Thanksgiving

We're almost there. If I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can already smell the turkey. The mashed potatoes. The gravy. The stuffing. The second helping of all that stuff. The third. The Tums.

Thanksgiving is, aside from watching midgets try to climb a flight of stairs, the single greatest thing any human being can experience. Most people probably disagree with me. Some may say the greatest thing anyone can experience is love. Others, self-confidence. Still others, a Chipotle burrito with extra meat. But those people are all wrong. It's Thanksgiving.

Whoever invented Thanksgiving (it probably wasn't the Pilgrims – my money's on James Dyson. That guy could design a shirt without a neck hole, and it would still be awesome) deserves a plaque made of the ground-up bones of Nobel Laureates. It's a holiday focused entirely on eating until you rupture your stomach. Then you watch football. Then you eat some more. If there exists something better, I'll ask you not to tell me about it, as I'm sure it would cause my head to explode.

Sure, ostensibly, it's about giving thanks for all the stuff you've got. And I'm not against that at all. The things I'm usually thankful for include these sweet-ass socks, “Arrested Development,” and ninjas. But in the postmodern tradition of my stupid generation, the thing I'm most thankful for is Thanksgiving itself.

If you're a “LOST” fan, Thanksgiving is my constant. If you're a Tarantino fan, it's my Brian DePalma homage. If you're a Kevin Smith fan, it's my huge bag o' weed. If you're a Joss Whedon fan, please kill yourself.

I look forward to it starting on Black Friday the previous year. Once Halloween hits, I start to dream about swimming in pools of turkey gravy. It's a sickness. But I know the cure: Eating turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing and pumpkin pie until I feel a little bit guilty and adopt a child from Uganda or something.

Plus, it affords me the opportunity to get together with my family, and unlike most people, I actually like my family (yes, that was ambiguous, and no, I'm not changing it).

Almost everyone glosses over Thanksgiving, and that's just not right, especially since it's a very jealous holiday and it owns several guns. To many, it's simply the gateway to Christmas. It's a harbinger. A pre-game. A checkpoint. But to me, it's the greatest thing since reversible windbreakers. So here's to you, Thanksgiving. I just hope you brought more wine.

Family Vacation

I'm a Californian, which is to say that I take orders from a man with a ridiculous Austrian accent. But really, all that means is I was born in California, lived there for a while, and stubbornly insist that I still identify more with that state than with any other. It's much like my mother insisting that, despite having brown hair, she's still a blonde because she's “got blonde coloring.” In any case, I'm a Californian. My relatives are almost all Californians. It follows that when I go on a family vacation to attend my cousin's wedding, our destination will likely be California.

Such was the case less than a week ago. We all jumped on a plane (not literally, of course – that would be silly) and flew down to sunny San Diego, CA, to watch my cousin get, as the kids say, married.

Did you know that the San Diego airport is, like, right there in the city? Looking out the window as we prepared for our landing on a 13-foot-long runway, I felt like I was carpet bombing Dresden. (History, you've been zung!) You really start to believe that you're about to slam into a high rise. Don't get me wrong; it's a wonderful city. It's just that their airport may as well be called “The 9/11 3D Experience.”

After tooling around The Velcro City (that's my nickname for San Diego, which I just made up), we drove up to Temecula to stay with my grandparents for a few days. Lemme give you a little background on my dad's dad: He's survived a stroke, a heart attack (or two, or nine), cancer, the Carter administration, and numerous slave uprisings, and he's still kickin'. He's also entirely unfamiliar with the concept of “tact.” I love the man to pieces (which, by the way, is an extremely bizarre image), but he's nuts. He once grabbed a waitress' shirt so he could read one of her buttons. The very first thing he said after I hugged him was “Can you fix the TV so the videos'll work?” to which I replied “Grandpa, you don't have a VCR.”

The next day was the wedding. It was a mercifully short ceremony (just about thirty minutes), and it was beautiful. It was at a vineyard (the Temecula Valley is like southern California's Napa Valley, except without all the unnecessary pretentiousness). I met one of my aunt's new “friends,” who promptly assumed that I was also his friend, and who rested his prosciutto-wrapped asparagus spear appetizer over a candle and insisted that he was “cooking the bacon.” I visualized stabbing him in the brain.

After a couple more days in Temecula, we trekked (or “went,” if you have a strict “no using words with two Ks in them” policy) up to Glendora, the part of California where I would live if I won the lottery and also wanted to live in Glendora. There, we visited my aunt and uncle and cousins for four or five days.

My favorite part of that leg of the trip (aside from seeing my favorite aunt and uncle – Is it wrong to have a favorite aunt and uncle? I make no apologies) was our trip to the beach. Ordinarily, I have a strong aversion to anything beach-related, as I tend to hate things that result in my being simultaneously sandy, sticky, sunburned, and sandy some more. Not this time. We made an elephant out of sand (and when I say “we,” I mean “everyone but me”). We barbecued hot dogs. We played volleyball. Honestly, I'm not sure if I could ever recall having a better time at the beach. I remember laying face-up on a towel just before sunset and thinking to myself, “Andrew, this place is alright. This is your new happy place.” Incidentally, my old happy place was sitting naked on a couch while eating Funyuns and watching “I Love Lucy” reruns. Hey, my happy place rhymes!

Coming in at a very close second favorite was our trip to Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles in Pasadena. When I was a student at Azusa Pacific University, my friends and I went to Roscoe's a couple times. I've spent the last several years trying to convince the rest of my family that Roscoe's waffles will make you see God. My praise fell on largely deaf (or, more likely, pancake-stuffed) ears, and I was beginning to lose hope in the idea that I'd ever get to taste that sweet, sweet ambrosia again. Seriously, if you're ever in southern California (on a trip, passing through, or simply by virtue of actually living there), you need to visit Roscoe's. I know the combination of chicken and waffles sounds monumentally bizarre, but trust me. It'll make you envy your own mouth. You'll see music and feel color. It's the greatest thing since the atheists invented sex in the 1960s. Even my parents liked it.

Later, we drove up the coast to San Francisco, a city I've wanted to visit since I said my first words (which were “Wrestling is so fake, dad”). We stayed in a crappy little town just outside of San Fran called Newark. I had no idea there was a second Newark in the US. I thought the first was bad enough.

In San Francisco, we hit all the touristy spots. We saw Haight Ashbury (there's a Ben & Jerry's there now). We drove down Lombard Street. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge (which was underwhelming to my sister; she preferred the Oakland Bay Bridge – I suppose she also prefers getting mugged and then peed on over being given free cupcakes). We saw numerous hobos, an inordinate number of whom had their hands jammed down their pants. We took the ferry over to Alcatraz, where we discovered that there are tons of furrners who travel all the way to Amurrca to visit one of our most notorious prisons. I guess that's because Amurrca kicks butt (but we don't take names; our pen must be out of ink).

One thing that surprised me was that San Francisco is cold. Mark Twain was right. And the fog. Oh, the fog. It rolls in like a fat guy at Sizzler: Creepily, noisily, and stinking of cheesesteak and Lipitor. It's truly amazing how quickly it can show up. It came in so fast one day, it sent me back in time.

I haven't had a summer vacation in a long time, but this one was well worth the wait. I laughed, I cried, I ate unhealthy amounts of In-N-Out. Not too shabby. Oh, and I dare you to use more parenthetical phrases in a single 1,100 word piece. You can't do it.

Caviar

Bob: "You know, sometimes when I'm eating caviar, I feel kinda guilty."

Bobb: "Why's that?"

Bob: "Because there are starving people all around the world, and if I'm gonna spend hundreds of dollars per ounce on a bunch of fish eggs, then I can obviously afford cheaper foods. You know? Then it wouldn't seem like such a waste."

Bobb: "Well, yeah, but how many poor people can afford caviar?"

Bob: "That's exactly my point."

Bobb: "No, you're not following. Poor people can't afford expensive foods, and yet there will always be expensive foods out there. Poor people will never eat caviar, because once they can afford it, they're obviously not poor. You're not taking food out of their mouths because you're not overlapping with any foods they'll actually eat."

Bob: "You're a horrible person."

Bobb: "In fact, you should only feel guilty when you're eating cheap, easily accessible foods. You're driving up demand, and therefore, price, which makes it harder for the poor people to afford it. Shame on you. Next time you get a craving for macaroni and cheese, bite your tongue and buy a steak."

Bob: "How do you sleep at night?"

Bobb: "Ever mix antihistamines with alcohol?"

This Conversation (Sorta) Actually Happened

Thought of the day 03/20/09

I'm not sure how I feel about Facebook birthday wishes. I have to assume that if most people are like me, they don't really know anyone's birthday until Facebook reminds them. Remembering stuff is for losers anyway.

Twitter, Shakespeare, Seinfeld, and Crack

As some of you may have noticed, I recently broke down and joined Twitter. For a long time, I actively resisted jumping on the bandwagon for no other reason than I didn't want to be so transparently populist. However, once my roommate joined, it took less than two weeks for me to realize just how useful it could be.

I get thoughts throughout the day that are too short and/or bizarre and/or simple to expand upon. That's why I started those thoughts of the day a while back. Once I found out that I could post those thoughts on Twitter from my phone, I got so excited that I peed my pants a little. Unfortunately, I was sitting on a cloth chair at the time, and now my whole room smells like I just ate asparagus.

If I could distill my feelings about Twitter into a single sentence, it would be this: DO NOT JOIN TWITTER. It is the white man's crack. That's why, in the last week, I haven't posted here, I haven't shaved, and I've only gone to the bathroom four times. At first, I thought it was basically just Facebook status updates without any of that cumbersome "usefulness." I couldn't have been more wrong.

You see, Twitter's evil genius is in its 140 character limit. Anything longer than that gets cut off and won't show up in the public timeline (though people can still read it if they click on the ellipses at the end of the post, but honestly, that is just way too much work). It forces you to be more creative whenever you need to edit something down. You have to get rid of all the unnecessary crap, so it trains you to be a more succinct writer.

Also, you can't really communicate more than one thought at a time, so it feels a bit like drive-by blogging. As Polonius famously said in Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit." George Costanza would be the first to observe that Twitter is a wonderful personality showcase. You post and then you're gone. No fuss, no muss, no titles. It's horrendously addicting, and it's almost as fun as hitting old people with shovels.

Another benefit of the character limit is the fact that it makes it easy for even the busiest of people to tweet (yes, that's officially what it's called; I know it's retarded), which means that a whole bunch of celebrities, writers, and comedians use it. You actually feel like you're getting to know some of them, and you can respond to anything they write (no guarantees that they'll read it, though, and they can easily block you if you're a creep or ugly, so don't ruin it for the rest of us, assface).

So that's my explanation for why I haven't written anything in quite a while, and I'm sticking to it.

Once again, DO NOT JOIN TWITTER.

Worldview

I was in the shower when I had a moment of apostrophe. My entire worldview is a result of these three things, in order: classical liberalism, contemporary American Evangelical Christianity (with a healthy dose of Reformation-era French Christianity thrown in for good measure), and television. Yet I consider myself a relatively well adjusted (if a bit glib and cynical) modern man. Ironically, and somewhat disturbingly, when all three of those things are combined anywhere outside my brain, the result is Bibleman, something that everyone reading this blog should either be ashamed of or shocked by.