Giving Thanks

Thanksgiving morning, I rushed to the supermarket for a quick last minute shop of forgotten items. Paper napkins and candles, for example. As I browsed through the aisles, there was a person next to me speaking loudly on her cellphone.

"Frickin' hell, I can't believe Thanksgiving time has come around atgain. I might just die, having to spend the entire weekend with the family." As you can imagine, I was shocked. But also instantly hooked. Actually, mostly I was just hooked. The person on the other end of the phone presumably uttered clucks of sympathy, for then my woman was grumbling again. "I can't believe they created a holiday forcing the entire family to spend time together. Just frickin' so irritating."

The sentiment was so incongruous with the goodness of Thanksgiving, and the excitement of a long-weekend, that I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. I was tempted to stick with her, I must concede, and see how the rest of her weekend transpired. But I had guests of my own, and things to get done, so I rounded the corner and continued my hurried shop.

In the next aisle I passed by two boys in their early twenties, two roommates doing their weekly shop, I quickly surmised. As I passed, I heard one say to the other, "I've never been more unenthused about anything more than this weekend. You can't imagine how boring it is to spend an entire four days with the family. It kills me."

Crikey, I thought to myself, as I quickly picked up what I needed and headed for the front desk. What's with all the Thanksgiving scrooges.

But I quickly forgot about it as the girl at the checkout started ringing up my items.

"Working on Thanksgiving?" I asked her sympathetically. "I hope you at least end your shift in time to be home for dinner?"

"Oh gosh, I always volunteer to work on Thanksgiving!" she responded with a laungh. "My family's mental, I'm happy to be out of the house on Thanksgiving day."

And all of a sudden, if I hadn't been before, I was especially thankful for the people with whom we sharing our giving of thanks.

Turkey Day

This morning, as I brushed an icycle off the tip of my nose, I rather disappointedly resigned myself to the realisation that winter is actually here.

Still, what that really means, I suppose, is that Thanksgiving is already upon us. This year marks the first time that Mike and I are hosting Thanksigiving at ours (well, come to think of it, it's the first year we have an 'ours' to host at). So we called the gang, and then we couldn't have anyone left out, so we called other friends who didn't have alternative plans, and all of a sudden, we were too many to cook for.

"Delta, what in the world are we going to do?! I can't cook for ten people! I don't even think I've ever made mashed potatoes before!"

Delta looked at me for a moment. "Let's just get it all on Fresh Direct".

And so it comes to be that the first Thanksgiving we are hosting, we are actually ordering the meal pre-cooked and pre-delivered from our online supermarket. Even (especially) the potatoes.

Welcome to the twenty first century.

When you know you're on to a lucky day

This morning I jumped out of bed with the fright of my life. Heart thumping in my ears and the works. Looked at the clock, and it was 8.30. Eight-thirty-frickin'-o'clock!!
"OMG f*&%ing shite!!" I shouted.
Poor Delta, soundly asleep next to me, rocketed out of the bed with a personal heart attack of his own.
"What happened?" he asked, once he'd surveyed the place rapidly and elimimated fire/earthquake/intuders, and had caught his breath a little.
"I guess I slept through my alarm. Go back to sleep," I told him soothingly. As if anyone can go back to sleep after being awakened like that.


Then I looked at my alarm and realised I hadn't overslept it. In fact, I'd entirely forgotten to set it the night before. How inconvenient. Especially seeing as I was supposed to have a 9am meeting this morning. There was no way I could make it to work by 9.


No time to think no time to think. Just pull on my jeans with one hand while brushing my teeth with the other and then quickly feed the cat while pulling on my socks and. Crap. There was just no way I was going to make it in on time.


So I logged into my email with all the noble intention in the world of confessing my over-sleep, and grovelling for a reschedule. Pulled up my inbox, and what's the top email there? An email from the person I was supposed to meet that morning.

Sorry, personal emergency, need to reschedule.


I couldn't believe my luck. Guess he had overslept too, if you ask me. Moot point anyway. So I put on my most magnaminous tone, and responded that of course I understood and would be willing to reschedule. But of course. Because that's just the kind of forgiving person I am.

Optimistic and hopeful

I hesitated to write this, I didn't want to go down rathole of politics, but I just have to. Or else think I might just burst.

"I think I'm going to head down to DC for Obama's inauguration speech in January," I told one of my colleagues yesterday.
"Oh you're just saying that because he's black." she retorted (obviously a republican).
I just blinked. I had no idea how to respond to something like that. It hit me in that instant, our spheres of comprehension, our parameters of reality, were so entirely different from each other, I couldnt' even bring myself to talk to her on the subject.

Of course it's because he's black!!! Don't you understand the enormity of what that means?! I wanted to shout.
But propriety (and my role as an HR bod) demanded a more polite etiquette than that. So i just smiled outwardly, and bit my lip inside till I almost drew blood.

But it was so much more than the race issue. It was larger than the petty and singular view of race that had polarised the country before. It marked the point in time when we had suddenly grown up, as a people, as a country. When we actually said to ourselves, that's enough of this rubbish - we are better than this. And for this, I could barely comprehend the surge of pride I felt. For this country which wasn't even my own, but to whom I felt a sense of belonging anyway. A country which had risen to the demands of the current day, and proved that the whole is truly better than the sum of its parts.

On election night, we had called everyone over for an election party. Over pizza, beer and wine, we alternately cheered and jeered at the telly, lifted by our own elation. Outside in the streets, as the news slowly unfurled, all of New York turned into a roaring continuum of excited chants and cheers. The atmosphere was contagious, spellbinding.

For the situation is more than Obama himself. It is the philosophy of unity he stands for. It is about witnessing history, in the making.
I am optimistic and hopeful, for the future that lies ahead.

A life of humour

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month (nanowrimo) for November. The thing about nanowrimo is that it demands an alarming alacrity of thoughts, and some hasty typing that gets my fingers in a tizzy. Needless to say, I'm already considerably behind schedule. Per my own calculations, I should have been about 10,000 words done today, in order to complete the requisite 50,000 words by the end of the month. But if truth be told, I'm on an embarrassing 5,700. I feel pressured, and pushed, and facing a tremendous writers block. Stuck at 5,700, what kind of novel is this going to be. Bah humbug.
"What are you writing about?" Delta asked me the other day.
"Oh, just about myself. I figured I'd start with the time that I moved to NewYork, and just see where it takes me."
"You're writing about yourself? So, erm, I hate to ask this but, how's that different from your blog?"
Touche.
I'll tell you how it's (marginally, microscopically) different. My blog is semi fictional. I mean, all the stuff that I said happens does actually happen, but I use some literary license to dramatize the mishaps of Ficali - you know? Just like a director might do when they make a film like "Into the Wild" (except with a lot less fame, no money at all, and considerably less glamour). So there's a bit of dramatic license, for humour's sake.

But with this mini-novel, I was determined to stick to the truth as much as possible. I started documenting my life with an exacting amount of accuracy, and a surprising amount of memory for detail. I started relating incidents as they actually happened.

But you know what? The stories were still funny. Without any exaggeration at all, the stories that encountered in my life just had a penchant for the ludicrous, somewhat like a Chevy Chase movie.

That's the story of my life. Just one funny thing after another, and me at the butt of it all. Rather an element of pathos to it all, but who am I to complain. I mean, I'm getting a blog and a mini-novel out of it, after all.