This is the time of year when I feel the crush of wanting what I can’t have.  Not what I want for myself, but for others.  The need to buy good gifts puts a great deal of pressure on me.  In the stores I become very focused and intense; cheery clerks smile and say “Hello” to me and I look at them blankly, like a drug-addled actor on the WB, and wonder why they’re distracting me when I have work to get done.

The worst things always happen to me when I’m shopping.  (I can tell the following story because my sister-in-law doesn’t read this site.) My sister-in-law likes Williams Sonoma cookbooks, but I’ve already bought her, like, 50 of them in previous years. She said, “Just get me the ones that were produced this year. I don’t have any of the new ones.” So I went to Williams Sonoma and picked up an armload of them, and the clerk said “Are you finding what you’re looking for?”

And I said “Sure!  I need all the recent cookbooks that were produced in 2004.”

She said, “But some of them are very old, and the company just updates them a little.”

My face fell like a Williams Sonoma souffle that’s been subjected to a 9.8 earthquake. “Update?”

“Yes, they sometimes alter the recipes slightly and then change the copyright date.”

“You mean...like, the recipe says to add a pinch of goat cheese to a salad, but this is actually wrong, and so the company gets subjected to tons of angry letters from amateur cooks who tell them to edit the recipe immediately or they’ll never buy waffle mix or no-stick cooking pans from Williams Sonoma again?”

“Yes, that happens, and sometimes they just put a different salad on the cover.”

So then I’m stuck, because I no longer know which cookbooks are the new ones.

The only person on my list that’ll be easy to buy for is my baby niece.  Having watched her very closely, I’ve realized that she likes plasticky things that make shrill noises.  So I’m either getting her a Fisher-Price toy, or Joan Rivers.

December, then, becomes my month for a strange, consumer-driven form of longing.  And I become very attuned to longing when I see it in other places. For example, the subway stations in San Francisco are currently plastered with posters for a personals hotline.  It shows a scantily dressed girl holding the phone receiver to her ear while arching her back and staring at the camera. This isn’t a kind of longing I associate with lonelyhearts--who puts on makeup to answer the phone, and who contorts their body into such a ridiculous position just to talk to someone?  No, I recognize the longing of the model, who is begging to be able to relax the pose, put on a warm coat, and go practice her bulimia in peace.

One of my greatest accomplishments is to place this web site on page #2 or #3 under a Google search for “Naked Girls.” I started the site long after Al Gore invented the Internet, but I still managed to elbow past scads of commercial porn pages with nothing but the frequent repetition of a key search string. Normally I get a kick from the constant stream of young intellectuals who come here looking for airbrushed flesh, only to find an inane story about grown-up men trying to drink in Florida during spring break; but lately I’m feeing more sympathetic than sardonic, because I know what it’s like to look for something and not find it.