Sunday, December 23, 2012

Thanksgiving 2012



I have a lot of writing backlogged, so I guess I’ll go with chronology.

Jack drove me and a boy from Nepal I had never met before home for Thanksgiving on Tuesday night. The boy thought language was the root of all social ills (as in; the origin of language, the fact that language exists). The next day Mama and I spent cooking. The feast day was spent with Inka&co. We played mafia before dessert.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about. When my parents came to the US, they didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving much (if at all).  The reason Thanksgiving was popularized in the U.S. has very little to do with any origin story everyone is told in school. Rather the point was to have an origin story to bring people together; people from all over the world. It works. 


Like any other year, I went over to Eloosha’s house. There was the Evening of Creativity (творческий вечер), that went until one or two in the morning. After that, ten of us (the university students, that’s what they call our generation) went to hang out with some other people our age in another house. We sang.

It’s interesting, from an anthropological perspective, how we act. Everyone sings, that’s true across all ages. But the students, when together, cease to have the concept of personal space. This isn’t just my friends. It’s other people who grew up in the USA but have Russian roots. I have no way of explaining this; it’s not a Russian thing or an American thing, and it happens very quickly.  


We played laser tag. It was my first time, and I think part of what made it wonderful was that everyone went, ages ten to fifty, more or less. At some point, I asked the generation below us what they though of us. Everyone is very opinionated, but I'm not sure the adults realized that they are not the only ones, and decided not to fall into that trap. But Anya and Etya said that they think we are just really cool, so score.
Before I left, Myron and I realized that Kirill didn’t know what coke and mentos could do together, and decided to right this wrong.
 


1 comment:

  1. Ha-ha!! It is funny about Kirill not knowing about coke and mentos! He seems to fall into the the "intermediate" generation then... I know about C. & M. because my younger son Daniel shared it with me and showed it to me following one of his "science" experiments :)))

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