Happy Starving Puritans Day

The angry, guilty, wannabe socialist part of me is not a fan of Thanksgiving. It's basically a gluttonous corollary to Columbus Day - I prefer "American Genocide day" - replete with a strange array of late-capitalist consumerist outbursts, from the Macy's parade to Black Friday.

That being said, Thanksgiving dinner is totally the best dinner ever. Tonight I had a great time with my friends Ryan and Katie wandering all over Billyburg trying to find the ingredients necessary to bake pumpkin pie, which was both fun and delicious. Tomorrow I'm going to a pot-luck style dinner that some my friends of mine in Chelsea are having. I'm making cranberry sauce, which, as I have been forced to explain to several people in the past week, is different than finding it in a can. If I can't be with my family for this holiday - and since I moved to New York, I haven't been - it's nice at least to have somewhere warm and welcoming to go.

And putting aside my cynical reservations, I do think that taking time aside from the business of everyday life to be with friends and family and acknowledge the things we're thankful is a ritual with some value.

I'm thankful that I have a place to go and people to be with this year. Further, I'm thankful that I've been lucky enough to have found caring, intelligent, talented people in New York who make my days warm throughout the year. I'm thankful for life, health, and relative sanity. I'm thankful for new and incredible music, movies and books. I'm thankful that so many people have recently realized that Bush is awful. I'm thankful that I'll be graduating soon. I'm thankful for a lot more stuff, but that covers the basics. Oh, and I'm thankful for you.

Unless you're Bush. In which case you should probably be reading something like, I don't know, the Times instead of my blog.