Snarky Behavior

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  And not just because of the food, although Thanksgiving food is the shit.  I love the idea behind Thanksgiving.  And this applies to multiple identities.

As a Host, I love Thanksgiving because it forces my family to get together.  On my mom’s side, at any given time, the interpersonal dynamics are such that every year, without fail, there is some party that is in some kind of fight with another party.  This means people are not speaking to each other, and so the “family get-together” is sufficiently awkward. 

That side of the family is all women (with the exceptions of myself, my Mexican uncle Manuel, and my German uncle Wolfgang), and so I am usually oblivious to both the nature and degree of the spats.  Since I thrive on awkwardness, this is always good times.  Plus there’s usually tamales, mole, and sauerbrauten, which I’m pretty sure you won’t find anywhere else. 

Sometimes, however, I get pulled into these spats (unknowingly).  This year, for instance, I didn’t book tickets to visit my mom’s family in San Diego.  My grandmother (Manga) wrote me a birthday card that simply read:  “I haven’t heard from you in awhile.  I thought we were friends.  This saddens me.”  The queen of guilt trips…. I love her.

On my dad’s side of the family, where we have disowned the white-trash extended family (in Missouri, pronounced “Missoura”), Thanksgiving is something else entirely.  We take turns going around the table, saying what we are thankful for.  It’s suprisingly heartfelt.  Usually we have a gay guest from our Unitarian Church who celebrates with us because he has been disowned from his own family, and has nobody else to celebrate with.  That’s heartwarming.

As a student, Thanksgiving represents a weekend to get away from school, drink my parents high-end liquor (which I am doing currently), convince my parents to buy me shit (going suit shopping Friday for hypothetical “interviews”), play the role of the “man of the house” (which entails not helping in any aspect, from cooking to cleaning… not only tolerated, but expected), watch football, take a nap, and so on and so forth.  It’s great.   

 I especially came to appreciate Thanksgiving after I graduated from college and moved far away from my family.  When you only see your family in yearly increments, they have a unique advantage to tell you how you’ve changed.  In the past, this has been mostly negative (have you put on weight?  When did you become such an asshole?)  But this year, my parents were adamant in telling me how much I had matured.  

I didn’t necessarily want to hear this confirmation, although I had suspected it to be the case ever since my 25th birthday.  I feel like grad school has aged me tremendously.  As if the demands and constraints of being an overworked student have drained my youth and vitality.  As if my life’s concerns have suddenly transformed from flippant to “adult.”  Being tremendously indebted will do that to you, I suppose.

(If you haven’t already noticed, I have no intention of making this post coherent.  Too drunk for that.  Every word I type requires at least four deletions for spell-checking purposes.)

Most of all, as an American, I like the idea of taking time to to be thankful  for the tremendous advantages we enjoy from being born in a country that just happens to be the most prosperous in the history of mankind.  I’m not sure how profoundly this gratuity may be, but in principle, its nice that we address it.

The downside of Thanksgiving is that it is the anniversary of the “Turkey Drop,” which is unoffially defined as “the last Thursday in November, when high-school relationships which persisted into college inevitably end.”  That is to say, six years ago I dumped my high-school girlfriend, and I haven’t really been in a substantial relationship of longer than 4 months ever since.

When I dumped my girlfriend, I did so because I felt that the cost of making a long-distance relationship work didn’t outweigh the benefits of actually being in a relationship.  Although I don’t regret the decision, in retrospect what I didn’t realize was that any relationship implies a cost, implies some sort of inconvenience or difficulty or effort.  It doesn’t matter if you live on separate continents, or if you live next door. 

My parents told me tonight that the only way to get through grad-school is with the loving support of a significant other.  That by its very nature, grad school is unrewarding in the short-term, and you must find validation elsewhere.  My dad was married when he got his Masters in Organic Chemistry, and my step-mom was raising my step-sister while she got her MPH. 

What they essentially told me was that I am unhappy by convention.  That I should be welcoming, not suspect, of the time, effort and commitment required of a relationship during this time in mylife.  

I don’t like the idea of codependence in principle.  But I must admit that it would be nice this year to be thankful to be in a fulfilling relationship.  In the meantime, I’ll just be thankful I have Johnny Walker’s Blue Label.