The hunt for the best gift.

In my opinion, the best gifts are "brilliantly useless". When you first take them out of the box, they seem pretty useless. They might waste your time, take up space, or go in the gift closet. They bear no resemblance to anything the recipient had on his/her wish list or registry. Their true value becomes apparent over time (which is why you should never, ever, clear out the gift closet). When they become valuable, they become really valuable. Not necessarily as valuable as, say, a bottle of water would be to you in the middle of the desert, but certainly valuable.

The best example of this I've received is probably a set of coasters. When I received them, I didn't have my own place, and we were inclined to set drinks directly on the furniture anyway. Now that I have my own place, they've become incredibly useful. They even match the decor, which is amazing, because I don't really have much of a decor, but they match what little there is. They get used quite often (although by the end of the evening we usually set the drinks directly on the furniture anyway; it's all in the company you keep).

I'm not sure what would be the best example of a brilliantly useless gift I've given. Possibly "The Field Guide to Stains", because I imagine it probably used up a significant amount of the recipient's time when first received (just flipping through the thing). As the years passed, it probably took up a significant amount of shelf space (it's rather thick). And eventually it because useful for obvious reasons.

For the next gift I give, I'm determined to make it as brilliantly useless as possible. I have already scrapped the first two ideas. The first because the technology is still rather new, and there's a good chance the item will become just useless in a short amount of time. The second I've almost scrapped, but not quite, because I haven't decided just how briliantly useless it will be. On the one hand, the recipient could be so incredibly well-organized and endowed with the right capacity that the item will never, ever achieve its full brilliantly useless potential. On the other hand, it could turn out to be as brilliantly useless as I think it could.

Life's a gamble, isn't it?