11/28/2005 - 4:25 a.m. | getting torpedoed

Subject: Thanksgiving

It�s later now, and there is nothing on besides table tennis. Some of the lady players are looking pretty hot, which is what we call a further sign of trouble.

Do not call it �Turkey Day.� Do not call that shit the day after �Door busters.� Those are my two holiday rules.

Ditto "Black Friday." I will fucking rip your heart out.

I did not get drunk. Not because I was hungover, but� it was almost tolerable. I can pass hours now, and the 5 we spent there didn�t seem so long as they used to. Maybe I�m growing up.

Then again, a good portion of that time was spent using the babies� Weebles (�wobble but they don�t fall down�) see-saw as a catapault, launching shit across the room in an escalating series of challenges (e.g. Dad firing egg people while I rolled the baby cart across the room, hopefully culminating in a perfect landing� When the book is published, I will insert a little diagram here so that it is clearer). It more or less finished when I toppled a glass of wine and spent the next half hour combing the rug and using some magic stain remover to get that hell off their new cream carpet. Luckily, for some strange reason, I have an eye for details like that.

Also for some strange reason I won fifty dollars. In some sort of ticket-based betting game. And you know how much I care for football. And my dad bought the tickets. So really it might seem a hollow victory, but I certainly hope not because maybe prize-winning makes up for horrible luck the rest of the time.

The food was good. By which I mean salty. That�s all I require anymore anyway. But it was forms of salty different from the typical situation. Turkey was dry meaty salty, potatoes were creamy smooth salty. And I�ve been longing for stuffing for a �. a fortnight. Yes, at least a fortnight.

My aunt Debby�s parents frighten me, as you probably well know. Kenny is a mouthbreather and has a mystery black blob on his hand (for some reason, it makes me think of steak). His wife is somewhere between worlds, (and I don�t just mean the booze) usually drifting back down to mention at least twice how impressed she was when I was younger, all precocious and talkative and whatnot. I feel like I�ve let them down in recent years, even if I am still both of those things. It�s just a lot easier to be impressive as a tiny child. For instance, I apparently taught myself to read at 4 years, second grade level even, which I myself would admit is an unusual feat. However, reading long ago lost its ability to impress, and here I am now with my tie (Yes, a tie� I know you all think I�m an artfag for it, but I think it looks good on me� Frames my body or something) and my muttered asides and my near-refusal to appear in photographs, and I don�t think they get it anymore at all. This is what smart babies do when they grow older. They turn into freaks you don�t get. So be happy your babies are normal, all right? They�ll be able to make good conversation later on.

Yes, we have babies now, so maybe less pressure resides in that. Everyone focuses on the children, and because they receive such a majority of the attention, there is less around to ask me about school, thank God. Hopefully they will keep squirting them out every couple of years. Not that I do not think they are cute myself, and I would gladly play with them if it were just us (in fact, I am secretly quite possessive), but there are about a dozen other people screaming baby talk commands at them, and if I were in there place, I could use any space anyone would give me. Of course, babies are not like me (Thank God � they would be all temperamental, scrawling little diatribes on the wall in crayon), so they probably don�t worry about that stuff at all. Still, sometimes I wish I had a little baby girl (always a girl, as they are much, much cuter, and maybe I could teach them to approach shy boys in their teenage years) who would be all cute like a sheep and want to come to me and give me cute hugs. Which did actually make me try and picture what a baby made of me and Missy would look like (an awkward mess that would be, impregnating her). �Skinny� is all I can think of, because �fucking bonkers� is not a physical description.

I guess that�s mostly it. The babies kept constantly playing with this little plastic piece of pizza that kept playing stereotypical Italian MIDIs, and I have not been able to get it out of my head since. I came home and ate more, because I don�t really understand eating holidays, and then watched films with varying emotions. Dodgeball to Titanic to Garden State, which is to say admiration to sobbing* to wanting to do ecstasy more than anything. Just that one scene, man. I don�t even love the rest of that movie. But I�ve been there, and I would sort of like to go back.

*I know, I know � it�s tripe. I�m very well aware of this. Doesn�t change the fact I get all weepy. Wish I died in a damn disaster. Which do you think is braver, by the way, because the movie can�t seem to decide � fighting to survive against all odds or nobly accepting death? Actually, there was a conversation between my grandmother and Kenny wherein they talked about being old and sick but still fighting to live. If anyone had been watching me, they would have registered either shock or disgust. I do not �get� the elderly. Which is to say I�m a horrible ageist.