MORE FROM THE NEW YORK SCENE: A HOLIDAY-SEASON IMAGINARY EAVESROPPER'S REPORT

---"I like to celebrate the Holiday Season through a daily quest for food items and beverages featuring pumpkin meat or pumpkin puree. If I see a pumpkin muffin on display in a bakery, I will immediately buy it and devour it with gusto. Maybe I should look for a Pumpkin Recipe book and cook a variety of pumpkin dishes during my off-duty hours inside my efficiency apartment's kitchen. I'd love to make a pumpkin cake and treat a friend of mine to that cake. It will probably be the first time he's ever eaten a pumpkin cake, so I'm guaranteed of getting credit for originality."

---"As Pumpkin-crazy as you are, you should at least invite a pumpkin farmer to lunch or dinner. I feel it's hypocritical to have a pumpkin fetish, as you obviously have one, without wanting to tangibly reward the farmers who made that pumpkin pleasure possible for you."

---"I need to find the best restaurant here for pumpkin pancakes. To me, that would make a terrific Holiday Season breakfast, especially if I'm sitting across from a relative or friend I actually get along with well."

--"Whenever I watch a Hollywood movie about young persons attending school, I see it as a strategy for stimulating my brain. I figured out from reading a book on how to stimulate my brain that if I watch movies about the educational process, this will help me to harness my own brainpower. So when friends say they can't see the point of my watching a movie about being in your teens and attending high school, when I myself am obviously in my 40s, I point out that those movies are like a born-again experience for my brain. They are intellectually rejuvenating, you might say. They remind me that all of life is a learning experience, it's just that these days I don't get report cards from any teacher. If you can't develop an effective lifelong education strategy, you are truly a flunky in the worst sense of that word!"

--"I think the antacid companies love New York more than any other city in the U.S. Those companies know that per-capita sales for persons  with upset stomachs are probably higher here than in any other American city. It's New York's specialty: live here or visit here, and you automatically get an upset stomach at least once per week."

---"I need to find a magazine or newspaper here that features a 'Wish I had Met You at the Time' section. I would then post a statement in that section in which I mention that day and time and exact street corner where I had observed a slender brunette lady I feel sure I could have had a good dialogue with. This might then get me a reply letter, so we could meet in person at a Starbucks coffeeshop."

--"I prefer to post my credentials on the Strictly Platonic Personals section of the local newspaper. This gives me lots of responses, at least, and then I have the pleasure of identifying which 1 percent of those respondents are persons I'd actually want to meet. For the remaining 99 percent, I probably should send them a sympathy card; but I don't want to compromise my own personal security. Anything that identifies myself to them could be construed as inviting them to stalk me. And goodness knows we have far too many stalkers here already."

--"You hear the term 'upward mobility' so often here that you begin to sense that maybe you should wear a T-shirt that declares, 'I'm an Upwardly Mobile New Yorker'."

---"It doesn't make you a VIP that you're being stalked. No one is comparing your case to the stalking of that famous Hollywood actress Jodie Foster. In your case, it's probably someone who regards you as an irritant, and wants to swat you like a fly he's irked by to the point of disgust. That's the only reason he's stalking you. His intentions toward you are strictly homicidal, since it's obvious from looking at you that he has no romantic intent toward you. I hope that's reassuring news for you. All you need is a good bodyguard, assuming you can afford to hire a bodyguard. And if you can't, maybe you could take out a loan in order to hire one. You could have that bodyguard work for you for one month, and then if you are still alive at the end of that month, maybe you could drop that strategy and try moving to an obscure place like Portland, Maine. That could foil the stalker, since he's not likely to rent an apartment in Portland, Maine, just to spy on you there."

---"I agree with you that moving to Portland, Maine, might be the perfect way to foil a stalker here in New York. I have never once had a friend or relative of mine say that he was planning to move to Portland, Maine. No one ever thinks of Portland, Maine, as a place in which to actually live, if you're a New Yorker. You couldn't ask for a more low-key, un-noticed place where the news media are so obscure that I have no idea what the name of the Portland paper is. It's probably called something like the 'Portland Press'. I'm don't even know of any college in Portland, that's how invisible that city is on my own personal radar screen here in Manhattan."