YAY!! I Survived Thanksgiving and Lived to Write About It!

Well, I made it through TG DAY. YAY!

And I didn’t:

1. Wander off into the woods in a huff after a TG Day annoyance, only to be found 24 hours later, alive and freezing, like the woman from Gloucester, MA.
2. Lock my kids in the trunk of my car, like the man from Fall River, MA (OK, this was Tuesday, but I think it counts as “Thanksgiving Week” behavior).
3. Shoot anybody, like the 76 year-old man in Colorado who shot and killed his 46 year-old son in an argument over chores.
4. Jump up and down on my mattress, fraying an electric cord, which then caused a fire, like the kids in Brockton, MA, resulting in 200K damage to two triple deckers.
5. Eat 3000 calories for my evening meal, like the average American at Thanksgiving dinner.
6. Crash a White House State Dinner (which really could have been interesting...maybe...although politicians DON’T strike me as the most fascinating people in the world...). Again, Tuesday, but it counts.
7. Crash my SUV into a fire hydrant pulling outta my driveway at 2:35 a.m. Thanksgiving night like Tiger Woods did, after an argument with his wife. (he’s OK, even though his wife then came running out to "help" him with a golf club in her hand)
8. See an image of Jesus in the bottom of my iron, like the woman in Methuen, MA (that woulda freaked me out, I’d say—although I have seen some pretty strange things in my life, such as a fish jumping for joy at a fish-less pond on Mont Royal in Montreal).
9. Line up at 3 a.m. for some cheap electronic junk from China that I really don’t need, like just about everybody did.
10. Get drunk or stoned, or call up some faithless ex-boyfriend for a "quick, let's avoid reality" booty call, or eat an entire pan of brownies in an attempt to space myself out on sugar.

So all in all, I am feeling pretty pleased with myself. All I did was get suicidally depressed for several hours, write some of the bleakest words ever to be put to paper, yell at the woman who works at the Harvard Square Theatre “You are HORRIBLE!!! You’re HORRIBLE!” after she was really nasty about letting me use the bathroom (I did it ANYWAY, so there!), shed a few tears on the bus, ate an entire bucket of buttered popcorn, sent a couple of guilt-tripping texts, and hated my roommate some more.

On the positive side, I met some nice people during my travels (including the British guy who buys an India ale every day from Cardullo’s and has lived here since 1967), made really fantastic homemade mince meat, realized again that I am SO grateful Werner Herzog and all his weirdness exists in this world, AND I didn’t jump off any bridges!!! So I consider this Thanksgiving a real success.

As a side note: I have a sign on the wall of my bedroom which reminds me to “Say YES to yourself!” and sometimes that involves saying NO to other people, including family members who might be inclined to use any get-together as an opportunity to have major screaming fits, as painful and difficult as that NO may be.

Next year I plan to be surrounded by love love love. Whatever it takes, I am damn well finding that in this world and making love love love the centerpiece of my life. That’s exactly what the extraterrestrials who landed in Africa in 1994 advised. OK, they said forgiveness is important too, but I’ll take this one step at a time. Here’s a link, for the skeptical among you:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case127.htm