Wild is a nice way of saying crushing my soul. I've worked at companies that give you 10 days, that they choose, for your first five years. I have no clue why we do this to ourselves other than the person in charge is not bound by it, and one day we all hope to be in charge.
Agreed, it just comes off as really odd. They don't want random stuff, but now they all of a sudden have two random wallets that they are grateful to have. While they "luckily" have a blog where they can thank the random stranger they sent their old leather to, who happened to take their time to handcraft them new objects out of it. It just seems too coincidental, and I don't believe that would ever happen to someone without advertising potential.
Nick Offerman has a great quote about this, it boils down to the guy deserves money for something he created and others could have, but were too cheap to make and require. It's not the patent holders fault that they can make money from caring about people's safety.
I agree with you on not liking the idea of changing your time sinks. I ran into a similar problem as your's with Reddit, and realized it was because I did not really like my self.
Somewhere along the way I realized I had not day dreamed or used my imagination for a long time because it was so easy to "read the nearest material I can lay my hands on".
To add to your advice I would suggest to try to find out who you are without outside material and to get comfortable with this self.
As someone from Tennessee, do you use stereotypes to judge everything? That being said, your assumptions about the state are based on East Tennessee, while this took place in Middle Tennessee. They're really very different and are about a 4 hour drive apart.
I'm naturally prone to anger, so were my parents, in my experience with my parents, and my kids, the line is how you react once angry.