Today is one of the most painful days for me. Christmas is second, followed by New Years ?day/night. I will hate next week, when everyone at school asks me how my holiday was and I get to either lie (like I did as a child) or tell them the awful truth: that really, having no family or really good friends around kinda sucks, so fuck Thanksgiving. It's always a dilemma between those two. And inevitably, if you say some, even nice, variation of the latter their smile becomes a frown. They want to hear fantastic tales of foreign relatives flying 10,000 miles to eat a turkey and celebrate America, or hear of the new babies you finally got to hold, and hear about how the children ran through the house all day and fed the dogs despite your telling them over and over that turkey and gravy and cookies will kill Fido, so knock it off...

Thanksgiving for me has always been having no family shoved in my face day.

My mom was never into Thanksgiving, we sort of did it if we had money to not go hungry or gas/transportation to get to a food bank , but having either of those things was rare when I was little and then I got sick at 11, and after that it was pretty much over.

And don't get me started about the foodbank food that we went all the way to get, only to find bugs in the cornbread mix and find that the turkey has been freezerburned beyond edibility. Because that happened too. Our cat wouldn't even eat the turkey it was so gross.

Then there was the fact that we had no family other than each other and so it never felt like Thanksgiving. And for some reason, despite knowing dozens of really amazing familes, no one ever asked us over to dinner. So, despite the fact that last year I had my first real not-alone Thanksgiving dinner in all of my (then 26) years (in a mansion to boot) with my friend P and his gf, and his friends and their dogs...I'm terribly bummed today. Because he is now in California and talking...typing...to me once a month at most. And I am here, by myself.

And my head still hurts and I've started sneezing...

Two weeks...and three homework assignments. And then I can get the flu...

~e