Not A Blog™

Yesterday I had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I have to lead off with that because, come Monday, I know exactly what will happen. I will end up in a knot of coworkers—near the coffee machines, perhaps, or maybe in our weekly update meeting—and the conversation will turn, as it predictably does, to what we did for [insert most recent holiday here]. In this case, Thanksgiving.

People will be discussing their Thanksgiving escapades—including the bad parts. Someone will mention how every time they get together two relatives end up in an argument about politics or something sensitive, and this time it looked like things were going smoothly right up to the cheesecake, but lo: Person A just couldn’t refrain from making the comment that cheesecake is actually less expensive than gas these days, and Person B immediately decided this was tantamount to making fun of the President’s notoriously simian features, and there you go. The coworker telling this story will be agitated and annoyed, but they never consider that not subjecting themselves to this nonsense is still an option. Or maybe it’s not; I don’t know. The question nevertheless remains: if eating with your family is such a hassle that you have to tell your coworkers about it, why bother? Why put up with that? It doesn’t make sense.

This was my first Thanksgiving living alone, and my plan to avoiding this family strife nonsense was to avoid my family. The biggest surprise about the whole thing was how little resistance I got from my folks. I got very little. None, to be specific. My mom calls and asks if I’m joining the family for Thanksgiving. I say, “No, I really don’t want to.” She says “okay.”

Cool! But I was expecting a little bit of a fight. I was kind of disappointed that I got off the hook so easily, however I definitely respect their not bothering me about it. The only thing more insufferable than a meal with my family, is a meal with my family with cheesecake.

I had Thanksgiving free. This has been my wish for quite a number of years now, and it was everything I expected, which wasn’t much. Let me tell you what I did. Nothing. That’s right, I did nothing for Thanksgiving. Well, that’s not strictly true. I used it as a day off as I would with any other day off—which makes the most sense, if you think about it. Why would you use your time off to go be with people who can’t stand the rest of the year? What changes?

So I read, mostly. I took a walk in a local park. But most importantly, I ate a meal on my tableware which I bought two and a half months ago. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, but I just never bothered because I’m lazy and it’s easier to throw away plates than to wash them.

That has been my excuse, but I have long suspected that it may not hold up to scrutiny because I have a dishwasher. The time it would take to load the dishwasher each day could be less than the increased amount of time I have to spend taking the trash to the dumpster, which I do more frequently because I’m throwing so much paper and plastic away. I think it would save time and money (and the environment) if I used regular dishes and washed them. The be-dished Thanksgiving meal was, then, an experiment I ran to figure out how much extra work I would have to do if I always used dishes. (I figured Thanksgiving was a good a day as any to run that experiment because any other Thursday I’d be working, and I didn’t want to jeopardize a weekend, lest it turn out to be a huge hassle.) The result? A negative amount of extra work was being done.

My problem, now, is this. Come Monday, people are going to be asking me what I did. If I say “nothing”, not only is that technically incorrect, but everyone will dote and feel sorry for me because I didn’t do anything with people. This I can’t be bothered with. Unfortunately, I can’t exactly explain that whole experiment bit because I’ve tried explaining things like that to people before, and they always look at me strange—never mind that this provided some very valuable information to me regarding my dish cleaning efficiencies.

There is a part two to this, as well, which also is something of a follow up to my article Food Rituals. In that article, I talked about how I eat fast because eating is something you have to do so there’s no point in wasting time on it. Well, since I’ve been on my own for a few weeks, I have an update to that situation.

From what I’ve noticed observing my own actions, I still eat fast, but I eat at a statistically significantly slower speed while alone. This is not something I would have noticed while eating as part of a group. My Thanksgiving meal, in particular, I really enjoyed (I had some unbelievably delicious smoked Gouda, among other things), and it took me almost half an hour to finish. For me, that’s a really long time. But why should this be the case? I think I’ve figured out why.

It’s because when you’re eating with other people, they’re always talking. It’s damn annoying. Eating is such a sensate activity to begin with, I fail to understand why people need to talk, too. So my goal has always been to finish before everyone else—while they were still quiet as they stuffed their faces, so that I can engage them in conversation later without also having to deal with the food at the same time. Seriously, people. Conversation ruins food.

My eating sans talking was probably the best part of Thanksgiving, as it is with every meal now, but doing “nothing” was quite pleasing, too. It wasn’t an oversight, and I didn’t miss out on those family arguments. Now I just have to figure out how to pull the same stunt for Christmas—a holiday complicated by the fact that it involves more than just food.

-Ted