Christmas 300

Christmas
Christmas was good. I don’t know when it actually happened, but somewhere in the last few years the joy of Christmas morphed from one of getting to one of giving. This year that joy was so vivid it was almost tangible, like a blanket up in which you could wrap yourself to keep warm. I absolutely love my family, and I enjoy little more than trying to make them happy. In the Midwest, families are normally insulted when showered with gifts as it serves to both seem to objectify a life in which hard work and values should take precedence over material things and also serve as an insult to the recipient. The one exception is Christmas, and I always enjoy exploiting it, while still staying barely on the respectable side of protocol.

My girlfriend and I ended up giving each other not only watches, but Citizen Eco-Drive watches. It’s tough to handle the situation by showing the correct amount of surprise and appreciation when you know that in a few moments she’s going to open essentially the same thing.

Honestly, I suck at giving gifts. I have absolutely no sense of style or taste. The one exception to this general rule is gadgets. My habit of keeping up with the latest and greatest cool shit gives me the mone advantage of knowing what the most popular battery-using presents are at any given time, and I took full advantage of that talent this year.

We watched a movie on Christmas eve. Here we go.

300
Like a pop-country song, it pretty much sucked. Aside from the quasi-accurate historical account and the admittedly impressive special effects, both devices were used to present a movie focused more on the latter than former, with little attention paid to a well-developed plot or storyline. I fell asleep during the middle, which somewhat invalidates this review, but when I woke up I didn’t really feel like I missed anything. The movie went pretty much like this.

• Set the small background story.
• Prove that the Spartans were much bigger bad-asses than the rest of the Greeks.
• Have a bunch of Persian attackers attack the Spartans and get slaughtered.
• Repeat ad nauseam.
• Heroes die.

It was the first full-on nude sex scene that I watched with both my sisters, my girlfriend, my father and my sister’s fiance. Objections couldn’t really be raised because my youngest sister was the only one who had already seen the movie. I think it may have been at that point I decided to go to sleep.