The Day After Thanksgiving

For graduate students everywhere, the day after Thanksgiving, more than any other day in the entire year, represents the greatest possible kick in the pants - especially this year, with the holiday falling so close to the end of term. That's because Thanksgiving is sweet oblivion, the one day in the whole semester in which I turn off the part of my brain that reminds me that I have to grade 40 papers and write two twenty-page papers and start researching things for my...I'm going to stop before I hyperventilate. But that switch is flipped nearly every other day of the academic year, even whilst we sleep, so being to turn it off for just a little while is a blessing.

Thanksgiving is my new Christmas. I get excited for it in the way I used to get excited for Christmas (but no longer do, Grinch that I am). We might chalk up part of that to the aforementioned brain switch, but it mostly comes from the fact that I love a) cooking food; b) eating food; c) drinking wine with aforementioned food; and, d) eating and drinking with friends. Don't get me wrong: family is great. Lovely people. But I can't drink a whole bottle of red wine in front of them (my family, at least). And I can't tell ribald stories or watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall or play a drawing game in which I present a rendition of a drunk guy taking his dick out at a company luau (great game, by the way). I can at Thanksgiving. And that's why I love it.

But now I get kicked below the belt, in the front and the back, by several different entities. English 100 is a grading hell at this point, I need to crank out a term paper in a little over a week, and J. and I need to tend to the hundred and three little things that need to happen before we ship off to South America. And that all happens within the next three weeks.

I'm less afraid than usual, largely because there is a very nice reward at the end of all this ($2 bottles of red wine at street cafés in Valparaíso), but the fear lurks. It lurks.