Who Do I Think I Am??

This one's about the Anti-Thanksgivian.

What's up y'all? We all know what yesterday was, and we know what today is as well. I'm thankful for a year at least that I'm not working in retail, so that I don't have to deal with a lot of the nonsense that goes into today.

For years, Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday. It still is, by and far, my favorite meal. In fact, many years ago, my folks asked me what I'd like for dinner on my midsummer day's birthday, and I requested a Thanksgiving feast complete with all the trimmings. At the end of July. And I got it. There I was, with my family and a few of my close friends...80 degrees and turkey.

My folks made up for it a few years later by completely forgetting about me throughout the course of an entire Thanksgiving and Christmas season. They summed up that odd season perfectly by splitting up sometime I believe in the following January. I found out while ordering breakfast for dinner with them at a restaurant. The family has since splintered in several directions, and Thanksgiving is no longer shared.

I still managed to enjoy some Thanksgivings though, be it with friends who were considered family, or new families that I was sort of adopted into. But I think the holiday was ruined completely for me just a few years ago. I was dating a woman, and like most I fell hard and fast in love, but she was different. It would be, I believe, our third Thanksgiving together, but our first after making that all-important business decision of moving in together about six months earlier. It was a bad business decision on both ends.

We had plans to eat with her family, some of whom were coming in from out of town. The holiday started normally, with preparations beginning the night before of what we were going to bring. She started cooking, I offered to help, there wasn't much for me to do, and so I got out of the way. We awoke the next day, and I was thinking we'd get ready, finish whatever it was we were bringing, and be on our way.

Boy was I wrong.

The woman remained in bed. A severe crying jag she was in the midst of. Now, we rarely ever fought, so this felt very new and strange to me. I really couldn't comprehend what was happening. I went to see what was wrong, and she began a tirade against me. She tore into me bigtime. About everything. All of my faults. Everything I did and didn't do, and especially the things I did wrong. And of course, she was right. This left me powerless. I knew she was right. I left her alone to sort herself, thinking she'd take a shower, start getting ready, and we'd enjoy the day. Silly me.

I probably lost track of time, being in my own little world (one of the things I was very good at doing wrong). Before I knew it, the woman, who I was very much in love with, was screaming again from the bedroom. I didn't realize a few hours had passed. It was closer to dinnertime, and she had yet to get ready. "I've been in here for hours crying, and you haven't checked on me or tried to comfort me or see what was wrong?" I hadn't, because I knew what was wrong from the previous tirade. It was still wrong. There wasn't enough time, nor was it something I could just reach into my toolbox for to fix appropriately. It was something two people in a relationship together had to work through. And sometimes, I was (I thought) smart enough to know, some people need to have a good cry to themselves before they can attempt to fix anything.

Like I said earlier, this was all new to me.

My take on the situation was, of course, the wrong take. Apparently, reading minds takes holidays off in our house. My thought process regarding the situation was, in fact, the incorrect manner of handling the situation. There was more female yelling, there were tearful phone calls, and there was no Thanksgiving meal with family. I'm pretty sure there was some sort of female "monthly condition" in play as well, but I was not in any position to speculate further. I think what saddened me the most about this day was that she was not going to be able to spend it with her family, especially the ones from out of town. I know I felt terrible about that.

The day dragged on. I didn't want to eat, thinking that at any moment she might change her mind and we'd be off, and I would've hated to ruin my appetite for my favorite meal given the circumstances. So as day turned to evening, as football games began and ended, I myself turned from thoughts of food to beverages. I decided I was going to have a few beers and forget it all; the holiday was officially a wash. Of course, this was about thirty seconds before the woman who I dearly loved came out and said her relatives were on their way, bringing food to us. I honestly didn't know how I felt, seeing as how I'd made peace with the day that was not to be anyway already.

The woman and I made peace as well with our feelings. I agreed I would help out more and be an even better person. I wasn't great, but I wasn't bad. However, this proved to be somewhat prophetic in our relationship. The next Thanksgiving went off without any hitch, but the same argument would emerge time after time. The crippling crying jags, my powerlessness of consolation, the willingness to do nothing until I gave up. That next Thanksgiving would be our last.

I don't celebrate very many holidays. Primarily because they don't interest me in some way or another. Some you need others to celebrate with you, and some can be celebrated on their own merit if you so choose (and those are the ones I usually skip out on anyway). Yesterday was the first holiday in quite some time that I would've actually celebrated, but I was alone and unable to.

I woke up and got dressed. I put on shorts because the weatherperson said it'd be shorts weather for me, and this made me happy because I like to wear shorts, and it might be the last time all year I could wear shorts. I went to the big CVS across the street and prepared for my turkey day feast: a can of Chunky chili, a pint of cookie dough ice cream, and something else I forgot already because it wasn't important. I also had the previous day's newspaper, because there wasn't going to be a holiday edition printed. I made it back to my room and ate the ice cream right away, because my tiny fridge unfortunately doesn't keep frozen stuff frozen very long. I found that out the hard way the day before with a different pint of ice cream.

I spent the day reading. Between Wednesday night and Thursday night I read a total of three novels, each over 300 pages. A fifty year history of the Buffalo Bills, a series of newspaper and magazine interviews with Charles Schulz (the cartoonist behind Charlie Brown), and a biography of John Lennon (yes, that guy). I was disappointed in the Schulz book because over the course of 50 years, it seemed like every interviewer basically asked him the same questions, and he gave pretty much the same responses.

Throughout the course of the day, I kept my can of chili on the heating unit of the room. My room gets ridiculously hot, and since I'm not allowed to cook in the room, I figured this would help. Around dinnertime (normal people dinnertime, not the holiday standard of 2pm...who the hell eats dinner that early anyway??), maybe 5pm-ish, I took off for a walk around town. It was eerily quiet, even for a big family kind of holiday. I spent an hour outside, walking around. I saw some places I'd heard of but hadn't seen before, and arrived at a few places I'd only been to by walking randomly around. At one point I came across a group of people. I had no idea what they were doing, but it seemed like a large group of people to be out randomly on a holiday.

I decided to go back home. I hadn't really heard from many people...just a text from a friend wishing me a happy Thanksgiving, and a text from a number I didn't recognize saying the same thing. Normally, years ago, I would've responded by echoing the sentiment and asking who it was, but this year I didn't. I'd just gotten this phone and had only given the number out to a handful of people, and this person wasn't one of them. I tried cross-referencing the number in my old phone, but it wasn't in there either. It was a 716 area code, but I no longer live in the 716 area. There were a couple people I was really hoping it might be, a few more (well, ok, one) more than others, but it was most likely not. I never persued it.

I just kept listening to the radio, reading my books. Finally I finished the last one. I never got around to making my chili. I wasn't really in the mood. I'm still not.

MUSICAL BREAK!!

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

VITAL STATS:

If ya go out and do the "Black Friday" thing, be nice to the poor souls who're waiting on you. They don't wanna hear your crap. They don't care if this is the most important Christmas of your life. They're making a few bucks so you can shop at an ungodly hour. Give 'em some respect. And if the store sells out early of that super-sweet deal of whatever, it's not the end of Christmas or the world as we know it. Get over it. Better yet, instead of shopping, spend a little more time with your loved ones.

That's really all for today. I've just been in a mood lately. We'll see how that works out. Peace, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!