This will be my second story this week about someone who did something stupid and fell face first into the Internet as a consequence.  Perhaps it’ll become a new thing around here; I dunno.  But have you read the bullshit about the yoga idiot yet?

(The article is called “There are No Black People in my Yoga Classes and I’m Suddenly Uncomfortable With It”.  No, that’s not a joke.  That’s actually what the article is called, and it’s every fucking bit as stupid and clueless as you might be imagining right now.)

The author: a Skinny White Girl.  Oh, so skinny, and oh, so white.

The perpetrator:  a Non-Skinny Black Woman, who we’re gonna make a whoooooole lot of observations about based on nothing more than making up a bunch of racist nonsense.  Read the article, maybe read some of the comments on Gawker, just revel in the stupid because oh my god there is so very much of it.

And lemme tell you a story.

It’s 1998.  I have just graduated from college, gone to Israel for a month or two, and then moved to Chicago.  I do not start grad school until, God, some unholy late date– September something, maybe, so I manage to find myself a series of temp jobs around the city for something to do and some extra money.  1998, as you may know, involved a horrifying heat wave; my choices were literally go to work or lay around my apartment and sweat all day.

So I got a job.  Which meant learning a brand new public transport system in a brand new city, effectively alone, when I’d never actually used public transportation of any kind before.

Something else I’d never done: been a minority.  I’d taken some African-American Studies classes at IU, but for some reason those didn’t count, and I was rarely the only white person in the room.  Until moving to Chicago, I’d never had the experience of being the only white person I could see unless I was alone.

It took a bit of getting used to.

So, yeah:  I’m on a bus.  I have no idea where I’m actually going, other than that the bus is eventually going to stop at X street, and that I have to get off there, walk a block, and board a train.  Because I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going, I sit in the very front of the bus so that I can a) hear the driver as he calls off stops and b) potentially see road signs in case the driver isn’t actually doing that.

Only white person on the bus, for the entire trip.  Cue 25 minutes or so of Rosa Parks white liberal anxiety bullshit.  Everybody was looking at me.  Only white boy on the bus and he’s sitting up in front.  He must think he’s better than us.  Fucking asshole white boy. Blah blah blah blah blah.  I seriously stressed myself out and felt guilty because I was the only white motherfucker on the bus and I was sitting in front of all the black people.

And then I wrote an essay about how bad I felt on the Internet.

Well, no.  What actually happened was that I got the fuck over myself and realized that no other asshole on the bus had even noticed I was there, because amazingly enough my white self was not the center of their collective universes.  Was it possible that somebody noticed the slightly nervous-looking white kid at the front of the bus?  Yeah, but if they did they were probably making fun of me and not aggravated by my existence.  And since nobody actually pays attention to anybody else on the bus– hell, if there’s a more “you don’t want none, there won’t be none” place in the world than a public bus, I can’t imagine what it is (edit: it’s an elevator).  

Nobody gave a shit.  I was not the center of anyone’s world.  I was being an idiot.  And I got over it.

Bonus, similarly-themed story:  I’ve also been the fat person striding into a fitness center, although I was neither black nor female at the time.  I’ve even been the fat person striding into the pool, and wondering what everyone else thought of my fat pale mostly-naked body, them with their muscles and their muscles and their zero fat body percentage and their Speedos and their muscles and oh, how dare you, fat person, sully our temple to our perfect bodies with your fat fatness.

Got over that bullshit too.

Here’s what they were thinking:  seven more laps, and then I can get the hell out of here and go have a cheeseburger.  Nobody gives a fuck about the fat people at the gym or at the pool.  If they do, get a new gym.  Ain’t nobody paying attention; you are not the center of other people’s lives unless you’re pissing in the pool or sweating all over the machines and not wiping it up.

Errybody get over themselves.

Pfah.