Hint

I’m a little disturbed by how many people have forwarded me this link, on how drinking coffee cuts back on liver damage from alcohol. It’s not like my caffeine addiction is secret- I’ve introduced more than a few people to Vivarin by pressing a tab into their hand and claiming that it’s a “nice, mellow buzz, totally amazing, dude”- and my propensity for drinking isn’t exactly Hoffa’s grave, but why is this the link that unites all of my friends in their perception of me? Where are the New Yorker articles and analyses of nonfiction and cryptic literary anagrams? Why this? It’s like that one Thanksgiving during college that my grandmother slipped a Dear Abby article into my cousin and mine’s suitcases, the one that claimed that men “won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free”.*

*Cliché, yes, but not when spoken by Dear Abby or your grandmother or a combination of the two, because when old ladies that say old lady things, it’s just right. Also, my cousin and I compared notes and then assaulted her with forward questions about sex, driving the whole family into a quaint New England moratorium on anyone ever admitting they had had sex, ever.