Dear Neil,
My dad is a doctor. As a kid, I always said I didn't want to be a doctor. I didn't like the prospect of dealing with blood and guts on a regular basis. I think now, I just didn't like the prospect of having to fix people all the time. I'm no one to fix broken people.

The day after Christmas at a bookstore, I was hitting on a clerk punk girl. My brother was trying to return a book that my sister gave him for Christmas. The book was ripped on the corner. I was just along to get out of the house. While he looked for a replacement or something, I tried to shoot the breeze. Her fingernails had the outlines from black polish that had worn off. My mom seems to have a theory that black fingernail polish equals bad human being. I made some joke about being a productive member of society working and all. I said the only other thing she could do was maybe to own a yacht. I was wearing Army pants, a blue jacket from the '70s (which my mom says is too small), and a felt cowboy-esque hat. Later in the mall, some stranger said something about me being a cowboy. I demurred, "Yee haw." My brother came back and filled out the return forms wrong. I told him to start over. He said no one would care. I asked the girl about it and my brother accused me of over reacting. No idiot, I was using the excuse to talk to the girl. After I said, "Yee haw," he said, "You like attention." Indeed so. It's one half of love. The other half is hugs.

Way back before Christmas, when I just got home from school, I went with my brother to some church related function that was being held in someone's house. Now these people were rich. Though if asked, they'd probably say, "Upper-middle class." I hate that. My parents are rich, dammit. That's why you become a doctor. So you can be rich. At the house, I felt so out of place. A phrase popped into my head, "A Hobo in a GAP commercial." I was wearing my dead grandfather's old plaid windbreaker. That thing is warm. If I do become a bum, that is what I shall wear as I sleep out in the cold. These people, they talked about cotillions and satellite television and all sorts of things. And here, I was proud of my ten dollar typewriter. It's like I died and went to Abercrombie & Fitch, and not in the good Ernest Hemingway sense either.

For a while now, I've liked my funky mittens. That's even what the people at school told me to call them, my funky mittens. They are wool, green mittens with two white stripes at the wrist. The basically are designed for a sixth grader. So I've been pretty diligently wearing these things, whenever I go outside in the cold. Getting ready to drive over to my grandparents house, a couple days after Christmas, my dad told me not to wear the mittens. He said he knew they were supposed to be dorky and thus cool, but they were driving him crazy. He said they didn't endear me with him. So I wore some gloves instead, but I was pretty hurt. I mean, these are my funky fucking mittens. I love my damn mittens.

Back to a few days after I got home from school. My brother and I went to a news shop downtown. I was looking for the January "Wired Magazine" about design. But it hadn't come in. So I bought "Adbusters" instead. In case you aren't familiar with "Adbusters", it is a hippie, anti-WTO, anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism, anti-America™ kind of magazine. And I read it some at home. They talk about how 1.5 billion people are over-nourished and mysteriously 1.5 billion people are under-nourished. About how you buy stuff, but it never fills the void that it promises to fill. About how you sort of need to be Zen and accept that things are impermanent, and on and on. My brother looks through it and says, "They hate America, don't they?"

So on Christmas day, me and my brother were given little Palm Pilot computer organizer things. And they're pretty fun to play with and all, but I'm still not sure how practical they are. I've been fine, just relying on memory and paper up to this point. At least now, I have something on which to write (albeit slowly) no matter where I am. So the day after Christmas, my mom gave us all two hundred dollars and set us loose in a mall. I didn't end up spending any money until we went to Best Buy, where I got a few CDs I was meaning to get anyway. The Apples in Stereo, Common, Ian Pooley, all kinds of good stuff. Anyhow, back at the mall, my brother managed to blow his wad at the Banana Republic. So while he tried out stuff, I just kind of sat back and tapped stuff into my Palm Pilot:

"The Art of Pastiche"
life tumbles down trails

grabbing third rails
shock art
and pop goes culture
time delay
live by satellite
the fluid id of tele-moral existence
so much for culture
thank the Sex Pistols
if you see them

and

"Great American Novel : Chapter 1"
It was the boringest of times; it was the boringest of times. The Great American Dream was, of course, a boring life. That was also the American nightmare. A life free of drama was a goal as worthy as solving world hunger…

and

In post-modern society, there are two main avenues of sale: identification and frenzy.

What I meant about the avenues of sale is that nowadays, you don't advertise things at all. You advertise everything. You make people go out and buy as much as they can. That's the frenzy part. In order to make them buy your particular product, you make people identify with your product. You think, "I like the GAP, they make the kind of clothes that I like." But the thing is, they are kind of clothes you like, because GAP has told you to like that kind of clothes. People think about what they like and don't realize they are being programmed into liking it. "People similar to me like this. Therefore I like this too." That's identification.

The trouble is, I'm not much of a target market. I like old, hand-me-down things. I cannot imagine myself as the owner of a new automobile. As close as I can come is maybe a PT Cruiser or something. I'd still prefer a '74 Nova or an '87 Cabrio. My family loves their shiny, new stuff and I do too, sort of. But I'm just not in the same league. If I was a doctor, all I could do would be put money into a mutual fund. Any other expenditure would make me feel guilty. I felt guilty buying a $10 typewriter because, "Am I really going to use it that much?" Hence my Christmas time quandaries.

I hope that your celebration of the observed anniversary of the Incarnation went better than mine. Have a fun 21st century.