Expatriated Thanksgiving

There's nothing like a genuine bit of cynicism to get one through the overly thankful Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Being in London makes unthankfulness all the easier to obtain. Try to make cornbread? Well good luck finding corn flour. Without a Native American or Hispanic population to provide sufficient year round demand for the stuff, it's basically missing from all major supermarkets. Luckily, I thought outside the box during my search and located a small packet of it which was marketed as "raw polenta". It was in the pasta section. Weird.

God forbid I want a can of pumpkin stuff. That's just impossible. Pumpkin pie was outlawed, I think, in the entirety of the UK sometime in the 1960s when several cans of pumpkin puree fell off the shelf at a supermarket and landed on a previously cheery young boy. Within the year he had begun wearing mascara, he died his blond hair black, and started wearing leather. This incident began the first wave of Goth culture. To avoid any future unfortunate fashion/music trends, the country discontinued its imports of pumpkin puree, thus making pumpkin pie a dessert too laborious to make.

I can't really complain, though. I'm unemployed, thousands of miles from home, and broke. I have a broken hand and my bedroom suffers from a relatively severe condensation problem. AND I have an unpaid internship which requires me to fill my days with tasks of manual labor that would usually be accompanied by a union wage. In this season of thanks, I guess I'm thankful for life. I'd be thankful for family, friends, health and what not, but I think my own actions are responsible for those things, and I don't really like thanking myself.

I am thankful for my second attempt at baking jalapeno cheddar cornbread turned out better than the first. I am not thankful that my first attempt at making cranberry orange jello came out better than the second. The best part, though, is that the entire holiday is completely unobserved by everyone other then American expats. There's something about being in a celebratory minority that makes the entire experience of the holiday itself that much better. Thanksgiving day expanded into a 4-day long gluttony bender leaving my colon in shambles and sending my blood sugar through the capillary roof.

The lesson, I guess, is that while there is seldom anything to be thankful for during these times of global calamity and cynicism, there is always an opportunity for the human imagination to conger something worse. I could be unemployed and unemployable. I could have a broken hand and a broken heart. Britain could outlaw pumpkin puree and pistachios. Terrorists could have hit Mumbai and Delhi. At the end of the day, it is what it is, and we should be thankful it's not any worse and I guess try harder to enhance our current lives for next year, so as to lengthen our list of ways things could be worse. While this may sound like a pessimistic interpretation of this day of over-consumptive days, it can't be because right now I feel totally psyched about repeating Thanksgiving festivities in a year's time.