So, blogs! What ever happened to the blogging era? i mean, i guess it is a bit... self-indulgent. Who has the time to write down their thoughts and isn't it also a bit presumptuous to believe people care enough to spend time reading them? Answers? Everyone, and no!
It's Thanksgiving. i'm used to spending turkey days low-key or alone, but supposedly my uncle is coming down from central California to the area so i'll meet up with him i guess.
Writing that paragraph above made me think of a Thanksgiving two years ago. At the time i knew i was getting out of the Air Force a few months later, and so it was a bit bittersweet since i knew i'd be leaving all these people i'd grown close to through work and the hell that was (think: carbon under immense pressure/temp to become...). And i knew that with the way things usually work out, i would likely never see them again. And (roughly) two years later, i haven't seen most of them since. i saw a few people when i drove through San Antonio on the way to California....
Regardless, Thanksgiving is good. Not so i can be given a day set aside to remember what i'm thankful for. Those moments tend to occur everyday like "i'm thankful that i'm not failing my classes". Thanksgiving is good because it ends up creating the moments for which i'm thankful (didn't want to end two sentences with prepositions)... Like that Thanksgiving two years ago... i knew it was my last one with them and i was still happy to be able to enjoy a day of not working and hanging out with them. Lots of laughs, good food, great friends.
Which leads me to the subject of friendship. i don't talk to many of my friends regularly. Random facebook comments are probably the closest it gets to regular conversation. Infrequent and impersonal, they may be.. but i really don't feel that i need to talk to them a lot in order to remain.. amicable. Or should i say, they don't need to talk to me in order for me to maintain our friendship. i "friend" for life. Sure, it might get awkward to keep a conversation flowing with my "tweet-like" mind which involves responses with less than 40 characters, but if they're cool with it then we're going to be ok. Heck, i don't even talk to my mom more than 1 or 2 times a month, so that should say something.
Strange, considering i still don't consider myself independent. i still feel like i'm in the bubble. Even after 6 years of being away from home in the military, working, getting paid, paying all sorts of utility bills, cooking, cleaning, sleeping... all by my lonesome, and i still feel like i'm attached at the belly button. i guess it's less an umbilical cord than it is a safety net. With all my family around and never being in any serious mortal danger and with a relatively flippant regard for life in general, i suppose i feel safe. i'm cozy. i'm well-fed (as apparent in my progressively tighter pants). So, i'm not independent. i assume i'll never be. How can i be when my life is so intertwined (especially with those i actually care about in the SDA community)? Someday i'll take on a family and we'll just be co-dependent. And i'm ok with that. More of a grudging acceptance of reality than one of ecstatic embrace.
So it's T(o)-day and it's a good day. i may or may not eat turkey (or tofurkey or dinner roast), but it's not about the food. It's about the people, yo. And that's something i will ecstatically embrace.
Hey! This was such a reflective post. I like your umbilical cord analogy and even while your post seems to imply that it's a negative thing, maybe it's not so bad to be connected to other people in that way. Maybe that's what keeps us grounded, motivated, and purposeful. Without them, I'm sure life would be a lot less meaningful.
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