Ah, Thanksgiving... This chica knows what it's all about.
My first Thanksgiving spent at a house that wasn't my parents' or my sister's was odd. I missed the things I was used to having, like Dad's Waldorf salad. I don't even like the stuff that much, but it was just always there, and Thanksgiving seemed wrong without it. Maybe I'll make it for the Rhodes family T-Day this year... Less the walnuts, though. Walnuts are Satan's snack of choice (well, when he runs out of souls, and baby hearts, and such).
God help us, though, if the day ever comes when this is a Thanksgiving tradition...
Note to self - even if a word has become part of your everyday vocabulary, if it happens to be a word that originated in ethnic slang, then blithely using that word to someone of the ethnic background from which it came could result in the impression that you're trying to sound "street" and earn you a reply laced with sarcasm. For example, the sentence "I'm assuming it's a warranty thang", when sent to an email recipient who happens to be African American, may cause said recipient to write back very sarcastically "Thanks, girl! Peace out! Word!" *sigh*
Parroter of catch-phrases that I tend to be, "thang" is just one of those words I've adopted, and I would have written the same thing (thang) to anyone in my age group and bureaucratic level here... At the risk of coming off as even more of a git, I actually wrote and told the person (who's a really nice, friendly guy) that I wondered if he was mocking me because I sounded like a poseur, and I apologized if that's how I came off. He sent a sweet reply saying he didn't take it like that and was "just playing", so now I feel dumb for assuming he was offended... but I still kinda think he really was making fun of me but then felt bad that I noticed and apologized.
Either way, I'm sure I made too much of the whole thing - but I'd just hate to think that someone I worked with thought I was the Herbert Kornfeld of the Big R, so I erred on the side of caution. Tess, worrying too much about what someone thinks of her? Inconceivable... heh
Basically, what it all boils down to is that I'm a dork. Peace out.
I hope you'll take some time to go over and read the blog Iraq Now, written by 1st Lieutenant Jason Van Steenwyk of the Army National Guard. (Not sure how he's updating, but I think he emails entries to a friend who posts them for him).
Van Steenwyk is a good writer with a fine sense of dry wit; he offers some really intelligent, thoughtful, pragmatic insights on the war, the media, the Iraqi people, and the practical and personal challenges of daily life as a deployed soldier. If I were in the Army, this is the guy I'd want for a CO...
This morning the sky was gray and rainy; fall is finally, officially here - a month past schedule, but welcome all the same. Now the sun is shining on the wet asphalt and browning maple tree leaves outside my window, but I know that by the time I leave here at 5 o'clock it'll be dark out. Having the sun go down before I get home is hard to take - it makes me feel like I've been at work much longer than in summer, when you can still go home and still have some daytime left to spare.
The cold and the leaves and the rain and the early sunset are making me really miss London all of a sudden. I just went back and read an entry about planning to go there the last time. I thought about Suzi and Pete's recent trip - this morning I used the Marks and Spencer teabags and hand cream that they brought back for me. Yesterday Bill and I were talking about our next big trip, and we both felt that we could easily go back to London just as soon as go anywhere else - although of course there are many, many other places we really should explore before we go back to the one we've seen: Germany, Scotland, Belgium, Amsterdam, Ireland, Italy� At the end of this train of thought I just really, really wanted to be in London again.
My brother Thom was unimpressed with the city during his recent visit � "Too touristy", he said. "Too many foreigners, too crowded." He's not wrong. It's a challenge to encounter an English person in the touristy parts of London. Some of the best times we had in the city were when we went off the beaten path, like when we took the Tube to a working-class neighborhood and walked along the streets, checking out the little curbside markets selling familiar veggies with unfamiliar labels ("courgette" for zucchini, "aubergine" for eggplant) and the people and the lorries and the bustle of a normal day. People were actually looking at us oddly when we spoke with American accents, as if thinking, "Why aren't you at the Tower, or the Eye, or some museum?"
We did plenty of sightseeing too, don't get me wrong� but the memories that really stick out for me are the more subtle ones - like walking through Hyde Park and seeing a group of ponies carrying children in brass-buttoned riding jackets, and scores of silvery kamikaze squirrels leaping around for booty, and packs of football players running across the bright green grass, seemingly oblivious to the cold mud clinging to their legs, and the polite interrogation of a park policeman who was suspicious of why we were hanging around too long behind a tree near some bushes (to prove we weren't up to something nefarious, we had to 'fess up and explain about the Geocache there, in which we were dropping our travelbug, George � he was amazed that this box had been hidden there for months without his knowing about it, but in the end seemed quite tolerant and amused about the whole thing). I remember Ted, the 80-year old former drive-in-lorry-wash entrepreneur wearing his Kensington Rowing Club cardigan ("I still row there twice a week!"), who politely asked to join us at our table and told us about how as a Royal Navyman in WWII he volunteered to dive for mines, because he made an extra threepence a day for it (three extra pennies, for putting a big tin can on his head, diving into freezing dark ocean water, and defusing bombs...). I remember the wet gray streets, and the smell of rain and car exhaust and damp grass and curry shops, and the incredible centuries-old carved-stone buildings, their glowing windows testifying to their continued vitality - that distinctly European fusion of the modern day with centuries of history which even the oldest cities in America can't match - and the carefully blank faces of commuters protecting their personal space mentally while forced to stand torso to torso with each other on the Tube at rush hour.
Yes, London is expensive and touristy and somewhat grubby; but it's also lively and park-laden and historically rich, and beautiful in its own jumbled, soot-stained, busy way; I love it madly. I miss it often. I will go back again and again, because there will always be something new, and something old, and something else to see.
Oh, sweet baby Jebbus...
My score: 142.5. I'm frightened at my own prowess. Did I do nothing but listen to bad radio in my formative years?
Surely I can't be the only one out there who has this much useless crap floating around in my archives! So it's your turn. Take the quiz and post your score, por favor.