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I am currently stuffed with turkey and filled with the familiar, annual feeling of dread that my belly will pop open and I'll be sitting here without any thread or fishing line or anything to sew myself back up. It's a good feeling.

Yes, it was belated Thanksgiving here in Korea this weekend, minorly belated for Americans and suicidally belated for Canuckers. British Nic and Yankee Jac prepared a wondrous feast of epic proportions: mashed potatoes, cranberries, stuffing, a thousand other foreign delicacies from the dreamland of Home and, of course, a turkey purloined from a seedy market somewhere in Itaewon. I was blown away by the effort that they put into everything - the dinner, the festive napkins, the am-bee-ance. It was done right.

Bigwig the fat white rabbit ate scraps off the floor and ambled around looking for a purpose in life. She was a very fitting, traditional touch to the evening. I was reminded of the loyal bunnies who helped the British slaughter Native Americans and Canadians with smallpox blankets and, to a lesser degree, bunny fur (only applicable to the natives who were allergic to rabbits). Most of those rabbits were cooked and eaten in the great Bunny Holocaust of 1621, after all the natives who were allergic to rabbits had died and the rabbits themselves became more useful to the Pilgrims as a sumptuous appetizer than a biological weapon. I wondered if Bigwig got wistful around Thanksgiving time - er, Korean belated Thanksgiving time - and thought about exacting her terrible revenge on the White. I poked my foot into her cage as a gesture of condolence and she bit my toes fiercely.

Afterwards, all that was missing was a big fat sit-around on the couch watching some NFL game that nobody really cares about. In the thankful absence of football we played Cranium and drank red wine on the floor, angrily debating the correct pronunciation/spelling of words like "acquies-KE" despite our bloated laziness. English teachers take English very seriously, especially when we're drunk. We also draw blind pictures of potholes very seriously, and perform dramatic mimicries of Hugh Heffner very seriously: "I have, like, ten fucking wives and three kids!" Oh, that could only be Hugh. Cranium is a hella-serious game!

Thanksgiving was a clash of nations, a coming together of every bastardized variety of the English language. It was a polygraph test about cooking apple pies, the tasty sacrifice of a turkey who was somehow far, far away from where it belonged. We celebrated the lull before the massacre and home was rebuilt in the Itaewon bubble for a few precious hours. Thanky kindly Nic and Jac... fight illegal employment deportation!

Posted by Chris at 09:59 AM >> Commentations (2)