Something about thankfulness or whatever

The day this publishes will be the Thanksgiving holiday in the US.

At its core, it’s not a terrible holiday. I mean, it’s kind of hard to get fractious about a day seemingly devoted to being grateful for what you have and what you’ve been given, for your family and friends, et-sentimental-cetera. It’s a reminder to live in the moment, to appreciate everything, no matter how small.

Okay. I can get behind that.

You want to know what I can’t get behind? The reason we ended up with this holiday in the first place.

It is my personal and deeply-held belief that human beings are a blight, and should be eradicated. We’re awful. We are the reason we can’t have nice things. Someone over in the Old Country decided to be a dick about someone else’s way of life, so the persons on the receiving end of the dickage decided to get out of Dodge. Then they found somewhere new, which was already quite happily populated with its own people, and everyone was nice for a while because the newbies were still reeling from the dickage they had fled. But human beings forget things. The further removed we are from a tragedy, the less we remember how much it sucked. So after a while, the people who had run away from being oppressed became the oppressors.

Fast-forward through land disputes, that debacle with the purchase of the island of Manhattan, smallpox blankets, all-out wild west warfare, the Trail of Tears, and reservations, and what you’ve got is a marginalized society which was doing beautifully before you got here, thanks very much, and should have been left alone to continue to do so. But no, someone got a God complex, and here we are.

Also, that ‘pilgrims and Indians’ nonsense the U.S. public school system shoves down our throats? LIES. UNTRUTHS. FABRICATIONS. PROPAGANDA. COMPLETE AND UTTER BULLSHIT OF THE HIGHEST DEGREE. Sean Sherman has something to say about it. (Shout-out to my editor for this insightful article.)

I really do hate my humanity sometimes. Properly hate it. I mean, we’re awful, aren’t we? We turn on each other at the drop of a hat, and for the most ridiculous reasons. Though if you think about it, those reasons really boil down to ‘you don’t fit into my normal and are therefore not to be tolerated’.

“But think of all the good things humanity has done!”

Okay, fine, we’ve done some neat stuff, but I’m pretty sure none of it was necessary. If you ask me, existence isn’t necessary, but since it happens, we find ways to fill it--and create our own problems by doing so.

What is even the point.

The complete lack of a point is (albeit humorously) summed up nicely in this little exchange from Black Books:

Manny: I want the weekend off. I want a life!

Bernard: This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!

Manny: We have needs! Fran wants to learn the piano, I want some time to myself, you want to go out with a girl--

Bernard: Don't make me laugh bitterly. Fran will fail, you'll toil your life away, and I'll die alone, upside down on the floor of a pub toilet.



Let’s circle back around to ‘a nice holiday about appreciating things’ and look at another way humanity has managed to make a complete mockery of something. I would like to draw your attention to Exhibit A:

Black. Fucking. Friday.

“Let’s use a day we’ve dedicated to being grateful to overeat, shout at our relatives, and then go shopping!”

Black Friday used to start at 7:00 AM the day after the Thanksgiving holiday. Just about everyone was able to be with their families and enjoy the day (massive tip of the hat here to all emergency service personnel who are always on duty no matter what--I appreciate you), and then they got up early the next morning to get a few things at half price or whatever.

These days I don’t think the stores even actually close on the holiday. Corporate greed has outweighed human decency (what little there was of that to begin with). Consumer culture has created a monster--one that needs to be fed on the latest and greatest at the lowest possible prices, no matter the cost to anyone or anything else. People get trampled at Wal-Mart, for fuck’s sake. Is there really anything so compelling to obtain that it makes it worth the possibility of grievous bodily harm? I find it all very baffling, not to mention disgusting.

The origin of the Thanksgiving holiday is tainted with the blood of innocents, and the secondary ‘just be grateful’ nonsense we’ve attached to it has long since gone by the wayside. We might as well just cancel it.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea.

Thanksgiving is cancelled, everyone! You couldn’t treat it with respect, so now no one gets to have it. I hope you’re happy.

What? Were you expecting bubbling positivity from me today? That’s cute.

Be careful what you wish for…

The last, oh, four or five times I’ve said, “Oh heck, I have to write a blog post,” my pal P.V. has jumped up and down and squealed, “Ooooh! Write it about MEEE!!!”

Well, P.V., you brought this on yourself.

The first thing to know about my friendship with P.V. is that there is a fairly significant age gap. I’m old enough to be her mother. Yes, it would have been a teenage pregnancy, but the fact remains that she is fifteen years my junior. She gets fractious when I refer to her as ‘the child’, but will then turn around when we’re buying snacks, pop something in the cart, and say, “Thanks MOM,” loudly enough for the rest of the store to hear.

And then I flick her on the noggin and tell her to get off my lawn.

The beauty of P.V. is also the thing I frequently want to strangle her for, and that is her eternal fucking optimism. She’s one of those gratingly positive and happy people. You know, the kind I eschew like the plague? Between us, at least, we make a whole person. Her saccharinity balances out my jaded bitterness and general disdain for the world at large. Almost.

“Okay, so, if she’s the kind of person who makes you come out in a rash, why the heck are you friends with her?”

Lemme tell you a story. Once upon a time, I went to tap class and had a tap teacher. A month later, that tap teacher got the boot, and P.V. got thrown to the wolves--the wolves being a class of bona fide adults she was expected to teach. (We’re not really that bad. Well, our language is. And we’re wildly inappropriate. But we’re grown ups. We’re allowed.) I honestly can’t remember what it was that got the two of us talking--she probably does, the weirdo--but something did, and apparently, as her delightful mother who works in the dance studio office told me the next week, P.V. found me completely and utterly fascinating.

I mean, she’s not wrong…

Anyway, somewhere between P.V.’s mom saying, “P.V., don’t be a creepy stalker,” and me feeling incredibly generous, P.V. and I started to spend more time together. Like, lots more. Like, she’s usually sprawled on my sofa every other Saturday afternoon.

She’s great company, really, even if she does have a relative inability to keep quiet for any extended period of time. She likes to bombard me with love and affirmations, which I’ll admit is good for me since I spend so much of my time vomiting up sentiments from the other end of the positivity spectrum. She’s an interesting human being, we have some common interests, and she thinks the sun shines out of my ass. Honestly it’s all very weird, but somehow it works. And, I’ve got a young mind to mold and/or corrupt as I see fit.

If you bet on corruption, you’re right.

Let’s face it--I’m a mediocre adult, so the best I can possibly be for her is the ‘yeah, maybe don’t do that’ example of how to be a grown up. The best I can do for her is validate her existence and her feelings and expose her to all the quality media that existed before she did. I made her suffer through all of Green Wing--both seasons and the special. I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to shove down her pretty little throat next, but I have several candidates, including Monty Python. When we’re together we do stupid things like go buy me pointe shoes and go adopt more rats. We eat far too much cheese. She asks eleventy-bajillion questions and I give completely not straightforward answers because I’m a jerk like that. What?

Things P.V. is good at: tap dancing, dancing in general, emotional intelligence, making you feel special, talking your ear off.

Things I am good at: rolling my eyes.

So, P.V., there you go. I’ve informed the world about you. You are the Frankie to my Grace, the Aziraphale to my Crowley, the Manny to my Bernard, and you’re only going to get one of those references because I’ve been cramming it into your clam-like ear for months now.

I love you, you strange little animal.

I HATE BEING A GROWN UP

Title brought to you by Jenna Marbles’ song of the same name.

I had one of those “Holy shit, I’m an adult” moments this week. It was Sunday evening. I was relaxed and happy and writing something that was going really well and having a glass of pinot grigio. It was time to eat. I turned the oven on.

POP!

SPARK!

And then all the lights started going weird and half turning on and half not turning on and that was kind of unnerving but as soon as I was sure that the spark hadn’t ignited an actual fire, I regrouped and did exactly what one should do in a situation like this:

I called an adult.


“Um...Auntie? I have an electrical issue.”

“Uncle, come talk to your niece! I can’t field this one.”

“Niece! Did the switch flip?”

“No, Uncle, the switch did not flip.”

“Flip all the switches.”

“The switches are making it weirder, Uncle.”

“Oh. Then please call Handyman Dave.”


So I did. Handyman Dave happened to be a couple of blocks away and popped over to take a look. Without his usual tools (he had just been at dinner with friends, bless him, and wasn’t in his work truck), his initial diagnosis was, “You have a gremlin. Can I come back tomorrow?”

And come back tomorrow he did. I won’t bore you to death with the technical details, but we found the source of the problem which was the breaker on the meter itself, not inside my unit, and the fact that my range went entirely tits up.

Now I have to go shopping for appliances.

Okay, one appliance. But still. That’s such an adult thing to have to do. On the one hand, it’s kind of fun, because SHINY NEW THING! On the other, it’s a pain, because I’ll have to find a deal that includes delivery and haul-away of the old one because I don’t have easy access to a truck. On the plus side, it’s getting toward the holidays, so everyone is having sales. On the not-so-plus side, that means that everyone and their mother is going to be buying appliances. Thank goodness for the Internet!

Also thank goodness for DoorDash, because my only cooking option for the foreseeable future is the microwave…or a strict diet of cereal.

But back to being a grown up. A thing at which I succeed, but do not excel. And I only enjoy it some of the time. And at the moment...well, that’s not exactly true. I don’t not enjoy it right now, it’s just a bit irritating. There are a lot of people who support the idea of what we’ll call ‘common sense classes’ (for lack of a better term) in high school, and I am definitely one of them. Teach kids how to balance checkbooks and track their finances. Teach them about how mortgages work. Teach them how to do their taxes. Teach them how to change a tire, and a fuse, and what a breaker box is and what to do with the switches inside it when something happens. Teach CPR and basic first-aid. Teach them the simple mechanics of a ballcock array, how to unblock a u-bend, what and where the emergency shutoff valves are for common household water sources. These are the points of knowledge that a great number of people manage to achieve adulthood without, and they’re significantly more important to everyday life than how to solve quadratic equations.

ALGEBRA DOESN’T DO YOU ANY GOOD WHEN YOUR TOILET IS OVERFLOWING.

Oh, and here’s another novel idea, how about we force kids to learn to read actual physical paper maps? Because when North Korea pushes the red button and every technological everything ceases to function, there’s going to be a whole pile of youngsters who have no idea how to get home. (I mean, if they can get home at all.) Or how to cook three simple, cheap, healthy meals, so that they have them in rotation when they move out? They’ll still eat nothing but pizza and Hostess cupcakes, but at least you’ll know they can eat some real food if they want, or cook something marginally impressive for their girlfriends.

Funnily enough, I actually had a moment about my complete disinterest in cooking with Handyman Dave.

“Wait, what?! A Fazzio who doesn’t cook?”

Oh, I can. And I have. And I’m sure I will again.

But that requires being a grown up.

And I hate being a grown up.

It works on multiple levels, you know

I love cartoons. Possibly to an unhealthy level. Given the choice between cartoons and a “grownup show”, nine times out of ten, I’ll choose the cartoons. A marathon of old Looney Tunes shorts? Yes, please. Animaniacs? I’m down. Garfield & Friends? Yaaasss!!!

Revisiting some of these old favorites as an adult has been eye-opening. Sometimes, as a child, you’d notice the adults around you chuckling at your shows, and in those moments you’d simply assume that they were laughing at the same joke you were. Well, maybe they were. But it’s also likely that there was something in that joke that you, at age six, were completely unaware of.

With Looney Tunes this was essential, since they were originally shown as part of the rotating reels at cinemas between the features and the news bulletins and whatnot, very much before televisions were ubiquitous--or even invented. The cartoons had to appeal to the whole audience or risk losing patrons between parts of the showing. They often served a dual purpose as well, advertising the purchase of war bonds, or recruiting for the armed forces, or propagandizing the enemy, or issuing public service announcements. Obviously today we see all sorts of dated ideas presented in those old Looney Tunes shorts, but we also see the things we missed as children, not having had the worldly knowledge we do as adults.

Whether we were watching Yosemite Sam fight off the amorous advances of a jail cell mate or catching Bugs with some naughty literature, it’s all there--and you don’t even have to look too hard.

Like most ‘90s kids, Warner Brothers’ Animaniacs was a staple of my after-school viewing. A couple of years ago, Netflix got the rights to the whole series and had all 99 episodes available to stream.

Friends, my jaw hit the floor more times than could possibly be healthy.

“I was watching this?! The censors let that through?!”

Cue much short-circuiting of the brain.



Possibly the most cited piece of adult humor from Animaniacs is the one pictured above. I certainly didn’t know what it was all about at age 8, but holy cow, do I ever know now. Yikes.

Now, when I was in college, I would schedule all my classes in the mornings, go home and nap, then have my late afternoons and evenings free for homework and rehearsals (drama major, remember?). At some point, I started watching Cartoon Network as a way to pass the time on slow afternoons. I have always appreciated animation as an art form, and in the mid ‘00s there was a spate of truly creative and unique animated shows, but my favorite by far was called Chowder. Sadly short-lived, it lasted only three seasons before it got shunted off into the siding. The show is an example of one of the most diverse variety of mediums used in a single series--ink and paint, computer animation, static backgrounds, watercolors, stop-motion, claymation, puppetry...the list goes on. Artistically it held my attention, but it was also wonderfully whimsical and madcap and had some fabulous built-in opportunities for boundary pushing. One character, Schnitzel, spoke entirely in the word ‘radda’, which allowed for interpretation by the other characters, and on more than one occasion another character would have a pearl-clutching moment as the result of something Schnitzel said, the meaning of which was only ever hinted at. Coming to this show as an adult (mostly) offered me the ability to see it the first time around through a grownup lens, which turned out to be just as much fun as seeing it once as an impressionable young innocent and then again later in life after an excess of bitter, jaded worldliness wormed its way into my psyche. Possibly my favorite exchange in the entire series, though not as filthy as some, is:



“Okay, great, so why are you chuntering on about this, exactly?”

I don’t know. Because subversion is fun? Because it’s nice to have one up on the kiddiewinks and share knowing glances with the other grownups in the room? Because after a while it becomes like a treasure hunt, and you start actively seeking out media you partook of as a child and searching through it with a fine-toothed comb looking for the naughty bits? Because it’s a welcome distraction from this garbage fire of a world we live in?

Maybe I just think that everyone should watch more cartoons.

::shrugs::