Gratitude, and the Social Graces

I was going to talk about molded-on tack and the Quarter Horse Gelding today, but since another matter came up in comments of my semi-annual "poor-pitiful-me" post, I will address that instead, before it becomes something it isn’t.

Yes, by some very odd circumstances, I did end up with two Diamond Jubilees. A very dear friend offered to get me one from one of her local stores, and I accepted. There was a gap in our communications over the matter, and for a period of a few days I assumed that something had gone awry with the deal.

In that brief interregnum, another dear person offered to get me a Diamond Jubilee, and fearing the first had been lost, I also accepted her offer. As you may know, my personal life experiences have taught me that back-up plans are a very, very good thing. I didn’t want to turn down the second offer, because I felt if I did, that would guarantee the first deal would collapse as well.

(That’s just how my life seems to work. That’s also how I ended up in the financial situation I’m in right now, but that’s not something I'm going to discuss here.)

The second Jubilee will be going to another good friend and customer who had also experienced a great deal of difficulty in acquiring a Diamond Jubilee. Part of my motivation for looking for a Diamond Jubilee was to find him one, too: on more than one occasion, his generous purchases have gotten me through some tough times. I wanted to find him one as an expression of gratitude on my part for being such a great customer.

As for gratitude, I must confess that I am very, very bad at the social graces of giving and receiving it. Wherever the blame lies - in nature, or nurture - it’s irrelevant. I acknowledge it as a personal failing, and I’ve spent a great deal of time in trying to overcome it. If I have failed to acknowledge my gratitude to any one of you, please know that no personal slights were intended. I am grateful - very grateful - for everything the hobby has given me. I just have a very hard time saying so, sometimes.

I had some reservations about making the Liminality post, but in the end I decided to click "Post" because I knew that some of my fellow hobbyists could sympathize with my plight. The hobby, as an entity itself, is not real good at acknowledging or validating the contributions of its members, except (in so many cases) after they’re quite literally gone.

And should be it for the mopey-dopeyness, until my annual "they rejected my BreyerFest Volunteer Application, again," post in late May.

Liminality

One of my favorite holiday films is the 1947 classic The Bishop’s Wife, starring David Niven, Loretta Young, and Cary Grant. It doesn’t get the same amount of airplay as A Christmas Story, but it always turns up on the TV at least once in the season, and this year it was on Christmas Eve on TCM.

Cary Grant’s character Dudley, an angel, has been sent to provide guidance to a bishop. The bishop (David Niven) more or less dismisses him as a meddler, so Dudley occupies himself with taking care of the needs of the bishop’s wife (Loretta Young,) who is being neglected because of the bishop’s obsession with building a cathedral. In the process, Dudley begins to fall in love with her. In one beautiful sequence, Dudley - whose true nature has not been revealed to anyone but the bishop - finally confesses his love to her, in the most roundabout fashion possible:

I'm tired of being a wanderer. I'm tired of an existence where one is neither hot nor cold, hungry nor full.

I can sympathize - not in being a semi-divine creature capable of working miracles, but of feeling trapped in a strange, liminal state. It’s sort of how I feel about my rather singular status in the hobby: in it, but not of it. Neither well known, nor unknown. Influential, but rarely acknowledged.

Most of the staff at Reeves knows me, or knows of me. But on the flip side, I still get hobbyists asking me for references, or questioning my authority on topics I sometimes, quite literally, wrote the book on years ago. (Ever have a conversation with someone, and realize they’re talking about you in the third person? The first time it happens, it’s funny. The third through seventeenth time, it isn’t.)

Part of it stems from some personal issues: I’ve been on tenuous financial grounds for some time now (partly by choice, partly not) and because of this, I’ve been unable to pursue projects that would have made me a more "visible" personage in the hobby.

The structure of the hobby is also to blame. I don’t quite understand the hobby’s tendency toward rigid hierarchies: a small handful of hobbyists are designated as BNPs within their respective categories, with little room for anyone else in the Treehouse of Awesome.

(You see it not just in what I do, but in every aspect of the hobby. It’s particularly bad in the realm of customizing: you have a tiny handful of designated "superstars," but everyone else? You’re lucky to get more than body price for the pieces you labor over.)


The arrival of my Diamond Jubilee - on Christmas Eve, naturally - really drove the point home. I had briefly considered entering the Diamond Dreams Contest, but aside from the logistical issues, I’m not sure that I could. My stories and my "voice" are known quantities, familiar (if not immediately recognizable) and therefore dismissable.

Ironically, the more anonymous prize model competitions of BreyerFest are still somewhat open to me, and I’ve had a little success there. But, like Dudley, I tire of being stuck in this strange state of being, especially as the New Year approaches.

More Glosses. Whatever.

All this whining about the Winter Othellos is starting to turn me off Glosses. Reeves should have made the Winter a Gambler’s Choice: if the off-the-shelf models in the series were available in Matte and Gloss from the very beginning, the Winters should have been too.

Then the whining would have been confined to individual tales of personal bad luck, instead of devolving into tedious arguments about the incompetence of Reeves’ marketing strategies. There’s much to be criticized there, no doubt, but the level of discourse rarely rises above "I didn’t get exactly what I wanted" = BAD.

I fall into that trap sometimes, myself: it wouldn’t take much effort on my part to construct a fairly righteous rant about my inability to secure a reasonably priced Diamond Jubilee, and the crazy way they seem to have distributed them. (No rhyme or reason, there.)

Speaking of crazy distribution patterns, I have no idea how the whole Gloss Valentine & Heartbreaker thing is going to pan out, either. Is this just a one-time thing, or all year/run long? Totally random, or a true one to five ratio?

It’d be nice if they did stick to the "one gloss for every five matte" ratio. That’d mean 1000 Gloss sets for every 5000 Mattes produced. If we peg the sales at a conservative 18,000 pieces, that’d be 3000 gloss sets out in the wild - more than enough to satisfy demand.

(Yes, really.)

It’s still too early to tell what Reeves is doing at this point. Trotting over to your favorite online dealer and placing an order for a Gloss one seems a little presumptuous to me.

It’s clear that they’re tinkering with different distribution patterns. I’m all for that: the more equitable or random the system, the better. The way it is now, some hobby-specific retailers have sort of gamed the system, and taken the "hunt" out of the treasure hunts.

I like the possibility that any given store might contain some rare or random treasure, even if it means that I might not get everything I want - like a Diamond Jubilee. The trick for Reeves is going to be in finally finding just the right plan - and hoping they won’t have ticked us all off by the time they do.

I do feel kind of sorry for the dealers: this should be the time of the year when everyone starts to get excited about the next year’s releases, tour stops, and the first real news about BreyerFest. Instead, everyone's having another meltdown about another glossy that may or may not be all that rare. And taking it out on them.

If I get lucky, I get lucky. I don’t have the time or the money to chase every shiny object waved in front of my face.