Turkey Week

As I compose this post, I am at 30,000 feet above east Texas. I feel very 21st century, with my laptop and my iPod headphones and my open-source document converter. I also feel like a poser, as my laptop was purchased used and my iPod was on crazy sale because the Nano had just been released and I'm only using an open-source program because I didn't want to pay the $100 that the Microsoft Office Suite costs. In fact, NeoOffice has been sitting on my hard drive for about 5 months: I am so unfamiliar with the Mac platform that I only just now, through some stroke of luck than I can neither explain nor repeat, was able to bring it to life. C'est la vie Jennifer.

Melanie currently drives a Mazda minivanSUVstationwagonthing. Her car, in keeping with the personal/emotional tsunami that has been assaulting both our lives since August, is in the shop for repairs following another driver's idiocy. But she gets to preview soccer-motherhood! She is severely disappointed and embarrassed about her new ride...but I was thankful for all that room when she drove me to LAX this morning. She definitely could have also shuttled half our block, but I didn't mention it. She's a bit sensitive right now.

Traveling on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving is crazy. At least with Christmas, people either take off before, or after, or some combination of the two, but with Turkey Day, there is no wiggle room. I realized this as I purchased my plane ticket two months ago (both the price and the insane schedule). Linda invited me to spend time with her family in Paso Robles and were I not stuck financially, logistically and inter-relationally, I would have made the drive. But I digress.
At the airport, I heard a girl behind me practically screaming to the person on the other end of her cell phone 'I just saw that my ticket says the 23rd, not the 22nd. I would not have planned to fly on Thanksgiving!'. Man, I felt for her. Watching people in airports is so much fun – I am always amazed. The woman in front of me had chrome rims on her suitcase wheels and I am not kidding. There was a 7-year-old girl dancing like Britney Spears in a music video while her mom looked on amused, a man in a patchwork leather jacket wearing nail polish and carrying a bag with a pin that said 'the moral majority is neither', a man reading Maxim magazine while his two kids looked over his shoulder and his wife tried to turn their heads away, an older couple sharing a juice box at the security checkpoint because it wasn't allowed through, a man with black hair and a mohawk dyed red, a college-age guy sitting on the floor, reading a pocket-sized Bible while waiting to board the plane and a man standing behind me, asking someone if 'the hormones had been working.'

The fact that it is the end of November is crazy. I've not stopped wearing practically the same wardrobe as when I arrived in LA in August. Sandals nearly all the time, t-shirts every day. My radio station is playing 90% Christmas music now. Speaking of, Bette Middler has re-tooled her song 'From a Distance' and released it on a Christmas album. To me, this is as ridiculous as Barbra Streisand singing 'Silent Night'. The song begins with the melody of 'O Come, All Ye Faithful' and then goes into 'from a distance, the world is...'. I asked Melanie about this and we both agreed that whether it meant that God is distant and uncaring or distant and uninformed, it is ludicrous to intertwine a song celebrating Jesus' birth with the notion that God is far away. They're mutually exclusive. I'd rather hear Barbra wonder as she wanders.

This is not my most interesting post, to be sure, but I'm running on empty right now. Happy Turkey Day to all, and remember that one pat of butter contains 45 calories (I watched the news last night – what can I say?).