Day 8 of not seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We're running low on food and in a few days I expect we will be out of Pepsi. Soon we will have no choice but to turn on each other in a ticket-rending frenzy. I expect it will get ugly. I've been secretly hoarding popcorn since Tuesday.

This is going to be a very short entry because BBC America is doing a Red Dwarf marathon. I'm not moving from this couch all night. They're showing Season 8, which I know a lot of people don't like, but I haven't seen it at all. I used to have the first six and a half seasons on tape, but I lost them years ago in a nasty breakup. I threw everything of mine I could get my hands on into the trunk of my car, drove off, and never came back. I would have been deeply embarassed to show up on his doorstep the next day going "I know I've just torn your heart out and stomped on it with cleats, but I forgot five tapes of Red Dwarf here that would be a real pain to replace. Could I get those back?"

I am a failure. Once again, I have failed to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and not for lack of trying. Normally, seeing a Hong Kong kung fu flick is a simple task. If they're playing on the big screen at all, they're playing at the Four Star, a run down little theater in the Richmond District where hardly anyone speaks English. I get to watch Hong Kong action stars attack each other with a bewildering array of weapons and styles (your Dragon Stance is no match for my Lotus Feet!) and afterwards I find a bakery and buy some dim sum. I've spent plenty of afternoons this way, but this weekend it was not to be.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon got rave reviews from the Chronicle and the Weekly. Instead of being confined to the Four Star, it's playing at the Sony Metreon (a shopping mall that's really an airport, only no one is going anywhere) where wirework-watching Matrix-worshippers have sold out the theater every time I've tried to go. Where oh where has my Death Ray gone? Why can't I turn it apon these new HK sword and sorcery fans who were busy drooling over Kevin Smith movies while I was watching Mr. Vampire and Tai Chi Master? I have the Old School points to cut in line to see this movie. I was into this stuff before it was cool, you bastards!

Not all of the yelling and stomping and screaming about the importance of yellow rather than white subtitles moved the Metreon theatergoers. There was only one place left to go: The Airtight Garage. Like most things about the Metreon, it's long on ideas and short on followthrough. The Airtight Garage is a Mobius-themed video arcade with thousands of square feet of games designed exclusively for this little outpost of Sonydom. There's a Doom-like shooting game that you can play against other people in the arcade. There's Virtual Bowling, where a giant bowling ball runs amok through the streets of San Francisco. There's some sort of mining game that I don't entirely understand. Overall, the quality of the games hovers just above the Nintendo circa 1990 mark.

Imagine my suprise when I walk into the Airtight Garage, with only the most cursory glance at the Emily merchandise, and there's a crowd of maybe thirty people standing around the newest game in the arcade, Dance Dance Revolution. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen, the peak of human civilization. It's the dawn of the year 2001 and two pre-adolecent girls (one of which is wearing pink phat pants of extrordinary width) are moving in perfect synch to a video game that dictates dance moves while playing music designed to invoke Britney Spears without actually infringing on her copyright.

I know it is my duty as an adult to sneer at this latest manifestation of youth culture, but I can't. It's calling to me. I can understand the desire to bounce up and down to treacly pop music. In fact, it looks like fun.

Oh God it's Christmas. I slept through most of it. There were times when all that I wished for was a coma that would knock me out at the beginning of December and wake me up in time for New Year's Eve. As it is, J is still asleep and I'm pouring over all of the books that he brought back from London.

Exhibit A: Vaughn Oliver: Visceral Pleasures by Rick Poynor, which includes every piece of artwork that Vaughn Oliver has ever done. It's page after page of beautiful 4AD album covers. Vaughn Oliver was the first person that really made me think about graphic design and typography. He often leaves the main image alone and surrounds it with unconventional frames and three or four different fonts. Now my head is swimming with ideas for redesigning my website.

Exhibit B: Four Hundred Years of Fashion edited by Natalie Rothstein from the Victoria and Albert Museum. The V&A's collection of clothing and textiles is staggering. They haven't neglected the early twentieth century either, with lots of clothing by Worth, Fortuny, and Poiret. Only the V&A could purchase a dress for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they don't have anything by Dior from 1953. I thumbed my way through the pictures and wept for the end of quality in women's dress.

Exhibits C and D: The Dorling Kindersley travel guides for London and Paris. I've never seen guidebooks like these. Not only do they include walking tours, historical background, and guides to all of the major museums, they have photos of everything. There are three-dimensional maps of every neighborhood and square and cut-away models of Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey. Normally, I judge a guide book by their San Francisco edition. In this case that's completely unnecessary.

I love coffee table books. This is probably because I don't subscribe to many magazines. It's common etiquette among my friends to leave a couple of issues of Skin Two or Marquis lying around so that guests can flip through them and identify their trussed-up friends. Look, there's Laura in a bondage sling with nipple clamps on! There's Rabbit being whipped! How do you know if you can't see his face? Tattoos. Did you see Dan in a corset feeding strawberries to some topless girl? I've already got that issue.

Fetish magazines make for hours of fun post-dinner conversation.

Now that I think of it, I don't know why I don't follow this trend. I have big, glossy coffee table books instead: Histories of lingerie, pouty models covered in latex, both of those Kevyn Aucoin books, New York Girls. It would probably be a lot funnier if they were all people I knew. In fact, I'm inspired. I'm going to cinch my friends up in corsets, give them all racoon eyes and make my own glossy coffee table book. I'll call it something like Industrial Wildlife and publish under a fake German-sounding name. There will be a two-page spread of skinny neo-tribal girls wearing boots that weigh more than they do entwined in faux-Sapphic poses in some trashed Bayview warehouse.

It will sell millions of copies. Let me go get my camera.

From the Why Oh Why Did I Go Work For a Startup Again Files:

We've moved out of the dark little basement. It turns out that somebody reported us to OSHA, so the Powers That Be had to accelerate the remodeling of our new office in Ghiradeli Square, right next to Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf. That's right, we're leaving South of Market, an office location mere blocks from my apartment, for a part of the city only visited by tourists. If Fisherman's Wharf were to fall into the sea tomorrow, not a single native would notice. To add insult to injury, the fastest way for me to get to the new office from my apartment is to take the cable car. Words cannot describe my acute embarassment.

I don't think it's even necessary to describe the sort of things that middle-aged couples with their cameras and their Alcatraz Swim Team sweatshirts have to say about a girl wearing striped tights and a big black trenchcoat. If they're not being snide and rolling their eyes, they're tapping me on the shoulder and asking me if my hair is real.

No, it's not. I was attacked by a black and blue muppet as a child. It was a scarring incident and I really don't want to talk about it. To this day I can't bear the sight of the letter E or the number 3.

We've spent close to a million dollars re-designing our new office space. It's ugly. The partitions, we're going with the open floor plan, which insures that no one will be able to get work done, are lime green.Yes, lime green would be my first choice when I'm looking for something that matches nicely with exposed brick. I'm clearly in the wrong line of work. I could be making hundreds of thousands of dollars as a colsultant to dot-coms, advising them to give their employees some privacy and maybe to avoid using marblized neon plastic. They've spent all of their money on fancy tables for the conference rooms but there is barely enough space in the server room for four Shark racks.

I hear that Sanrio's IT department needs a senior network engineer. I'll bet you get all of the Keroppi mousepads you want.

This is going to be in my novel. Like most things I write, it's not entirely untrue. Something like this really did happen to somebody sometime. It might have been me. I don't know.

It's well past one in the morning when I decide it's time to go home. On Howard and Folsom, the party is hardly over. Big, happy crowds of people are standing out in front of clubs with their cigarettes. There's a line around the block at 1015 of little Filipino rave kids waiting to be strip searched. Someone's car alarm is going off and a couple of blissed out rave kids are grooving to the sound of sirens and the thud of the bass spilling out from the clubs.

The alleys are dark and empty. Even though it rained just yesterday, they smell like piss that's been there for a hundred years. I walk through Clara, Minna, Natoma, the little streets named after Gold Rush era prostitutes. I'm cutting through another one (was Shipley a madam? What kind of name is that?) when a man's voice shouts after me, "Hey! Hey hey hey hey..." He's trotting up behind me, sneakers scuffing on the sidewalk.

"You wanna buy some ecstacy?"

I walk just a little bit faster. "No."

"Wanna buy acid?"

"No."

"How 'bout some coke? I got good coke right here."

"No."

"You got five bucks on you?"

"No."

Now he steps in front of me. He's really not such a big guy, not much taller than I am. Little dredlocks. White sneakers. But he's in front of me now. He's getting in my face.

"Please lady, I haven't had anything to eat for three days!"

I tell myself this man isn't here. This man isn't here in front of me. He's not blocking my way. I could just walk though him over him.

"If you've got E, coke, and acid in your pocket, you don't need money to eat." I try to step past him, but he moves with me. His shoulder bumps up against mine.

"Listen, lady, you don't know what kind of guy I am. I could be crazy. I could be desperate," he says looking down the alley. There's no one there. "I could have a gun, you ever think about that?"

"I just want to go home, okay?"

But he just shakes his head. "Do you understand? I could be crazy! I could have a fucking gun!" With one hand he reaches into his big coat and suddenly I can see a bulge in there.

I should run. This is the part where I should be running down the alley as fast as I can. Maybe he really is crazy. Five people have been shot in my neighborhood this year. How many of those confrontations started like this? We're circling around each other in the middle of the street, me with my hands at my sides, him with one hand in his coat.

"Show me your gun," I tell him.

The guy blinks.

"I mean it. Show me your gun and I"ll give you all of my money."

He's frozen now, brow all scrunched up like it takes concentration to get that gun out of his coat.

"Come on, show me the gun. I wanna see it. I can't wait to see it. If you've got a gun in your pocket and you're gonna mug me with it, you'd better show it to me!"

I have him now. With one step, I close the distance between us and shout, "Show me the motherfucking gun!"

One more time, his head jerks while he looks down the street. The alley is so empty and quiet that my voice fills it right up...gun...gun...gun.

He pulls his hand out of his coat. He pulls his hand out and combs his natty hair back with his fingers. Then he turns on the heels of his sneakers and walks away.

Day Two without J.

Sleeping alone is not so bad. I can lie diagonally across my bed. I can read until six in the morning. I could probably eat crackers in bed if I didn't mind cleaning up the mess.

Cooking for one is bad. I just can't bring myself to do it. I mostly drink tea at home and go out for Vietnamese pho when I'm hungry. We're having noodle weather here. It's cold and the sky is grey. Sometimes it rains just enough to wash a layer of grime off of the city and the pavement is bright with the reflection of streetlights and neon signs and headlamps.

I thought that I was going to have to walk home alone after the club on Friday night. I actually felt a twinge of young-lady-walking-through-bad-neighborhood-in-the-middle-of-the-night concern. I'm a city girl, born and bred. I've always had a healthy contempt for the sort of people who think that they have to move to the suburbs when they're ready to spawn because a city is somehow not an appropriate place to raise a child. I've been walking alone through bad neighborhoods all of my life. Of course, part of city survival is knowing how to avoid trouble before it starts, so I let Todd walk me to my door.

Maybe I'm not such a tough girl, but at least I'm not decomposing in China Basin.

I survived Day One without J. I have thirteen more days to go. When this is over, I'd better get a button or a badge or a tee-shirt. He took my copy of Red Mars with him as airplane reading. I wasn't finished with it yet. I still had another hundred and fifty pages to go. When I started Green Mars I was all confused and now I don't know if it was because of things that happend at the end of the first book or if the second book just starts off that way on purpose. I'm nursing all of my little annoyances so that I don't break down in a great big soggy boyfriend-missing puddle.

I did laundry. I'm sure that this is the reason that people read my journal. There's a vast audience out there for the riveting details of my daily routine. The People demand to know about my trips to the grocery store. They must know if I seperate my whites from my colors and if so, which group do black and white striped stockings go into? Every day I am deluged with fan mail from people who want my recipe for jambalaya, people pleading for the opportunity to become my sidekick, people who want my advice on weighty political matters, people who want me to marry them in a Unitarian Universalist ceremony. The pressures of fame!

I took a bag of laundry to Brain Wash on Folsom St. SOMA is a very funny place. We don't have a decent grocery store within walking distance, but we have an ultra-hip laundromat. This is a neighborhood for people with pressing laundry needs and empty stomachs. Maybe it's just assumed that we eat out every night. You can do that at Brain Wash. There's a restaurant in the laundromat that serves breakfast food until the middle of the afternoon and an assortment of burgers, stir-fries, and other basic California fare until ten-ish. I was all ready to sit in a corner reading Green Mars and sipping on a soy chai latte while my laundry spun in little circles, but for one thing: stand-up comedy.

Thursday night is open mic comedy night at Brain Wash. Silly me! Maybe if I was a better person, a real supporter of the arts and not a cynical killjoy, I would have stayed. I would have clapped and laughed in the right places. I would offered support to these poor, budding comedians and their little wadded-up pieces of paper dotted with jokes. I am not a good person. I pulled on my coat and headed down the street to 1984, where I could huddle with the staff and discuss the political aspects of Kim Stanley Robinson.

My nightclub addiction runs deep. I no longer have to actually go inside. I can stand by the door and a whole parade of weirdos and freaks will stop and talk to me while my laundry dries. Of course, some of them had difficulty registering my presence without platform boots and a cinched-in waist. Wait a minute...you're not wearing makeup! The clubgoer takes a moment to contemplate this. It looks nice.

I'm not sure how I feel about looking nice. I don't want to make a habit of it.

I run back to Brain Wash before my reputation is further tarnished. My clothes are undamaged aside from a mild case of exposure to bad jokes. Black and white striped stockings are washed with the whites. Another day was vanquished. I'm pretty sure that I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The words aren't coming. I hate that. I've started half a dozen journal entries in the last couple of days and I've discarded them all. Instead of writing, I've been reading. I finished Culture Jam and I was just about to start House of Leaves when a friend of mine lent me the entire Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm about three hundred pages into the first one. I'll get to it all. I'll have plenty of time for reading with J gone to London and Boston for the next two weeks.

When J bought his tickets, I wrote out everything that I was doing for those two weeks: birthday parties, concerts, clubs. Out of fourteen days, five were completely empty. I have nowhere to go and no one to see. I haven't spent an entire day by myself in maybe a year. I haven't had to go to bed alone in longer than that. I'm going to drown the next two weeks in books. I'm going to hold it under and hope that it dies. I'm going to be all alone for Christmas. I never even celebrated Christmas. I never cared about Christmas. But on Christmas everything is closed and everyone is busy, and this year I'm going to be all alone.

I once did a horrible thing on Christmas. I was driving to San Francisco from Santa Cruz to visit my boyfriend over Winter Break. He was expecting me in the afternoon, but I wound up in town a little bit earlier than that, so I stopped to visit a friend of mine. Well, not really a friend, more like an ex-boyfriend. Well, not really an ex-boyfriend because we still occasionally --did I mention that this was a horrible thing to do?

So it's Christmas Day and I'm parked in this guy's driveway. I'm ringing his doorbell. I do this sort of thing all the time with him, show up unannounced. Sometimes he's home. Sometimes he's not. This time he's there and he's got a girl with him. Her name is Pam. She's a tall girl with perfectly symetrical features and long, straight Joan Baez hair. I almost get back into my car. I don't want to interrupt anything, I tell him. I've already done the automatic girl thing. I've looked her over and I know I don't compare. I'm a little punk girl that year. I'm wearing black jeans and a Johnny Thunders tee-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

No no, this is an ex-girlfriend. That kind of thing is long behind them. It's safe to walk down to the cafe together and talk. It's a bleak and foggy Christmas Day and we're in a cafe draining espressos and talking about the nature of love. No time wasted on introductions, no pleasantries. No, we fell immediately into soul-bearing, life-story talk, the three of us. Everyone drags out the mangled corpse of their Worst Relationship Ever, which is always good for a laugh.

It's late afternoon by now and we've gone to see Harold and Maude at the Red Vic. By the time we come out of the movie theater, it's dark. My boyfriend has started calling my pager and I've been ignoring it for about half an hour. We're all sitting on my ex-boyfriend's bed, where we've resumed soul-baring. Pam and I are sitting shoulder to shoulder and our mutual ex-boyfriend is splayed across us. It's strange, once you've slept with someone, the way you feel you have a right to their body. My ex-boyfriend has his hand up the back of my shirt, running his hands across my new tattoo. Pam wants to kiss him. It's obvious. She keeps bringing her lips to his cheek until finally he goes ahead and does it. Someone starts to say "If anything happens..." but I never hear the rest of it because my pager is going off again.

This time I call my boyfriend. I'll be right there. Yes, I know it's almost eight. I just got a little bit distracted. I got dragged off to a movie. Yeah, I'll be over in a minute. Bye.

Only I'm not leaving. I'm still on the bed where we're all fumbling towards the inevitable while the phone rings and rings. Now it's nine o'clock. Now it's ten o'clock. Now the doorbell is ringing and my ex disentangles himself and runs downstairs to answer the door.

Hey, it's your boyfriend!

Really? Shit. I'd better go.

As I climb into the car, listening to my boyfriend tell me about how I blew him off for most of Christmas Day, I resolve to do a terrible thing. I know that when the moment comes, when he asks me what I was doing up there, I'm going to lie.

Of course nothing happend. Don't be so paranoid. He had one of his ex-girlfriends over, girl named Pam. Didn't you see her car in front of the house?

Yes, I'm still here. I'm just a little bit tongue-tied lately. I've been doing a lot of domestic things: cooking, sewing, puttering around the apartment. I'm hanging curtains (purple velvet) and framing photographs (sepia-toned, mostly). I've been very slow to get settled into my place. After moving practically every year for the last five years, I'm hesitant to even bother unpacking anything. What's the use when my lease is up in six months? I'm not so frightened of apartment-commitment that I still have cardboard boxes lying unopened, but after half a year I still haven't hung up any of my posters. I'm sure a good therapist could read plenty of meaning into that, but I don't want to examine my life too closely right now. I just want to find a good spot for my Turandot print.

Every year I swear that I'm going to leave this horrible place, this strange and merciless city with it's homeless trolls living under the freeway, it's self-rightious bike messengers, it's extortionist landlords and mad-prophet venture capitalists (may they all wind up living under the freeway one day). I don't want to decipher any more Byzantine parking signs. I don't want to spend another night freezing on it's inhospitable beaches, where neo-tribal fire dancers insist on meeting in spite of the dangerous winds. I don't want to watch the construction of another big, white million-dollar loft box. I don't want get soaked in the rain while waiting for a taxi or an N Judah that will never come. I every year I vow to abandon this place to the blonde, SUV-driving marketing chick clutching her Williams Sonoma catalogue.

Take it! No, really. I don't want it anymore. I'm going to go make some other place hip.

Who am I kidding? There's no place to go. Besides, if I leave here now, I'll never know how my zeitgeist novel ends. Every story has to have an ending. Someone has to see it through. I feel obliged to watch it fall apart. I'll fiddle while the NASDAQ plummets and CEO's fling themselves into the middle of 280 traffic in despair. I'll be laughing as ahi tuna consumption per capita dwindles. The end is important in all things, says the Way of the Samurai. Someone, usually a very minor someone, has to be left standing at the end of the play to tell us what it all means. Maybe I'm stupid to think that it might be me, but if I leave now, how will I ever find out?

I just ate a sandwich that left me hungrier than I was when I started eating. Instead of getting dinner tonight, I decided to walk down to the corner store and get a sandwich. No sooner had I consumed the thing than my stomach was grumbling. It's just another marvel of modern technology. I don't understand how such a thing is possible. I saw this sandwich. It had two pieces of bread, some unidentified cheese, and an assortment of roasted vegetables. It had substance. I'm certain it must have had some sort of caloric value. How is it that this sandwich actually leeched calories from my body? Does Weight Watchers know about this?

I'm just full of rightious anger today. I've been reading Culture Jam by Kalee Lasn, the Adbusters guy. I picked it up at just the right time. I'd been feeling more like a consumer than a human being lately. It's an ugly feeling. If I can't exactly shake it, I figured I might as well validate it. Lasn posits that America isn't a country anymore. It's a billion-dollar brand. The worth of an American is measured by how much he or she can consume. It's a patriotic duty. Even if he's a little sloppier than I like, Lasn makes some interesting points. He thinks we've lost control of our own culture. Culture isn't the stories that we tell each other anymore, it's the stories we see on TV. Culture is something that's fed to us.

I fear he may be right.

This is the story of a girl and her void. The void lives in her pocketbook. It whispers things like Wouldn't those Isaac Mitzrahi pants look great on you? and Don't you think you'd look better if you lost ten pounds? The void thinks she needs a new car. The void thinks she needs a bigger apartment. The void thinks she'd look sexier if she smoked cigarettes. Sometimes the girl doesn't listen to the void. She cooks at home. She doesn't buy anything all day. She walks somewhere when she could drive. Sometimes the girl just wants to shut the void up, so she goes into the local Walgreens and buys a lipstick. There are days when the void is all-encompassing. It sucks her into Sephora or worse, Las Vegas. The void likes it when the girl pretends that she's rich. Las Vegas is a good place to pretend. Sometimes the void talks the girl into shopping on ebay. Those are good days for the void. It's happy, even if it isn't full. The void is never, ever full.

The void likes sitting at home in front of the TV. It likes to watch commercials. Commercials give it new ideas for things to buy. Commercials are everywhere. The void is whispering to the girl when she sees ads in bus stops, in the newspaper, on the gasoline pump.

The girl gets older. She gets a degree. She gets a job. She gets a career. She gets a promotion. The bigger her pocketbook gets, the bigger the void gets. The older she gets, the more important it is that she buys expensive things that make her look young. The void booms (it booms now because it's so big) Isn't it time for you to get married? Now the girl looks for a boy. Sometimes she finds boys that the void doesn't like: musicians, slackers, artists, dreamers. The void is suspicious of creative people. The void tells the girl she needs someone grounded, stable, professional. Of course that's just a nice way of saying that she needs someone rich.

So the girl marries a nice, professional (rich) boy and she hopes that the void will be quiet for a while. But that's not enough, the void starts whispering her ear at night, a whispering that's worse than all of that shouting and booming. It whispers Isn't it time for you to a have a baby? That is the void's fondest wish. That's what the void wants most of all...a little void of its own.

There is only one thing to do when internet connectivity is down at work: Discount Fabric Warehouse. Dry cleaners. Soy chai latte from a cafe that isn't Starbuck's. Even when the world grinds to a halt and no one seems to be capable of doing anything but bothering me about when the outside world will come back up, I manage to be a productive and useful member of society. Even now I'm composing this entry in Word so as to look busy and important, so busy and important that people will stop asking me stupid questions about things that are beyond my control.

The next best thing to looking busy and important is being just plain gone, hence my trip to Discount Fabric Warehouse, now Open to the Public. Fabric stores, like hardware stores, exist in a realm of infinite possibility. This is a new set of curtains. This is a bustle skirt. This is the bolt of silk chiffon that will just be tacked to your ceiling for the sake of looking luxurious. I suppose that if I was a better person, a person with organisational skills and a real work ethic, I would finish more of these projects. As it is, I rarely get more elaborate than notions for a skirt or new buttons for my coat. It's just about all I can do to fix the things that are broken and torn.

Do I remember that when I walk into a fabric store? Of course not, not when there's gold pleated Fortuny fabric for $10 a yard. I bought burgundy ribbons for my hair and trim for my lace parasol. It will all wind up in a pile with all of the other project fabric in the Spooky Dream House. It will be neatly folded next to the Chinese brocades and black tulle, just behind the jar of antique buttons and clasps that never get sewn to anything. My plans will fall by the wayside, like so many other things, until finally I forget what I bought all of those things for and I unfold them and tack them to my wall.

Have you ever been paralyzed by envy? I have. Sometimes it hits so hard that I just about choke on wanting.

I went to visit some friends of mine to celebrate a birthday party. They live in a spacious Victorian flat with that thoroughly lived-in look. They have a piano and a purple velvet couch. They have pleasant clutter and fifteen foot ceilings. The whole place is filled with candles. The fridge is covered with pictures of their witty and beautiful friends doing witty and beautiful things. They have perfect, Tim Burtonesque silverware. Their bedroom is yards and yard of burgundy and gold fabric. I am crippled with consumer envy.

It's exhausting to want so many things. I wonder what's wrong with a world where we congratulate each other on having the "style" to buy such clever, clever things. Congratulations, you've purchased thousands of dollars worth of goods from the Restoration Hardware catalogue and arranged them in a pleasing manner. You've got artificially aged wrought iron furniture and a set of faux-rustic plates, so French Country. You're a real bohemian now.

If I know it's all fake and none these things matter, why do I keep wanting them? Why do I just about faint when I walk into a beautiful house? Why is nothing that I do ever enough? I will never own enough corsets. I'll never have enough yards of burn-out velvet. There will never be enough candles or old postcards or quirky glassware in my miniscule apartment. There isn't enough room for it all. I have to throw out the old old things to make room for the new old things.

I'm a great gaping hole of consumer neediness, hurricane Never hitting Union Square. It must be Christmas. It could only be Christmas. In a few weeks it will all be over. We will put this behind us. I'll go shopping at the after Christmas sales.

Thank you, oh Gods, who have at long last granted me my soy chai latte.

There's an old joke, so old it's got whiskers on it, about a religious man who prays to God and says Please God. I have been your humble servant all my life. Let me win the lottery. A few weeks go by and the religious man is getting impatient, so he prays again. Blessed Lord our God, why have you not answered me? I have redoubled my efforts in your name. I praise you day and night. Grant me this one thing, God. Let me win the lottery. Months go by and the religious man prays some more. The months turn into years and finally the religious man gets down on his knees and prays Come on, God. This is really getting to be too much. I have devoted my entire life to your service, but you haven't answered this one prayer. I want to win the lottery, God! Don't I deserve it? What else must I do!.

Now a voice like James Earl Jones booms down from the Heavens:

Buy a lottery ticket!

All I had to go was look outside of the Starbucks/Briazz/Wells Fargo Borg cube. I promptly found two coffee shops where the chai flows cheap and hot and the soy milk never runs out. I've had two today. I'll have two more tomorrow. Words cannot describe how much I've missed my soy chai latte.