Excepting Alice, of course.
OK, so here's what I did on Thanksgiving.
I got up. That's a good start.
I got coffee at Starbucks. (Peet's was closed today.) I read for pleasure around there (in the seats outside Peet's because there weren't any tables left in Starbucks) for a while.
I went to the office and got some work done.
I had an early dinner with my parents and siblings at Club 41 (or whatever it's called) on Delacey Street. The food was decent, but dealing with my family is exceptionally stressful. They started the dinner off talking about the "full-bodied" taste (what the fuck does that mean?) of the wine they were having. This lasted several minutes. I wish one of my friends were around, so that during that part of their conversation I could overtly ask them, "So, what new video games are you playing?" or something else my family would flagrantly not care about. Ugh. (At least this time, that was only a few minutes. I've been at dinners with them that had 20 minutes of wine bullshit and 30+ minutes of my OBGYN father giving details about his patients. And people wonder why I'm messed up? At least I can talk about reasonable topics, like D & D, New Order, and quantum mechanics.) Anyway, I'll spare further details, but I am nothing like these people and it goes far beyond how many times I was dropped as a child. I swear that one of these days I am going to search through my house and find the adoption papers (flagrantly ignoring a couple obvious physical resemblances)... Maybe it was that whole thing about being dropped? Clearly, it did something to my head. I'd like to be more patient with my family, but being with them makes me want to beat my head against a wall until it's a bloody pulp. (And patience is not one of my strong points, by any stretch of the imagination...)
After dinner, I went over to Joe and Lorian's to play the new Serenity RPG. In contrast to dealing with my family, this stuff reduces my stress and is greatly enjoyable.
Oh, and I listened to Alice's Restaurant (the 18 minute version) at work today, which is a moral inperative on Thanksgiving. Well, not the work part---but listening to this particular song, which is a song about Alice.
1 hour ago
7 comments:
Mason, regarding wine: swirl, smell, sip, and look across the dining room, and describe the person insight. Hopefully you will get lucky and come up with descriptions such as "full bodied", and "a little fruity". I may have mentioned this before, it's a trick that a coworker taught me, but have not tried it out. Nontheless it's pretty amusing to me. - jing
Interesting---maybe that is what people mean. Of course, I don't drink wine (or any other alcohol), but it seems worthwhile to attempt this interpretation the next time such a conversation arises. At least that will let me pass the time and be less bored during those conversations.
Isn't it called swilling the wine (swirl, smell, sip)?
ooopsy! my advisor once asked me to use the word "caveat" in an abstract, and i showed up with "with some caviar...". he shook his head and found me a dictionary. -jing
Jing: That is excellent!
An even better one, however, was that one of my students once wrote about "consecration of energy" instead of "conservation of energy" in a draft of her research report. Clearly, she had spent too much time in Atlanta...
Then again, if one consecrates energy, I bet that would work really well against undead.
As for the wine stuff, it may well be called that, but I wouldn't know. Cornell actually had a very popular wine-tasting class that most of the "Hotelees" (aka, students in the Hotel school) tried to take. I had a Hotelee friend who I met in my bowling class. We had very cathartic bitch sessions. Presumably, stuff like that is among what they were suppose to learn in that class.
I've always considered myself blessed among Techers that my family lives over a thousand miles away, and thus I can't visit for all those random little holidays during the year.
As far as adoptions, adopted children from an ethnically similar genetic background can, in fact, appear similar to their adoptive parents, despite no biological relationship. At least, that was what I comforted myself with when I was living at home.
Lanth's comment reminds me about the part near the end in Real Genius in which Jordan and Mitch discuss the latter's introducing Jordan to his parents---the comment about his being embarrassed by his parents. Also, Prof. Hathway's comments at the beginning of the movie are apt: "Are you sure he's not adopted?", etc.
When I was away, I definitely didn't visit for random holidays in which I don't believe anyway. I guess I just don't interact well with people who don't know what an eigenvector is...
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