Turkey Day

I woke up this morning and started to watch the Age of Innocence with Daniel Day Lewis, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer. It was pretty good. I had to stop so I could do some of my dad's business this morning. I was too tired to do it last night. I had seen the entire Masterpiece Theater version of Edith Wharton's The Buccaneers a couple of years ago. It was like 6 hours and featured Mira Sorvino smoking in a tree. It was nice.

I guess my Thanksgiving revelation is that I should not be so scared of Edith Wharton, she is more foreign than difficult, but somehow in my mind she is viewed as such. It could possibly be that anything that smacks to hard of an isolated high minded society or has worn a whole into the mighty sarcophagus of American letters should be held at hands distance and declared irrelevant by so many in my academic camp, Faulkner excluded. But I like Edith on film, so I must read her now, she writes about a world that I have had to deal with in so many ways, working publishing houses.

Otherwise Thanksgiving dinner was nice. I slept most of the day. I needed it. My father, stepmother, sister, grandmother and I ate together around 4:30. We cooked half and ordered the other half. The dressing was pretty chemically laded. But everything else was good. We will be eating this stuff for days.

I tried to start The Pilgrim at Home by Gonzalez Eschevarria but my family won't let me. My mother called, interesting conversation. Lots of talk about the family reunion. It is interesting because I had a dream where both sides of my family and I were eating at a table in Switzerland. All of a sudden, one half of my family got up and left the table, while the other half stayed. I think I know what that means and I am subconsciously waiting for it to play out.

I am starting to feel overwhelmed by this application to Presbyterian University. I have other things that I need to do for my survival and I am not really sure how to balance all of this. I think I am delving into Brass Band music as a natural alleviator of stress. Rebirth and Kermit Ruffin (thanks Catherine) have been my on heavy rotation, a sort of penicillin for this feeling that I am drowning in mediocrity and spicelessness as far as my future intellectual world is considered (more the PU visit than anything, not my friends), not to mention clubbing, drinking, eating and just enjoying life. Life in NYC feels like a long chore where there is no time to do anything but commute because friends blow you off and reschedule at a drop of a hat. That is the NYC way I think. So, big brass bands will be it for a while. It all makes me feel much better.

Happy Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is black Friday. Good Luck for you lucky shopaholics.