only 38 shopping days until christmas
I fucking love presents. Imagine that you can do people favors and then they’re favorably inclined towards you such that when your unrelenting bipolar disorder type three causes problems in your life you have more slack with which to apologize. Imagine that your relationships are yielding passive income because the person is using a nice thing that you got them so they experience appreciation sometimes as if you’d sent them a nice text once per week. Imagine that you can make people happy, which is in truth my life purpose; all of my fantasies of an ideal job or a transhuman future involve me being able to make people wildly happy at scale (in ways that evoke their gratitude and awe).
To determine my gift list, I just look at who I’ve texted with in the past week, and resolve that anyone not in there is probably not really my friend.
Then, I open up my gift list (which is a note on my phone which I’ve been populating all year long or sometimes for many years long, in which literally any time anyone mentions offhandedly a thing that they want, I find a way to discreetly append that to my list so that I can, with a posture of wickedness and glee, fantasize about what a good present this is and how happy I’m going to make them.
Who’s my gift list:
1
2
3? nah fuck her
4
5
6 (wait she’d hate receiving a christmas present actually)
7
8 maybe
9
10
do i even like anyone else
11
12 maybe
13 maybe
14 people?
15? but something small so it’s not weird
Okay, let’s go through this process thinking in public so as to reveal my process.
15’s pre-existing gift list is:
Authentic boar-tooth tattooist in Japan; Tom of Finland art; Polygenic for his kids.
He doesn’t have any kids yet and ordering a $50k IVF therapy isn’t small enough. Similarly I don’t think I can find him an authentic Japanese tattooist who uses boar teeth. Some Tom of Finlands it is!
Tom of Finland is a pretty pornographic comic celebrating gay culture. It was, apparently, a whole cultural moment.
So I should try to find him some old Tom of Finland art. It’d be weird if I bought him an authentic print (those are like $3k - $30k) so I should probably try to find some scribble from the artist, a bar napkin with a man’s ass drawn on it, or something.
Ok after searching and also using some AI tools which weren’t fast or very good and then I disregarded them I found an old Tom of Finland VHS tape that he and the boys might get a kick out of watching together. (They’re straight). He’s probably my coolest friend? Not in terms of who I like best or who is most famous or who is the best dresser but he might be the best male dresser but rather cool in terms of like
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So he and the boys (no one gayer than a bunch of straight dudes) would *love* watching an hour of authentic retro gay porn on VHS.
Great, ordered. Gift accomplished. Merry Christmas. Now to do 14 more.