For some unknown reason or another, my wife has decided that I like moose-related stuff. She bought me a stuffed Team Canada moose one year as a stocking stuffer, and I thought it was great.
As such, all moose-related stuff is great, and any knick-knacks or small toys she buys me are all moosey.
Funny enough, I do like meese. And I love the stuff she gets me. But before that stuffed moose, I had never expressed any moosentric interests.
does your MIL hang out here (the Dope)?
Owls. I belong to Mensa so everyone thinks I must therefore collect owls. Several of my Mensa friends suffer this same problem. Owls are okay. When I was a 'tween, I made three owl pin cushions, in different sizes, based on a drawing I made one afternoon. That was the extent of my owl interest.
Why? What’s the link between owls and Mensa? That owls are “wise”?
Yes.
Luckily, this hasn’t escalated to the level of gift-giving yet, but my father-in-law thinks I loooove trains. He always goes on and on about his travels by train, because he “knows how much * enjoy train travel.” While it is true that I think a healthy public transportation system is crucial to our nation, and while I have sometimes enjoyed the pace and ground-level view of train travel, I’m really not that into it. I think I mentioned once that I used to enjoy taking the Amtrak between college and home. Since that seemed to be a “safe” topic, one which we could discuss without showing our resentment of each other, I think he glommed on to the idea that we both share a passion for train travel. OK, fine. As long as he’s not trying to convince his daughter to dump me, I’ll just go with the conversation.
No…my wife shared the story with her, and she still hasn’t let it go.
I have no use for fashion (though I have an innate sense of it), I know about dressing in layers, and I have an incredible tolerance for cold weather. I have a “hoodie” that is warmer than it looks, which I wear on all but the coldest days.
People must think I have no heavy coat because I have no money, and they give them to me. I donate most of them to New York Cares, but enough already.
I don’t dislike the color pink–but I’m not as fond of it as I was as a smallish child. There are other colors which I like at least as much as I like pink. This message has not gotten to all my relatives.
I have a suspicion that the quilt my grandmother had made for me was the one with the big stupid hearts on it all in various shades of pink. Um, no thanks. Big stupid hearts are appropriate for little girls–or maybe lovesick teens. And I can see how you might think hearts were appropriate for a wedding quilt, but since I’m not getting married anytime soon, a wedding quilt would be depressing. (And since the quilt is so sickly pink, I would not be surprised if my hypothetical future husband would say “Look, I love you, and I know you love your grandmother, but I’m not sleeping under that”).
My mis-gift is frou-frou smelly bath products.
My skin is sensitive and very very dry, and prone to outbreaks of eczema. I don’t use bar soap or bubble bath or fancy smelly lotions, lest my skin turn into the sahara desert with oozing red cracks. You’d never know it from looking at my bathroom, though, because I always get a bumper crop of overly-scented fancy bath products each year.
My dad is probably guiltiest of this - somehow, he always ends up buying me a big assortment of smelly toiletries, despite the fact that he knows full well I spent my childhood covering myself with a variety of steroid-based ungents. The winner of this year’s selection of scented offenders is a soy-based candle that melts down into massage oil. It’s supposed to smell like “Tropical Paradise” or somesuch nonsense, but I think that’s because the marketing department determined that “Tahitian Whorehouse” didn’t score high with focus groups.
I smell a re-gift. Sigh.
Hideous, terrible clothes. The bf got them too. Fluorescent board shorts two sizes too big. He got a really ugly plaid shirt, and some too-small pants. I at least got a blue shirt that I can wear to work. Also, useless kitchen stuff. This year, we got a sushi set, since there’s nowhere within an hour to buy fish that I’d trust for sushi anyway, and a caramel apple machine.
I can’t say this has happened on any large scale. People can read me surprisingly well.
My dad, OTOH, has been known to do this. When I talked about wanting to study in Barcelona, he told me that my favorite basketball player, Magic Johnson, had caught AIDS there.
Problems:
The AIDS epidemic in Barcelona is more or less over.
Magic Johnson liked to put his penis in everything that moved and, probably, some things that didn’t.
I don’t actually like basketball.* :rolleyes:
Oh man, you are never going to live that down.
Actually, most of them seem to think you enjoy knife identification, getting drunk and having sex with sheilas.