Whitest-People Problems

This morning, I was lying on a fur, underneath another (faux) fur, with a fur-covered cat stretched across the length of my chest. He’d climbed up and fallen asleep there while I was watching So You Think You Can Dance, his sweet ribcage rising and falling slowly, safely, warming and comforting me where he lay. And then the show ended.

I was watching it on Hulu via Disney+, which evidently doesn’t just start another show when a show ends. Instead, it recommended a show I might like—Dance Moms: Abby’s Studio Rescue, which I’ve never heard of and in fact think I would not like. But I would have watched it in this circumstance, when the alternative was watching nothing. Because: Thomas was sleeping on top of the remote. And as everyone knows, it’s illegal to move a cat who’s relaxing on top of you.

This, I lay there feeling, is the best problem I ever had.

I had a similar feeling a few weeks ago, when our group farm internet was buffering and so whatever thing I was trying to watch wouldn’t load, and instead of getting frustrated (which I often do, sometimes suddenly and unbearably) I got a zingy little thrill and thought: White-people problems!

I felt like I’d made it. There’s a special class of problems that to me qualify as white-people problems, and this was one. It’s not to say I didn’t have any real problems all, of course; soon, a contractor who was supposed to start the process of fixing my badly cracked bathtub would arrive and be more openly hostile to me than any stranger has been…maybe ever, scary, standing there seething at me from a few feet away, in my small home space.