Love in the time of anthrax

For the past couple of weeks, my mood ring has been indicating a near-constant state of freak-out. As I awoke yesterday morning to read the news of a powdery substance found in Frist the night before, Rick James himself would be hard pressed to describe exactly how freaked out I became.

I know that the stuff in Frist was almost certainly harmless, perhaps sugar off a powdered doughnut someone chowed down on while checking his or her e-mail. And I know that I stand about as good a chance of contracting even mild, "cutaneous" anthrax as I do of getting tenure at Harvard. Still, the mere fact that I now know precisely what "cutaneous" means is giving me a heck of a helping of the heebie-jeebies. No matter how much hand-holding I get from Tom Ridge — no matter how many times he hugs me close and whispers softly that I have nothing to fear while tight between his manly arms — my psychic homeland remains fundamentally insecure.

No, this is not another Rooseveltian column on how the only thing freaking us out is freak-out itself. Rather than FDR, I'd like to quote a wise man and/or woman whose name I am too lazy to look up. "Just because you're paranoid," he/she/it once said, "doesn't mean they're not after you."

In appealing to this anonymous authority, I'm in no way suggesting that bioterrorists may actually have put me after Dan Rather and Tom Daschle on their list of VIPs to germinate. Nonetheless, someone, somewhere certainly seems to be plotting my doom. After much contemplation and an equal amount of Dewar's the other night, I finally figured out who it was: my editors at this very newspaper.

After all, as far as I can tell, the 'Prince' is the only paper in existence that feels the need to put the authors' hometowns and e-mail addresses at the end of every column. I had long failed to realize the import of this small editorial detail — until, that is, I recently wrote a series of anti-anti-war pieces. I soon found myself deluged with weeks of the most adamant anti-anti-anti-war e-mail imaginable. One local peacenik even threatened to picket the Grad College until I admitted the error of my hegemonic ways.

Not that I have any objection to such a fervent exchange of ideas, especially on a subject as important as the current anti-anti-war/anti-anti-anti-war debate. But in what way, my dear editors, does it enrich campus dialogue for the general public to know that I'm from Riverdale, N.Y.? I have yet to receive any correspondence expressing disagreement with my position that the United States has a right to defend itself, but explaining that — what, with my being from Riverdale and all — it is perfectly understandable that I would be unenlightened in such a prototypically North Bronx-y kind of way.

No, my dear editors, the only reason you release this information is so that my enemies can hunt down my childhood friends and immediate family. How this fits into your larger scheme, and whether you have any ties to the a- Qaida terror network, requires further investigation. Regardless, I do not hesitate to class you among those that President Bush so eloquently calls "the evil ones."

Still, if there's nothing I can do about this biweekly release of sensitive personal information, the least I can do is make use of it for my own purposes. For example, I could really use a pair of decent speakers that I could plug into the headphone jack of my laptop. If any of you 'Prince' readers out there have a pair for $50 or under, e-mail me at the address below. Heck, why limit it just to classifieds? Let's give this a whirl: "Single white columnist, 22, seeks female pundit-in-training for romantic evenings of Chilean Merlot and CNBC. Turn-ons: The New Republic, centrist Democrats, Maureen Dowd. Turn-offs: Terrorism, the Princeton Peace Network, Noam Chomsky. If you'd like to get opposite my columns, respond, in 650 words or fewer, to the address below."

All, remember, is fair in love and war, and now is certainly a time for both. So I look forward to our first date. I'll bring the wine; you bring the Cipro. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.