day 10: prized possessions
September 12, 2008
mission:
- give away a prized possession
yesterday was my good good friend brianna’s 26th birthday. i’m not the best at coming up with fun gifts, although i wish i were. maybe i could be…but it’d require some special sort of brainpower from me that i’m not sure is always functioning :D i don’t like giving gift certificates and cliche gift items, though, so i always get stuck. beyond that – i’m sort of broke. but i wanted to be novel.
a broke, novel gift. ok. so i ended up not being that novel, but still :)
one thing i decided early on was that i want to give brianna one of my favorite pairs of earrings. giving away something i love was something i really wanted to challenge myself to do. in fall of 2007 i went to visit a friend in miami, and brought back these awesome hand woven and painted dried palm tree leaf earrings made by a woman from colombia. i bought like 6 pairs. i was so proud of my original purchase that basically no one else would have (especially on the west coast – the lady was vacationing with her boyfriend in MIA and was headed back for colombia the next day).
the earrings are also huge so they attract a lot of attention and comments. since getting them, i’ve had a more than a few friends threaten to sucker punch me so they could steal my earrings :D some offered to purchase them, but i still couldn’t part with them. very protective of my babies. i’m a bit of a compulsive earring fiend and collector. for brianna’s birthday, i finally decided to part with a pair and gift a beautiful yellow and blue one to her. yellow also looks awesome on bri :)
bri’s also been asking me, pretty much since i met her, for me to burn her some music (she likes my musical taste and wants to be put on, [brushes off shoulders]). it’s something i’ve even tried to do for myself but am too lazy to do. ask friends, they can attest to the same 2 cd’s in rotation in my car for a year+. it’s kinda sad. there was a miracle last night. i made myself comfy in my bed-desk (i’ve been kinda camping out there while my girl shak stays with me in the living room) and started burning cd’s, whilst eating chicken wings and cupcakes, of course. don’t worry, lappy stayed clean.
wrote a nice little note on my new papyrus stationary (more like a lengthy admission of how i lightweight stalked bri =P), tucked the earrings in the envelope, and put on a shiny gold seal.
and topped it all off with a vase of pretty yellow and orange lillies along with purple lilacs. i was there after floral hours so whole foods produce homie hooked it up with some extra foliage goodies and little decorative stones for the vase. yeeeeee.
it’s nice to detach yourself from the material and share a prized possession with those you love. love will only grow. also, giving any gift when you have less means can be very profound. my uncle once said to me something to the effect: ‘giving gifts when you have the means is nice. but giving when it hurts a little exemplifies the true beauty of a gift in the spirit of love.’
word life.
