Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2003 | 11:26 AM

I sat with her at the kitchen table last night drinking Magic Hat #9�s and having the conversation I�ve been waiting to have for years. I never asked her �cause I figured she�d tell me all about it when the time was right. I guess the time was right last night because finally, I just don�t care anymore. Wait�strike that. I do care, but I care about it in the way I might care about a character in a book. And not even an important character. The character who gets shot on page five after buying some bananas and a porno mag. And anyway, there�s not much new under the sun as far as it goes.

Nothing she said was any kind of revelation. I had figured as much, and I shocked myself by being amused rather than hurt. The periods of time we view as Greek Tragedy while they are occurring become French Farce in hindsight.

Oh wow�that last line sounds like something the Professor in Oleana would say. Help�I am turning into a David Mamet villain, and not even the rich one who looks like Alec Baldwin and drives a porche. Somebody rescue me from the bloodless halls of academia and force me to take my fucking self less seriously.

Oh and on this subject I�m going to quote the great David Cross who is the harbinger of all things true, real, lovely, amazing, rock solid, and marinated in bile:

Another one [type of laugh] that I can�t stand is the I�m-in-on-the-joke laugh that people who fancy themselves posh and educated in all things social and cultural love to let you hear. This is the laugh where you hear the joke, but because everyone around you might not be as erudite as you, you swallow your laugh (but only after you�ve made sure people heard you quietly �get it�). You get to listen to that one a lot at unfunny Woody Allen movies or foreign films where a character makes a reference to �Flaubert� and the asshole in front of you with the cashmere turtleneck is the only one chuckling to himself. And that�s the sound of �happiness�!

I don�t mean to change horses in midstream (heaven forbid) but we ALL do this. You know who you are, you self congratulatory fuckers. I feel like everyone I know (myself included) is part of the �We�re So Much Fucking Smarter Than You Are� club. We are all pricks. Or dicks. Take your pick. I like prick better I think, but there�s room in this world for all of us. And if you don�t like words with I-c-k- in them, well cock will do just as well.

Hey�did you know that every great white man in the past was actually a black woman? It�s true. Also, Copernicus was Polish and �weapons of mass destruction� is actually a covert code term that translates roughly into �sand�. Read your bible. It�s all there.