Thursday, November 24, 2005

I am Thankful for....um...I'm thinking...


So there you are, sitting around the table, a feast of unimaginable proportions lay before you. The food is on your plate. Your glass is full of wine. Your stomach is rumbling, because you've been fasting all day waiting for this glorious moment. And then someone brings it up. You were hoping this moment wouldn't come. The question is asked, "What is everyone thankful for?" They go around the table. You're thankful that you weren't first, that's for sure...but what else? I mean, there are innumerable things you ought to be thankful for... for instance, you wouldn't be celebrating Thanksgiving if you didn't live in America, and being born here is kind of like winning the lottery in a sense. The vast majority of people are not born in America, and the largest portion of people in the world are very poor and do not get to eat turkeys in November, and don't have presidents who pardon one turkey for a photo op on said holiday. As a sidenote, I've always thought this was a stupid tradition...I mean, the Turkey has not commited any sort of crime (beyond being born a turkey sometime before Thanksgiving), and therefore has nothing to be pardoned for. But the president always saves one from the choppnig block (actually, he pardons two). So anyway, there you are, dreading your turn turn to talk about what you're thankful for.

Invariably your turn comes around; you complement the cook, whoever made the food, whether the bird is dry or not, mention a significant other or two out of obligation, and if you're lucky, you can manage to crack a joke or two and not sound like you've been forced into it. Then everyone says grace, an interminable thirty seconds, and then, finally you get to eat. You dig in, thankful mostly that all that traditional stuff is out of the way, and you can finally do what Thanksgiving was started for in the first place, stuffing your fat face until you can't eat anymore, because if you do, you'll just yack it all up and feel like crap for the rest of the night, or worst, your stomach will burst and you'll die a horrifyingly painful death as stomach acid leaches out into your abdomen, destroying all sorts of sensitive organs and tissue.

Turkeys are hideous birds. Take a moment to click on the pictures. They're awful.
The top picture may be meant to be somewhat touching...but let's face it, it's kind of disturbing. I mean, there's really nothing majestic about these birds except that something like eighty percent of thier body mass is edible and delicious (if prepared properly and not injected with an absurd amount of meat-rubberizing hormones). I'm thankful that I'm not a Turkey. I'm thankful that I'm not from Turkey, for that matter.

It's not that I hate the Thanksgiving. Far from it, tonight, I got completely smashed and ate enough food to feed a young boy in a chinese sweatshop for three weeks. It's just that sometimes holidays are not fun in the same way that they used to be when we were kids. When you're a kid, you have no responsibility beyond having a good time...but now, holidays can become very stressful, especially if you're having dinner with family that you "haven't seen in a while." It's like some P.R. meeting or some sort international summit. You're on your best behavior. You make peace with your uncle who's an abusive closet drunk. Everybody knows it, but it's a bigger sin to disrupt the false stability of the holiday than to point out what an incredible asshole that guy is. Okay, so most of this is an extreme hypothetical situation. This year the day was mostly pleasant. However, I have had some really bad ones (wait till I post on Xmas).

I am thankful that some people will read this and get a laugh.

3 comments:

Froyd said...

I don't think you're a doctor, I think you're a fraud. and a quack.

Dr Kuha said...

Do you have a point? Or are you just typing to see yourself type. Besides, what would it mean if I wasn't a doctor? Nothing. Because being a Doctor means nothing.

Froyd said...

how very nihilistic of you.

all I'm sayin' is that a REAL doctor would have been at brigid's cross last night.