Whiter Shades of Pale (26 page)

Burning through Victorian novels to show up a rival at an upcoming graduate school party.

Proven fact that men in graduate school are attracted to sensible shoes.

Social networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced-level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example, under music they would simply list
P.M
. Dawn or under films they would choose only
Armageddon
. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.

However, it is important to remember that the “where” is often as important as the “who” when it comes to social networking. As noted earlier, white people are obsessed with being in the right neighborhood, and the Internet is no exception.

In the early days, white people joined a social networking service called Friendster, where they could connect with old friends and make new ones. Eventually white people started to notice more and more of their friends on MySpace, so they closed their Friendster accounts and migrated to the new service. It was like living in a neighborhood that was pretty good but kind of far away, so you might have to miss out on a few parties. Needless to say, this was unacceptable.

For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profiles and managed their friendships. But soon the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling
musicians. In real-world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check-cashing store, a T.G.I. Friday’s, and a housing project. All of which strike fear in the hearts of white people.

White people were nervous but had nowhere else to go. Then Facebook came along and offered advanced privacy settings, closed networks, and a clean interface. In respective real-world terms, these features are analogous to a house or apartment with a security system/doorman, an alumni dinner, and a homeowners association that guarantees the protection of the aesthetics of the neighborhood. In spite of these advances, some white people still clung to their old MySpace accounts. That is, until they learned that Facebook was started, like so many things beloved by white people, at Harvard.

Within a matter of months, MySpace had gone from a virtual utopia to digital Detroit, where only minorities and indie bands remain.

As it is with almost everything white people like, the advanced white people will of course talk to you about how they are thinking about deleting their Facebook account because of the issue of privacy and the terms of use of the site. What they are really looking for is someone to tell them to keep their account, how enjoyable their updates, photos, and general presence on the site are. It’s like wanting to hear your eulogy before your funeral. So while these white people might talk a big game, they aren’t actually going to do anything about it.

If you plan on befriending white people, it is essential that you join them in the digital suburbs and open a Facebook account immediately. It’s also a good idea to make up a story about how someone from high school sent you a friend request and that after accepting you discovered that they were fat and unsuccessful. White people love these stories.

It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people
will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people, which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel toward the original property. Yes, it’s complicated.

The other problem is that these announcements create a ticking time bomb whereby a white person must read the book in
advance
of the release of the movie. This is done partly so that they can engage in the popular activity of complaining about how the movie failed to capture the essence of the book. But more important, once a book has been made into a movie, a white person can no longer read that book. To have read the book after the movie’s release is one of the great crimes in white culture, and under no circumstance should you ever admit to doing this. Literally dozens of white friendships have imploded when it was revealed that someone read
Fight Club
after 1999.

So when it was announced that
Where the Wild Things Are
was being turned into a feature film, white people didn’t immediately get excited at the prospect. In fact, a great number of white people cringed when they first heard it was being turned into a movie. This was merely instinct. But those concerns quickly turned into an opiate-like peace when they found out that the film was being directed by white person favorite Spike Jonze and adapted for the screen by legendary white writer Dave Eggers.

Though the talent and the material have white people in a tizzy, the real excitement comes from the fact that this film is based on a book that is forty-eight pages long and made up mostly of illustrations. This means that white people do not have to reread the book until the day they head to the movie theater. This frees them up to watch the Director’s Series, Vol. 1,
The Work of Spike Jonze
DVD that they bought years ago but only watched once.

Finally and perhaps of most value to you is the fact that the film has generously provided you with an excellent way to test out how many
white friends you have. When the trailer was released, you should have been inundated with emails, instant messages, and Facebook wall posts about how you need to see the trailer immediately. If you received no word that the trailer was available, then you currently are in possession of no white friends. If you received multiple notices, you should take note of who sent it to you first. They are your whitest friend.

Cult movies are one of the hardest things to understand about white people. In straightforward terms, white people like movies that are so bad that somehow they eventually come back around to being good. Sort of like how communism and fascism meet at the ends of the political spectrum. Make sense? No, it doesn’t. But that’s all right. It’s a complicated concept and something that is only really understood by those who have reached expert-level status with white people.

It is impossible for a white person to explain the difference between a bad movie and a bad-good movie. This is because all white people are born with the ability to detect and appreciate high camp. In much the same way that dogs can hear higher frequencies, white people are born with the ability to fully enjoy the works of John Waters.

But do not think that this means a movie is naturally born as a cult classic. No, it must go through a number of steps. The first is to be declared a cult movie by white people who used to work in video stores but now spend most of their time on message boards and hanging around art house cinemas. The second, and more important, step is that a large group screening must be
organized and well attended. Once this has happened, a movie is a cult classic and can be enjoyed with popcorn and a detached sense of irony.

Finally, accepting an invitation to go see one of these movies is less an opportunity for fun and more of a sentence to at least a few hours of prep work. You will be expected to pre-watch the movie so you can yell out your favorite lines, and it’s sort of implied that you will dress up as one of the characters. Under no circumstance should you ever accept an invitation to go see
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. White people spend less time preparing for their SATs than they do for this movie.

In their twenties and early thirties, many white people will engage in something called a “long-distance relationship,” though for brevity’s sake it might be easier to think of it as an “extremely slow breakup.”

The long-distance relationship generally begins as a short-distance relationship either in college or during a particularly memorable weekend trip somewhere. No matter how it starts, the long-distance relationship begins when one white person moves away from the other. Normal logic would dictate that if you’re living in different cities, living different lives, then there really is no point to a relationship and you should just end it now. But not white people.

Regardless of how many of these relationships have failed (an incredible 100 percent), white person logic dictates that
you can keep a long-distance relationship alive and healthy by talking on the phone every day and meeting every few weekends. Eventually some amazing coincidence will bring the two back together and everything will work itself out. It should be noted that the influence of romantic comedies on white people has been a decidedly negative one.