It's Thanksgiving weekend, 2021. For the past four or five years we've spent Thanksgiving at home, usually with friends but sometimes alone. I remember once, circa 2017, it was just the four of us, and I cooked a turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing and all that and nobody ate it but me. S was on some sort of weird diet and the kids were even younger kids, so they just wanted cereal or whatnot, and I was left to eat everything I cooked for the next week.
Last year we ordered out, but all the places serving traditional turkey dinners were sold out weeks in advance, so we got food from this Middle Eastern place, which was good, but it didn't remind me of being young, which is what I want on Thanksgiving. Their turkey kebabs were excellent, however. In fact, they caused a bit of consternation in the G & G family, because there weren't that many of them, and they were the only thing the kids liked, so S gave them most of them, and I only got a tiny portion.
S does that with the kids, and it really annoys me. If we are sharing a meal, and they only like one part of it, then she'll give up most of her portion of that thing and expect me to do the same. But I don't like doing that because, for one, we're the parents and we provided the food in the first place, and we're bigger and eat more (it's like Chris Rock's joke about dad always getting the biggest piece of chicken). For two, our kids our spoiled enough. They don't need to go grow up expecting us to give them the food off our plates when there is a whole table full of other options. That's just S's way though. She has this perpetual paranoia that our kids aren't getting enough to eat -- like we've failed as parents if they are ever hungry for longer than three minutes.
Anyway, this Thanksgiving we had plenty of every dish. S's sister joined us with her friend and her friend's boyfriend, so there were seven of us in total. I ordered from Whole Foods in advance, thinking it was basically from their hot bar, but it was all stuff that needed to be heated up. The turkey was an actual turkey, not servings of turkey like I was expecting. (The order just said "turkey for four.") Thankfully, I wasn't sure if it would be enough for seven people (it would have been, despite what the order said), so I had already cooked a smaller bird, and we didn't even need the Turkey they provided. (It's currently in our freezer, and I have no idea when we will next have occasion to prepare an entire turkey.) All we had to do was reheat the sides, which only took about 15 minutes, as opposed to the hours it would have taken to do the turkey.
It was pretty good -- not as good as homemade, but nothing ever is. I was three whiskey and sodas into the night by that point anyway. I have this bottle of scotch my dad bought me, like, 25 years ago, and I left it at my parents house unopened until they drove it out to me (with a bunch of other stuff) circa 2013. I finally opened it a few Thanksgivings ago, and now I pretty much only drink it once a year. Thanksgiving really is the best holiday for drinking, because you can start earlyish, get a nice buzz going, eat a huge meal, sober up by bedtime, and wake up the next day barely the worse for wear.
It was a good little Thanksgiving overall. It's supposed to be a holiday of gratitude, and I did have a genuine moment of thankfulness. It was after dinner and I just poured my last cocktail for the evening. S and Sw and her friend were playing a game of Rummikub, and the boys had dragged the boyfriend of Sw's friend downstairs to play video games. (Apparently, he's a total gamer, so I don't think he minded.) We just bought this nice Bose speaker, so I put on some jazz, and sat down in the front room of our house, no phone or anything, and sipped my drink. I looked out our big window into our peaceful neighborhood, and, with the music and the cocktail, it felt like I was in the 1950s, living the American Dream. You know, DG, it's not a bad life you've carved out for myself here.
In other news, we went to a Van Gogh exhibit on Wednesday. We met one of Lil' S2's friends and his parents there. It was pretty cool. They had a bunch of replications of his work up with facts and context about them, and then they had this huge room where they projected his art on the walls and floor and then they played sounds and music behind it (see below). It was legitimately trippy. Then they had this coloring exhibit, where you could color Van Gogh's paintings and then project them onto the wall. The kids loved that. They also had a VR exhibit, but I passed on that. It cost extra, and last time I put on a VR headset it made me kinda nauseous. Lil' S2 seemed to be having so much fun with it, however, that I wished I had tried it. Maybe the technology is better now, so it won't make me feel sick.
In other, other news, Lil' S1 has been doing so well on his spelling tests (100% on his last one) that S bought him a little Gameboy type of thing. It was super cheap, like $25, but it has over 160 games stored on it, and most of them are old NES games. It has a few of my favorites, so I've been hitting it up -- Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros., and best of all RBI Baseball. I was all fired up to beat Super Mario Bros. for the kids -- I totally remember how to do it -- but I wasn't able to. Some of the controls aren't perfect, and there doesn't seem to be a way to run at full speed and jump simultaneously. There's one part on level 8-2 that requires this, and I tried it about fifty times (literally) and wasn't able to do it. Sucks.
It also sucks that there is no Super Mario Bros. 2, the best of the Mario games, hands down, in my opinion. There is also, sadly, no Mike Tyson's Punch-out!! I know the kids, especially Lil' S2, would love that game. Maybe they couldn't get the licensing -- or maybe they just didn't want to include a boxing game in which the objective is to fight a series of ethnic stereotypes to earn a championship match against a convicted rapist. That could be it too. Whatever the case it's a shame, as that game will never be too problematic to not be awesome.
Until next time...
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