A Small Christmas List

by Evan James

When some of us were still young boys but already chronic insomniacs, we began to demonstrate a talent for obsessive list making. While some precocious and intelligent children stayed up past their bedtimes reading The Red Badge of Courage under the covers with a flashlight, we spent those wee hours making never-ending lists of things that we desired with an all-consuming passion: rooms filled with trampolines, shopping sprees at K.B. Toys (we were obsessed with the idea of having a shopping spree anywhere, really; it could have been at Sears for all we cared), comprehensive psychoanalysis--- the list literally went on and on.

While the lot of us still haven’t given up our dreams of one day satisfying every single one of our wildly unrealistic material wants, this Christmas we’ve managed to limit the intense breadth of our worldly appetites to a list of five well-considered wishes:

Civil rights, or Kiehl’s gift certificate

We would like to one day marry the same-sex partners we will one day learn to love, but until that day comes we will be perfectly happy buffing our faces with pineapple papaya facial scrub. Follow that up with a nice washable cleansing milk, a refreshing calendula herbal toner, a slathering of costly lycopene facial moisturizing cream, and you have one luxuriously gay face.

Influence by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

It may be an exaggeration to say that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have written a book. Suffice it to say a book now exists the creation of which had something to do with the entrepreneurial twins in question. They have been working on it in their laboratory (which, if the rumors are true, is the very same hotbed of scientific experimentation that produced the mirror image darlings themselves, and which, if the other rumors are true, is the working storyline for the next Charlie Kaufman screenplay) for almost two years. For the book, the only surviving cast members of Full House interviewed artists, designers, and others who have influenced them over the past decade, including: Christian Louboutin, Bob Colacello, and Louis XIV.