Sunday, November 28, 2004
How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation
To begin with, I bought pants at Wal-Mart. This is a sentence I never thought I would utter, but when I arrived in Quincy I discovered I had forgotten my gym shorts, and rather than skip five days of working out (or hit the treadmill in denim) I decided to pick up a new pair. But as luck would have it, there was a major snowstorm, and the Wal-Mart was as far as I could skid. And as luck would further have it, they only had shorts in sizes XXL and above, apparently operating on a theory that only the truly fat should be allowed to excercise in November. So I bought a $8 pair of sweatpants. They're charcoal gray and an absolute delight.
For our Thanksgiving dinner, however, I chose a non-fleece ensemble. We took my grandma to The Ritz restaurant, the sort of local-color-rich, gravy-laden, cranky-service-heavy establishment that was all the rage in the 1940s but has lost some currency with the death of family meat loaf night and the sock hop. We had a delightful corner booth, which allowed me to awkwardly slide across a vinyl seat approximately one thousand times on my way to and from the buffet, which was ample enough to feed an entire third world nation for a year, or Tyne Daly, depending. Then we heard stories about the past. Involving awkwardly obsolete views of race, sex, gender, and just about anything else of importance. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.
The rest of the break was largely uneventful. I bought some Christmas cards at Hobby Lobby, where an elderly checkout lady named Lurleen insisted on counting my purchases twice and tried to sell me a Christ-related impulse item. I met friends for drinks at a local bar frequented by Shriners and monster truck drivers. I saw the new Disney movie with my parents.
It was the best Thanksgiving ever!
To begin with, I bought pants at Wal-Mart. This is a sentence I never thought I would utter, but when I arrived in Quincy I discovered I had forgotten my gym shorts, and rather than skip five days of working out (or hit the treadmill in denim) I decided to pick up a new pair. But as luck would have it, there was a major snowstorm, and the Wal-Mart was as far as I could skid. And as luck would further have it, they only had shorts in sizes XXL and above, apparently operating on a theory that only the truly fat should be allowed to excercise in November. So I bought a $8 pair of sweatpants. They're charcoal gray and an absolute delight.
For our Thanksgiving dinner, however, I chose a non-fleece ensemble. We took my grandma to The Ritz restaurant, the sort of local-color-rich, gravy-laden, cranky-service-heavy establishment that was all the rage in the 1940s but has lost some currency with the death of family meat loaf night and the sock hop. We had a delightful corner booth, which allowed me to awkwardly slide across a vinyl seat approximately one thousand times on my way to and from the buffet, which was ample enough to feed an entire third world nation for a year, or Tyne Daly, depending. Then we heard stories about the past. Involving awkwardly obsolete views of race, sex, gender, and just about anything else of importance. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.
The rest of the break was largely uneventful. I bought some Christmas cards at Hobby Lobby, where an elderly checkout lady named Lurleen insisted on counting my purchases twice and tried to sell me a Christ-related impulse item. I met friends for drinks at a local bar frequented by Shriners and monster truck drivers. I saw the new Disney movie with my parents.
It was the best Thanksgiving ever!
