Happy Thanksgiving!

Isn't she beautiful?

Every year, my best buddy, The Canadian/Lebanese, has a Thanksgiving Feast to end all feasts.

(It should also be known that The Canadian/Lebanese presently kind of hates me with a sort of fiery passion for setting an embarrassing photo composition of him as the trivia's Facebook profile photo. But that's a story for another time.)

Anyhoodle, this year The Canadian/Lebanese had to top last year's feast which was constructed to top the feast from the year before. In 2009, he constructed a beautiful Turducken. In 2010, to raise the bar, he made a Turduckgoopheasantchicken thing that was a complicated and beautiful creation made of six (or was it seven?) different birds. For 2011, it seemed there was no way to top this culinary monstrosity, short of combining emperor penguin and the oft-thought extinct but terrifically delicious dodo inside of an albino unicorn.

Instead, he went whole hog.

See what I did there?

You're welcome.

I digress.

There was a turkey and a chicken inside of that beautiful pig, and just to make the atmosphere merry and bright, he played Babe and Charlotte's Web. It was a magical night.

On Sunday was the BF's annual Thanksgiving with his roommates/coworkers which involved turkey, ham, corn, green bean casserole, ahi tuna, yams, mashed potatoes, three different kinds of pie, a case of wine, and, of course, vodka. Once we'd all eaten to disgusting excess (the very day after eating turkey-chicken-pig, mind you), we sprawled out like beached whales to watch a seasonal MST3K favorite, Santa Claus.

A weekend just doesn't get more merry and bright than that, eh?

Tonight, we have a delicious and boozy night out on the town scheduled to celebrate the recent Doctoring of Hot Curry. This isn't some inference of Frankensteining; Hot Curry successfully defended her thesis this week and is now officially Smart. Dinner, I believe, will involve Peter's Inn followed by nightcaps at Birds of a Feather. Because obviously what you need the night before the biggest feast of the year is a delicious dinner.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving dinner with the BF at my parents, which I am hoping will involve oysters (more on that later), to be shared with some family friends and my two roommates who are Thanksgiving orphans this year.

And, of course, the obligatory gratitude spiel:

If there is anything I have learned in the past few years, it's that you cannot take anything for granted, that gratitude is a daily practice, and that you are owed nothing and but can find just about anything when circumstances are right. We are all born into ideas, plans, classes, and bodies that are riddled with limitations. Your fight is no different from anyone else's in the sense that we're all here to survive one way or another, but disparity is grossly huge and ignorance is soul-shattering. While every person may be born good, people have the potential to become grossly un-good; sometimes even evil. There are bad people in the world who want to do bad things, and there are good people who haven't a clue how to be good because they've never been given a chance. If you have a single moment to speak up, to right a wrong, to do something that makes someone else's life a little bit easier, there are no guarantees that an exact karmic scale will tip back in your favor, but it does create the hope that at a point in time when you need help, perhaps someone will be there. Good doesn't begat more good, it begats hope. Which might be the better.

Let's not discuss the poor, innocent pig pictured here. I may be struggling through my battle of trying to be a benign force in this world, but you dangle some delicious turkey-chicken-pork in front of me and all bets are off.

Happy Thanksgiving.