some New Book Title.” Or even better, “That was a captivating example of navel-gazing self-obsessive introspection. In response, here is a step-by-step list of how to buy gifts for women that don’t involve Borders or Best Buy.”

So the Season for Giving is now also the Season for Wanting. Use the comments section to drop hints of varying degrees of subtlety about what you’d like me to buy you (or make for you, but you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment if you go that route, I’ll warn you now) for Christmas. (Or Hannukah, if you’re one of my Heeb friends, assuming I haven’t already missed that.) (Or, for that matter, whatever weird-ass thing the rest of you celebrate in December that makes Decent God-Fearing People such as myself have to resort to “Happy Holidays” while you kill Christmas.)

I have to warn you that I still don’t have a 100% accurate picture of who reads this blog, and I can’t guarantee that a comment will get you a gift. But you can’t win if you don’t play. Sample comments could be, “Your post about the new Mustang reminded me of this new set of stainless steel knitting needles that are really awesome,” or “I agree with you about ‘Arrested Development’ and would like to watch volumes 1 and 2 on DVD.” Amazon links are welcome.

It could be said that this just ruins the whole spirit of the thing completely, but think of it as your gift to me. People are always, okay frequently, giving me the perfect thing that I never would’ve thought to get myself and it turns out to be a very nice and thoughtful gift. And I don’t like to be reminded that that’s a talent I lack.

Q: What do you get when you cross a JAP with a nerd? A: Me, apparently.

My Roomba came today, and I swear to God it made sense for me to get one back when I ordered it. I was tired of seeing the bits of styrofoam and big dust tumbleweeds all over my hallway that’ve been there for the past few weeks, but I was out of vacuum bags. My dream-logic rationalization was this: I could just go to Target, find the bags, get them home and see they don’t fit, go back to Target and get the right ones (I did all this, last time I moved), vacuum everything up, and then go back to being too lazy to vacuum for another eight months or the next time I had to move.

Or, I could make an investment in a fairly expensive robot vacuum, which costs more now but would be more likely to get used more often. Put it that way, and it’s a bargain! And I’m realizing that I’ve got to clean more often around here — I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that I’m way too hairy to only vacuum twice a year.

So I took the thing out of the box, and I swear it shuddered a little when it saw the floor. It was kind of like a Russian mail-order bride who’s resigned herself to making sacrifices in order to start a new life in America, but then she gets off the plane and sees her new husband is Michael Moore. After I charged it up and let it wander around a little, it got to the bathroom door and immediately turned around. I’m sure it was just because of the lip of the floor into the bathroom, but I wouldn’t have blamed it even still.

It managed to navigate around both rooms of my apartment and the hallway without much incident, although it did threaten to chew up my speaker cables (they warn you about that, and they need to get taped up anyway) and it got stuck under the couch and had to call for help so I could dislodge it.

When it was finished: well, the results weren’t all that great. There were still plenty of missed corners, and it left long strings of hair and lint on the edge of the rug. But to be fair, it was kind of like sending a coal-mine canary into Chernobyl. I put a new bag in the upright vacuum (now that I had already bought the Roomba, my brain switched out of have-to-buy-new-gadget mode and reminded me that I had one spare left from the last time I moved) and did a pass over the whole apartment. It was a lot easier knowing that it was the last time I’d ever have to do it.

The thing comes with a remote so you can drive it around yourself; I haven’t used it yet because I don’t have any batteries. So now all I need is a cat and a teddy bear. The only part that bugs me so far is that they had to make it “cute,” so it has a different beep for all its different cleaning modes, including a little “uh-oh” beep when it gets stuck. It sounds too much like those little Simon games and programmable robots from the 80s.

I’m not going to lie; now I want a Scooba too, but that’s not going to happen. They’re twice as expensive, I just don’t have the floor to warrant one, and besides, two cleaning robots would be getting into OCD clean-freak territory. I ended up washing the kitchen & bathroom floors “by hand” tonight, and I just locked the Roomba in the bathroom to sweep up the leftovers. It’s in there, banging against the walls and the door like William Hurt in Altered States.

I’m sure it won’t be long before it starts to put the pieces together. “I serve Human. I clean floors. Human is dirty. Human makes floor dirty. Must eliminate Human.” But if it gets all uppity, it’s really not fast at all and I can just out-run it into the living room. It’ll get lodged under the couch and then I can just point and laugh while it beeps for help.

I think I’m going to call it “Lupe,” because “she no Dust Buster.”