sometimes, being an adult can be truly wonderful. sometimes, as so painfully well pointed out in Being John Malkovich "consciousness is a terrible curse. i think, i feel, i suffer." but sometimes you find yourself in a good pain from a full belly, with friends and acquaintances surrounding a naked carcass of roast beast, talking shit, sipping wine, feeling alive.
thanksgiving can be good for that.
as a kid or young adult, thanksgiving can be a purveyor of stress, tight lipped conversations rife with passive-aggressive demands for gravy. but now that i'm hundreds and hundreds of miles away from a family whose matriarch alone i keep any meaningful contact with, it's good. it's soooo good.
so good, i had to do it twice!
saturday night, i went to a friend's to join her and friends for the first feast of the weekend.
on sunday, matt and angela (dear friends, former flatmates - well, matt had actually been my lover too) invited me to share the HUGE FUCKING turkey they'd bought. having a table, it made sense to do it chez moi. one call here, another there, and before you know it, every last chair in my place was filled.
same salacious and satisfying story as saturday: people connecting, consuming, chatting, sharing. things in common, things to discuss, things to just sit back and contemplate. and food, such food. we even had 4 pies for 8 people! too hilarious... quote of the weekend actually pertains to that, from angela: "pumpkin pie is the carrot cake of pies."
all in all, it was a great fucking way to spend a weekend. happy thanksgiving indeed! despite the colonial history, despite the continued racism against our first nations brothers and sisters, despite thanksgiving seeming to be a celebration of that hypocrisy and cruelty, i chose to embrace it as an opportunity to gather, feast and be merry with some of the people i've been lucky enough to meet in my newest home.
i think that's ok...
3 comments:
I doubt you are capable of avoiding your tendency to be nice. That's just how it goes, sister. Grapple, grasp, and embrace. You are: you are.
Trust me, it makes sense.
A kind of, early Thanksgiving... is it not? Pardon my typical American ignorance, but do you all in the 51st state have a different Thanksgiving than the original colonies or what? Booze and cigs with good company makes for a fantastic celebration, any time of year.
Cheers!
> I doubt you are capable of avoiding your tendency to be nice.
heh yea right, ask my ex-lovers...
(mwahahaha)
yep - october thanks for us northern kids. november gets remembrance day. for a while in our tiny history, it was actually in april (to celebrate some prince's recovery or something), which is just silly considering it started as a celebration of harvest. come to think of it, november's a little late to be celebrating harvest. crazy politicians, changing dates for their nefarious agendas. fuckers.
oh, and call me your 51st state again, and you'll see me get mean. puttem up! puttem up! (lol)
Yes. I don't doubt your potential for ferocity, especially if I compared your national song to "O'Tannenbaum" - but I would never do that. I made the mistake of saying "man, it's JUST like the states here!" while in a Toronto bar, right after a Raptors game.
Didn't go over so well with the locals. I had to buy several bottles of Molson Export (never *exported* anywhere) and dole them out to enraged strangers in order to calm the situation. You Canadians aren't as friendly as you would have us naive yanks believe...
Did I already tell you this story? Shit, probably.
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