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Fruitcakes Celebrating Holidays

I was quite pleased to realize this morning that tomorrow is thanksgiving, which means that Todd has both Thursday and Friday off. We don’t celebrate any holidays, but are pleased when other people do because it means that, for example, we can go to the movies and no one else will be there. Which is what we’re planning on doing tomorrow. Thanksgiving is even more idiotic than christmas: get ten people in a room who hate each other’s guts, force them to make conversation, and as if that weren’t enough, let’s make sure they’re extremely hungry too. Whee! Bread and butter thank-you notes tend to look like this:

Dear Mom,

Thank you for the lovely Thanksgiving dinner.
The Bert and the kids ate enough to last them a week!

Love,
Your Daughter

when what they should really look like is:

Dear Mom,

Well, we all lived through another one. Good thing
Uncle Frank didn’t bring his rifle this time, or that
argument he and Bert had could have been a lot worse!

Love,
Your Daughter

and speaking of Thanksgiving, one of the people who regularly reads Coffee Shakes sent me a story that made me laugh and I asked permission to post it here, she said sure:

I received an email this morning from a close friend in Colorado, and we’d been corresponding about a number of things, including the upcoming holidays and truth in online journals etc. The first words I read in her message to me were:

// Oh, yeah… Sage… how terrific!

And I’m thinking to myself, “oh, that’s neat, she reads Sage’s pages too.”

Then I read the rest of the sentence…

// Do you suppose I could alternate that with bay leaves on the turkey?

I found out that Ani Difranco was playing in Boston this weekend, and that I could have gotten tickets if I’d known. Argh. Well, it could have been worse. I could have found out that Louise Fitzhugh had come back from the dead and was giving a one-day-only free writing seminar in Boston and I missed it.

On our way back from Boston I read Danny Drennan’s 90210 summary from the file I’d saved on the laptop, and once I’d finished reading it I turned on the radio and we listened to the news on NPR (some of which involved the sounds and description of this man making a warm salad from scratch, which had both Todd and I all but drooling and really wishing we had something other than Taco Bell to eat in the car). After the news a program called New York Kids came on. Topic for the day: a play called… Wait. Put on your Cringe-Repellant suits first. Ready?

A play called The Sick Boy. I have nothing against sick children. I’m sure it’s hell on earth to be their parents, much less to be the actual sick child, and I wouldn’t wish that situation on my worst enemy. But America has gone so far when it comes to glamorizing terminally ill children that the entire concept has become a caricature that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. The idea of a play based on a dying boy made Todd and I dive to change the radio station. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything else to listen to and we eventually winced our way back to the show.

It wasn’t as bad as you’re thinking it was. It was worse.

We suffered through a rendition of the song “I Am A Hero” by a warbling fourteen year old boy who I guess was nervous because he didn’t hit many of the notes. Being a terminally ill child does not make you a hero. Handling the situation with grace and dignity doesn’t even make you a hero. Kids who stand up for other kids who are being bullied, kids who work hard to be the best they can be, they’re heros. The Starlight Foundation, which asks dying children what they want and gives it to them, is a crying shame. Being a dying child means that something happened and your body is self-destructing, and that’s all. That there’s an entire charitable organization built around granting wishes (like, for example, going into the woods and slaughtering endangered animals, or shaking a rock star’s hand) makes me sad. All that money that could be going to cancer research, or AIDS research, or, hell, while I’m fantasizing, how about to save endangered animals from psychotic children?

Where are the Beatles when you need them?

Trivial doesn’t BEGIN to describe The Great Sponge Debate