Thanksgiving dilemmas

Thanksgiving makes for numerous dilemmas. Do I eat breakfast, or do I starve myself all day until the monumental feast? From some, do we go to my parents’ house, or my in-laws’ house for dinner? Dilemmas.

Truth be told, these dilemmas are not so problematic, as routines, or better yet, traditions are formed over the years. For instance, you learn after years and years to snack lightly for breakfast and lunch, then stuff your face at dinner. Or at least I have. And for deciding which parent’s house to go to, tradition usually decides.

However, even though my immediate family’s (my mom, dad and me) tradition is to go to my mom’s brother’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, there is still a little bit of a dilemma with my dad’s side of the family.

My mom, dad and I are very close with both sides of the family, and that is where the dilemma presents itself. Every year my dad likes to visit his side of the family. Their dinner takes place at my dad’s sister’s house.

He likes to stop by and just say “hi” for a few minutes before heading over to our dinner at my mom’s brother. This sounds innocent enough. Not a big deal.

But it is.

We always seem to get to my aunt’s just as they are sitting down to eat dinner. My dad’s side of the family is like the old retirees in Florida who do the whole “early bird special” thing eating at before 4:30.

What is awkward about this is that we are obviously not eating with them since our dinner is only about an hour or so away. So we sit there watching them eat. They can see us salivating, staring at their delicious spread. They offer to get us a plate knowing we will decline.

We feel like the uninvited house guests who make everyone feel uncomfortable because they feel awkward eating in front of us, and we feel awkward when we see they are not eating and are just looking at us.

The spotlight is all on us. They know we will not be staying long so feel they should engage us s much as they can while they have us. Meanwhile their food is getting cold on their plates.

Just imagine sitting at a table watching people eat. Weird right?

Now imagine sitting at a table with three people watching you eat. Equally weird?

Without fail, every year after we leave we look at each other and say, “Wow, that was awkward, again. Why do we do this every year?”
But, without fail, every year we go back for the torturous awkwardness.

Thanksgiving is, for most, the second biggest holiday of the year after Christmas. So why is this not an issue on Christmas, the biggest holiday of the year?

Simple, Thanksgiving is all about the Thanksgiving dinner. The turkey, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the yams, the cranberries (the only time when the canned version is equally as good as the real deal) and the pumpkin pie...oh, and being thankful of course.

If you lost count, that is one meal. One.

For Christmas, it is not all about the dinner. Quality time with both sides of the family is possible. Brunch with one, and dinner with the other in my case.

This year was no different, we put ourselves through the awkwardness, left saying we will not do it again next year. But next year the dilemma will present itself, and I am sure we will do it all over again. Because we are thankful to have two options for dinner.

The Guilty Pleasure that is "Glee"

Jocks, goths, “Cheerios” (a/k/a cheerleaders), geeks, freaks and the popular kids are cliques in most high schools. None of which however, are as exaggerated as the television show “Glee” makes them out to be...hopefully.

High school can be tough, but it is rarely as tough as it is portrayed on FOX’s “Glee”, which is about, among other things, a group of students from various cliques coping with the ridicule that goes with being in such an “uncool” club as glee club is.

Will Schuester, played by Matthew Morrison, is a Spanish teacher turned glee club coach/teacher. Schuester is a former glee club member of the fictitious McKinley High School, and wants to return the club to its glory days when he was a part of it.

“Glee’s” antagonist, and Schuester’s nemesis, is Sue Sylvester, played by the always hilarious Jane Lynch (“40-yr-old Virgin”, “Two and a Half Men”, “Role Models”). Sylvester is a type-A, no nonsense, my way or the highway personality. The words “feelings” and “sensitive” are not in her vocabulary.

Sylvester is the coach of the high schools golden nugget of sorts, the national champion cheerleading squad, whose team members are called “Cheerios”. The Cheerios house all the popular kids, even though they are mostly illiterate. To use an SAT reference, the Cheerios are to glee club what motorcycles are to scooters. This comparison works perfectly because scooters, or Vespas have been becoming increasingly popular, just as glee club and “Glee” has.

Sylvester does whatever she can to make glee club suffer and/or disappear, even by sending some of her precious Cheerios to infiltrate.

Among the students, there is an interesting slew to say the least, with every stereotype imaginable. The quarterback jock who is also one of the key members of glee club, the most hated and unpopular girl who finds solace in glee, the popular shallow cheerleader who is pregnant, a fashion forward gay kid that at first look (and second, third and forth look for that matter)is hard to distinguish as a male or female, a wheelchair bound kid, a stuttering asian girl, and a portly black girl with tons of glam and attitude among others.

The characters and stereotypes are sensationalized for entertainment purposes, and to shed light on what some kids go through. “Glee” is a smart, funny, entertaining show that teaches lessons at the same time. It exploits stereotypes in an attempt to break them down.

On the most recent episode entitled “Wheels”, the glee club cannot afford to get a wheelchair accessible bus to nationals for Artie, the wheelchair bound member. After a lack of empathy for Artie by the rest of his glee-mates, Schuester tells them they need to raise the money for the appropriate bus or no one is going. To add to that, Schuester makes them ride around in wheelchairs at school and informs them a wheelchair number is being added to their performance.
A show famous, or infamous depending on how you look at it, for breaking out randomly into song and dance numbers like a musical, it never seems forced. After the lack of support from his glee-mates, Artie has a solo song and dance number singing “Dancing With Myself”.

“Glee” has multiple story lines going on and arching throughout the season, and touching on each would make this review twice as long.

It is an interesting show loaded with laughs and entertainment. Be warned, some of the laughs and topics can be offensive to the sensitive and politically correct. And if you like music, this show provides plenty. It is a little corny, but good fun and exposes stereotypes in an inventive way.

The Dreaded Graduation Application

Exams, term papers and finals. Oh my! The last few weeks of the semester for a college student are some of the most stressful weeks every year.

All of the work a student did during the beginning portion of the semester is almost irrelevant in comparison. If a student had a bad semester, it can all be washed away with a strong finish; however, if a student had a good semester, it can too all be washed away, but because of a bad showing in the end.

Colleges house some of the most highly stressed people in the world because of its competitive atmosphere and the importance of having a college education for the professional world.

There is also pressure to pass classes because no one wants to have to take a class over again. And with tuition increasing more and more every second it seems, it is not always an option to take classes over and over. Taking classes until one passes, obviously will prolong the amount of time one will have to be in school, and, therefore, keep the bank account dwindling away.

Something else I have recently discovered as a new form stress, well not necessarily a new form of stress, but another reason to stress, is the graduation application.

As a college student, you finally get to the point of realistically thinking about graduation and graduating, and this blasted application comes along to put this egg shell around you for the next, and your last, year.

You are suddenly asked to say what classes you have left to take before you are able to graduate. This may not sound like as big of a deal as I am making it out to be, but think about it. When you look at the remaining classes you have left before graduating, you are also looking at the classes you cannot screw up in. Because if you do not pass one of them, then it is another semester stuck in college.

That is another semester of tuition, a parking permit, not to mention the fee for pushing back graduation another semester. But worst of all, having to retake a class you just failed.

Then you try to see the silver lining: “I am only taking this one class, so I can focus solely on it, and everything will all be fine. Think of all the free time I’ll have too.”

Then the stress seeps in: “If I don’t pass this class when it’s the only one I’m taking, I’m really screwed.”

That is another semester of tuition, another parking permit and another fee for not graduating.

All because of the damn graduation application.

Now your stress is stressing. The stress as a college student becomes the stress as an athlete in the last seconds of the championship game. Passing those final classes is like being down by a point and shooting two free throws with no time left on the clock.

In terms of ways to manage the stress, I don’t know. Do yoga, go for a jog, take some vitamin-B.

I am not, and have never been, a person who others envy, but the one thing I have been frequently told is a desirable characteristic that I possess, is the ability to remain calm in every situation and not let things get to me.

So being a, for the most part, stress free person, my advice is to just know that everything is going to be alright. It sounds cheesy, but there are a lot more important things in life, and that school is only a small part of it.

But if my advice just sounds ridiculous to you, then going back to the free throw reference, don’t miss.

Column on a columnist

Jon Carroll...

The most interesting man in the world? Maybe.

A somewhat self-effacing and satirical man, who started the Unitarian Jihad, was assistant editor of Rolling Stone magazine, editor of the Playboy spinoff magazine Oui, and now writes five weekday columns for the San Francisco Chronicle, all of this, and more, without a college degree.

Maybe not the most interesting man in the world, but interesting nonetheless.

Carroll was born and raised in southern California on an unspecified date. According to his biography on sfgate.com, he is “pre-baby boom by 1.3 years”. He attended college at the University of California, Berkeley where he did not graduate, but was the editor of the UC Berkeley’s humor magazine the California Pelican.

After leaving Berkeley, for unspecified reasons, though intriguing innuendoes were offered as to why, he got a job for the San Francisco Chronicle editing the crossword puzzle, writing summaries for television movies and interviewing minor celebrities.

In 1970, he left the Chronicle and became assistant editor of Rolling Stone magazine where he did not stay long. Throughout the 1970s Carroll stayed in the magazine world, but was somewhat of a nomad. When he became editor of New West magazine in 1978 he won a National Magazine Award.

Carroll was forced into retirement (again, for reasons unknown) until 1982 when he landed the job that he currently has as a column writer for the newspaper that gave him his start in the journalism industry, the San Francisco Chronicle.

He has become known for his columns about his cats, his creative wit involving the minutia of everyday situations and for starting the Unitarian Jihad.

Unlike the Dos Equis’ “most interesting man in the world”, Carroll is not fond of social gatherings. Carroll’s diagnosis of the awkward situations in his recent two-part columns “The bad party guest” is reminiscent of famed writer and actor Larry David’s.

“Sometimes there are no private rooms available - perhaps they are all upstairs, and the staircase is in plain view of the living room, and if I start upstairs someone will yell, "There's a bathroom down here," and then it will get awkward. I'll have to go to the bathroom even if I don't want to. I can't stay in the bathroom, for obvious reasons, so there goes that private space.


I have spent a lot of time on back porches too, which in San Francisco at holiday time is often uncomfortable, because of course I am not wearing my overcoat because then it would look as though I were preparing to leave and people would say goodbye and then what? If only I smoked! I may have to take it up again just to explain my abrupt disappearances.”

The Unitarian Jihad is a tongue-and-cheek movement which uses peaceful means to oppose religious extremists. This sort of satirical writing and way of thinking make Carroll’s writing so enjoyable.

While reading his columns for research I began to notice I would be at the end of the article without realizing it. Though he uses “I”, “me” and “my” quite frequently, it does not interfere or alienate the reader.

Jon Carroll...

The most interesting column writer for the Chronicle it the world? I’d say so.