Whiter Shades of Pale (25 page)

At this point, the white person has essentially asked you to be their drug dealer. If you’re not a drug dealer, this is very offensive and it’s up to you if you’d like to call this white person racist and enjoy a number of
guilt-related gifts and meals. If you
are
a drug dealer, you should not attempt to set up a deal with this person for a larger quantity of pills.

It is the acquisition of the drugs that makes all the difference. White people learned a long time ago that one of the greatest benefits of prescription drugs is that an insurance company will pay for them. So any and all drugs that are paid for by an insurance company are completely acceptable for consumption, including those prescribed to friends and family members.

But if you buy the same drugs on the Internet or from a dealer, then you are most definitely the wrong kind of white person. Unless you were doing it to get on
Intervention
on A&E, and then maybe it’s all right, provided you write a memoir, too.

The ability to understand the difference between casual abuse of prescription drugs and problematic abuse of prescription drugs will be of the utmost importance in your friendship with white people. For example, a white person finding an old Vicodin in the medicine cabinet and then washing it down with a glass of vodka and falling asleep listening to an old Pavement CD is considered to be an acceptable activity. A white person buying a Percocet from a drug dealer and then going home, taking it, and falling asleep to a 3 Doors Down album is not acceptable, and an intervention must be performed immediately. This will address the problem of a drug addiction and the far more important problem of appalling taste in music.

There are few fruits or vegetables that play a more important role in the world of fine dining or dinner party hosting than the olive. Regardless of the size, grade, or pedigree, when white people get together there is an implicit agreement that some form of olive will be made available. This is important should you ever have white guests past 6
P.M
.

The exact reason why white people love olives so much has been lost for centuries. There are theories that the popularity is due to the fact that olives require an immense amount of work and energy to create a relatively small result. Much like a nonprofit organization.

But the most important reason you should familiarize yourself with olives is their role as a signifier that your neighborhood is being overrun by white people. No, white people won’t start planting olive trees; that would be far too much work. But rather your local supermarket will see the addition of what looks like a pushcart filled with sun-dried tomatoes, cheeses in water, and, of course, olives. This cart arrives because the white people who have moved into this neighborhood have accumulated enough quality furniture (and are confident enough in the crime levels) to host a dinner party. In shopping for that party they realized that the local market didn’t carry fresh olives and they quickly escalated this complaint to the manager. And voilà, olives show up in your supermarket.

On the plus side, when you see those olives you should buy as much property in the neighborhood as you possibly can.

Look of confusion comes from constant question about whether or not he should have gone to law school.

Political T-shirt in an attempt to inspire students to stop drinking and start reading books.

Trying to look older, though sadly the thrift store jacket is two years older than him.

Contains thirty-three tests, one copy of Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish
, one copy of Barthes’s
Mythologies
,
The New Yorker
, and a hidden copy of Harry Potter.

Thinking about dropping out and working in publishing.

Heart still broken from when a student called Nabokov a “homo.”