Tagged: Legos

Martha Thomases: Shop ‘Till You Drop?

Black Friday is not my thing. It involves a bunch of stuff I don’t like: Getting out of bed when it’s dark out… crowds… pants.

But a lot of people enjoy it, despite my skepticisms, and there are even reasons that explain the brain chemistry of this pleasure. Far be it from me to deny anyone a dose of dopamine.

Or a present.

If you read the link, you’ll learn that a lot of the fun of Black Friday involves successfully scoring a good deal in a like-minded crowd. I suppose it’s part of our hunter/gatherer DNA. However, nowhere in the study does it say that Black Friday, or even a real bargain, guarantees that the shopper finds the right present for a loved one.

Now, some of my favorite presents have been glaringly bad. My husband once bought me an enormous yellow dress that hit me in the middle of my calf (and nowhere else) so that I looked like a yellow bag of take-out food, and he was so proud of himself for getting something that was (then) stylish that I wore it a bunch.

Still, very few of us set out to select an inappropriate gift. We want our friends and families to love our selections, to love us for knowing them so well,

Hence, books.

No one is insulted to get a book. No one curses in the middle of the night when they step on a kids’ book on the way to the bathroom. A book says you, the giver, think of the recipient as someone who is smart and curious.

In this day and age, we need books more than ever. Our society is more polarized than any other time I can recall, and we all have a tendency to listen only to ourselves and not consider other points of view. A good book, fiction or non-fiction, puts the reader into someone else’s head.

Look how little we know about history. I can sneer at people who don’t know the real story because I read a graphic novel written to educate children.

It’s possible that by the time the gift-giving holidays are upon us, we will have stopped talking about sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace. But until then, there is this. A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and I wanted to share it: “If you consistently maintain that women are a sort of shiny, bewildering object that is handed out to you when you amass sufficient money or power, one that may eventually be useful as a container for potential humans but otherwise does nothing but emit an irritating buzzing noise whenever its mouth falls open, you don’t have to worry that you will ever face consequences for mistreating one.”

That line is from Alexandra Petri, who was a new voice to me. And she’s hilarious.

If you have someone in your life who has a problem understanding that women are human, there are some very entertaining books that might change their minds while they laugh. I happen to like this one a lot. And if you or your friends have limited contact with people from other parts of the world (geographically or sociologically), there are books for that, too.

Have a great weekend, whether you go shopping or not. If you do, think about books as gifts. You can still buy chocolate, sweaters and television sets, but if you get Legos, remember to include slippers, too.

Marc Alan Fishman’s Toy Story

In front of me stands Kyle Rayner, Saint Walker, and Guy Gardner, each behind their impenetrable clamshell wall. Next to them, Alan Scott’s power battery. It doesn’t grant me the power of the Starheart, but when we lost power last week it provided enough ambient light to get me to the staircase. Beside that, a 6” Orion and a 10” Sandman.

To be honest, I sit here, in my man cave a veritable kid in a toy store. The entire Ultraforce sits to my right. Behind me, a cache of Nerf weaponry that would be illegal in ten out of ten office wars. And sitting over my TV, in front of my faux mantle, is my prized possession: the mini replica of Kyle Rayner’s power battery. How coveted is it? It’s out of box and totally played with.

It seemingly goes hand-in-hand with our shared brand of nerditry, does it not? This compulsion to collect. As a child, it started simply enough. He-Man begat the Transformers, the Transformers begat the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Turtles begat Exo-Squad and a deluge of Legos. When I reached junior high and began my love affair with comic books, soon the toys of my youth gave way to the collectables attained at the comic shop. They were, of course, the same damned toys. But it mattered not. For a toy in the hands of a comic book aficionado (carefully kept in the packaging that held it) became an investment. Or so the counter-jockeys told us.

What is it about our love affair with pulp and ink that leads us to waste our disposable income on trinkets, props, and replicas? Why do we need to surround ourselves with the relics of our favorite heroes and villains? When we were children – and we all still are in one way or another – action figures and their ilk were there to coax our imagination. Perhaps I’ve grown up too much, but the figures that stand on the chair rail in front of me offer no inspiration. They were purchases on the compulsion to own one example of each of the DC cosmic color spectrum. And when I nabbed that coveted Atrocitus and Larfleeze… did I feel like a more complete human being? Did some icon appear over my head declare “Achievement Unlocked: Poorer Nerd +5”? No. The figures were purchased, put on display, and left for dead.

I admit in between bouts of writers block, or a bad-art-making day I might be tempted to slice open every last one of their plastic prisons and pose them in epic battle. But that thought is stamped out at the siren’s song of Netflix, my DVR, or my Xbox as they pull me away like a cartoon cat lured by window-sill pie.

Some might stick to their guns and cite the collector’s market, eBay, and the like as reason to surround themselves in the mélange of rare molded plastic. But to what end? It’s rare to hear of a collector living a life of leisure through the simple resale of mint-in-box bric-a-brac. Is it because so few of us can really avoid the temptation to create lavish dioramas? I doubt it. If I were to feign a more realistic guess, it would be that the mass manufactured toys released to Wal-Mart alongside the chase figures sold at twice the cost to your local comic shop are only specifically special to a segment of people that already own them in the first place. A snake eating its own tail is never really full, kiddos.

It leads me back to beginning. Why do we buy these hollow treasures? Is it any better, say, then those who buy NASCAR models, commemorative plates, or sports memorabilia? Ahh, that’s the ticket! The golden calves we fill our tombs with are simply extensions of self. I am Marc Alan Fishman, and within that name there are many footnotes. Aside from a loving father, a dedicated husband, a comic book creator, a graphic designer, and Diet Coke consumer, there is also a collection of aforementioned action figures, Nerf guns, and more DVDs than one needs to own – particularly in this day and age of streaming media. These are the items of my id. These are the tactile representations of my singularly unique fandom. As a whole, these relics resolve who I am, if only to myself.

And when I leave this mortal coil, I have complete faith that those I leave behind will take my mountain of useless crap, and donate it to the nearest nerd that will take it. In a perfect world, some snot-nosed punk will use his lightsaber to unearth my Batman: Brave and the Bold Green Arrow (with unusable bow) and place him at odds with a Stealth Mode Iron Man missing most of his extra snap-on armor. Perhaps he’ll have a few fleeting moments of glee before he’s booting up the Playstation X-5000. Maybe later in his life, he’ll remember those toys and seek out a digital copy of The Longbow Hunters or Demon in a Bottle. And when he does, I can only hope he’s old enough to afford that boxing glove arrow replica prop set awaiting him on Amazon.