Turkey thoughts
A debrief from the long weekend.
Thanksgiving food is just not that good. I used to look forward to eating a little bit of turkey because it only happens once a year, but now that I’m the one making all this stuff I can safely say that none of it is really that good—and there’s always too much left over and we never eat it fast enough before it goes bad.
I never hated The Holidays until recent years. Even though my family has always been difficult and extremely flawed, crazy shit never boiled up around the holidays. Just on regular days. I think it’s because most families who go crazy around the holidays do so because they’re stressed out from the pressure of having to perform The Holidays correctly. My family never cared about doing things “right” or being good hosts.This kind of pressure is a uniquely American thing and I’m only half American on my dad’s side. My (American) aunt always timed her cooking poorly and everything would be cold. Around ten years ago we started just doing Thanksgiving with the four of us: my mom, my dad, my brother, and me. Then it was three of us plus my brother’s girlfriend. Who are we to impress? The real stress comes from just being around each other, which also used to be more palatable but has changed due to things like time and grief. It’s a lot of work to keep things going and keep morale high—but hey, that’s what big sisters are for.
It’s misleading to say that I hate The Holidays. I actually love them, when it’s outside the context of blood family relations and mandatory work parties. I love eating food and the lights and decorations, cheesy Hallmark/Netflix/Lifetime/etc. movies, and giving people small gifts. I’m ambivalent about mulled wine but I will drink it happily. For some reason winter events happen outside when it’s cold and I’ll walk around the fucking zoo every time. I even enjoy that 85% of my friends have birthdays during Sagittarius season, making it extra busy for birthday parties on top of everything else. My friends are also not people who really care about appearances and in impressing each other through extravagance, even though all of their parents are American.
In typical my family fashion, we’re going through a lot of changes very fast. This time it’s material changes—a new apartment for my dad to live in that’s smaller and cheaper and less full of black mold in the walls. The move-in date popped up fast and it’s time to clean out the house that has been called “home” for the last thirteen years. It’s taking a lot of time because there’s just so much fucking Stuff. Don’t you hate it whenever you move, when you’re putting stuff into boxes and thinking to yourself, “How the hell do I have this much stuff? Where did all this stuff come from?” It’s like that but it’s the stuff of like four people over the course of thirty years.
Most of the stuff is (was) my mom’s. Why the heck did this woman have so much Stuff? Boxes of stuff. Boxes in boxes of stuff. Stuff on the walls. Five different serving plates we never used, one for each major holiday. My mom is the one that’s not American, and up until she left Poland for the U.S. she lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my grandparents and whichever of my aunts were there at the time. I’ve been to this apartment and it is not big. There’s not a whole lot of room for stuff. In Poland you can’t have a lot of stuff. But in America? That’s the place to have stuff! To have rooms of stuff. To have stuff—that’s the freedom they talk about on the television.
Black Friday isn’t a big deal anymore. At least not within my social circle. I think it’s because we’re too broke but also we all live in apartments that are just too small to have more stuff than we need. I don’t like to buy shit I don’t need, but I also like to collect old stuff. I also have a ton of my mom’s old stuff that I feel like I can use, or feel too bad to throw away (problematic, I know!). I keep getting gift cards of various amounts from work in a way of them saying thank you for working extra hours for no real good reason, instead of them just paying me more. There’s never enough in the budget for THAT. Look at the market!
I know this whole thing sounds kind of pissy, and maybe it really is! I feel fine, but there hasn’t been anything on my mind except for the loss of time I’ve had the past couple of weekends due to cleaning out a house and I have Big Applications due in like 48 hours! Yikes! Wish me luck!
Also the Bears keep winning and I need whatever they’ve got going on to sprinkle onto me so I can start winning after a dry period since 2007. Let’s go!