Big beer stein, drinking to stave off boredom, a waste of money I should send to New Orleans, or Armenia, or at least spend on music. How many times do I pledge to myself that I am going to quit drinking, or cut down on drinking, before I become a problem drinker? And with me, it's not even that much of a social lubricant. I'm generally all loose and lubed up, with no real sense of embarrassment. It's the consumption that I love. You know it's sexual repression.

"Lastly, to the poster who commended the original poster's bravery in sticking it to Johnny Cracker. I agree with you, but the premise of this post just fuels stupidity... Until later...My friendly semi-enlightened whatever...take care and be safe. Try not to get too caught up in stupid shit. I'm out. -rv "

This is from craigslist, from a posting I responded to that a Black woman had written looking for some platonic white friends to "stop her from hating Whitey." I honestly wandered into the whole thing and am now convinced that the original poster may be a women I went to college with, with whom I had a brief non-friendship marked by racial and hipster tensions; this then reminds me of other paranormal psychic experiences I've had and then back again to the idea that time is not linear, and I can see the future because I have such a good memory.

The point is. I like the phrase "sticking it to Johnny Cracker" better than I like being called a "friendly semi-enlightened whatever." I like all the po-mo thought and race politics, and I like being an annoyingly proBlack white woman. Exactly what that means, too, with pc capitalizations and total knowledge that the whole thing is bullshit. I don't really know what percentage of everything I do and think is completely ridiculous; I try to find comfort, at various times, in 1) Christ, 2) the Annie Dillard "For the time being" super view of human history; and 3) the pithy plaque my sister has about "making a difference in the life of a child." What is NOT comforting is how cerebral I want to be but how biological and cultural I really am; that I am deeply fretting not about big issues but about the pervasive sense that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing that all 28 year old middle class white graduate degree holding smarty types feel. CS Lewis is right, humans are crap, selfish nasty monkeys.

And living with my fucking sister has me thinking that a new hair color and more varied makeup color palette is going to make my ennui and panic just slip away. While knowledge of my basic sinful nature has me angrily resigned to the fact that she is right.