Le Jour des Dindes

One accepts when one chooses to do a public thing on a regular Thursday, a full 52 Thursdays per year, that when one is American, that will mean exactly one of those Thursdays will fall on a day when you've got a bunch of other shit going on. For that reason, as in previous years, this will be a short post, with very little depth of thought behind most of it. In that way, it will only be half like all the others.

I say all this more than half way through the first Thanksgiving day of my whole life where I've got literally nothing going on. One of my children is traveling today, so we had the whole shock-your-nervous-system-into-paralysis-with-an-overload-of-carbohydrates-in-commemoration-of-Manifest-Destiny holiday fest this previous Sunday, to great effect. I had planned to half-ass it on Thursday (today) with two of my kids and store-bought turkey, but I remembered how much I like home-made gravy and that was that.

All of that said, I have used up a lot of my time today. I was up at 4 am to get my kid to LAX for his flight. I would recommend traveling on Thanksgiving Day as I got to LAX and back in under two hours, which is only impressive if you know that I live in a place where "LAX" and "two hours" in the same sentence is usually followed by some version of "Mm hmm, and then how was the drive back?" Making that kind of excellent time is a dad story I will share over and over for the rest of my life. Absolutely worth it. And premature apologies if I ever meet you in real life, as I guarantee I will recount this for you again. And again.

The rest of the day has been me on my own, still remembering the spirit of the season by ingesting way more calories than a body needs for any five days, let alone one (starting with donuts on the way home from the airport, then Indian food a few hours ago).

Then I finally watched the François Truffaut modern cinema foundational classic film Jules et Jim. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say I thought it was pretty darn good, if a bit insistently French. There was like one English line in the whole dang movie! Indulgent. At least Breathless had the decency to cast an American in one of the lead roles speaking such spotty French even I could follow it. For that reason alone, if anyone at some party asks me who my favorite French New Wave director is (because I'm sure I'll be at a party out of a 1970s Woody Allen movie where shit like that happens), I'll say Godard, but refuse to elaborate. If I've learned anything about making effective points in public over the last few months it's that details are for losers.

OK, this isn't as short as I thought it would be, but I am delivering on the lack of useful content. For now I'm going back to my therapy-via-feedbag self-care program for the day. Today I am thankful for my working pancreas.

Happy Thanksgiving, America.