28 November 2013

Day #14 - "Americans" excel at two things...

"Americans" excel at two things like nobody else...

Every year, on the last Thursday of November, people across the country get together with friends and family to take part in a feast of (usually) epic proportions. Wide varieties of foods are consumed in mass quantities. Before tucking in at the table, people post ridiculously cliché pictures to social networks of their turkey, which they assume looks drastically different from the turkey that their neighbors and everyone else are pulling from their own ovens to put on their own tables... even though they don't.

Then as though they forgot the lessons they swore they'd learned last year, they load up their plate with 3x as much food as can fit. They eat themselves into a stupor... and that's before they make one sucker clear the table and switch the plethora of dishes from dinner food to dessert. Then once again they pick up their forks to shovel any number of different kinds of pie into their open mouths.

This is when the post meal posts begin. People blame tryptophan they've been told is in turkey for the coma like state that their digestive tract forces upon the rest of the body... but it's not tryptophan that renders them incapable of getting off the couch for the next several hours. It's the amount of food they pushed through their lips. Did they truly even taste the food?

Every year, days... weeks even, are spent preparing for this day. People start enumerating the things they're thankful for. The love of friends and family, a roof over their heads, clothes to keep them warm, their health (or relative health), the list goes on. Everyone speaks of how much they have everything they need to be happy.

And then the store advertisements come into play. People are convinced that it's not enough to be contented with shelter, physical nourishment and emotional comfort from loved ones. They need the latest gadget. The newest toys. Forget that they don't use the ones they already have. Forget that they don't have the money for it. They believe the commercials that tell them that every minute in which they don't have a particular item in hand, they are missing out on something great. And so they stand in line for the "door buster" deals that thanks to peoples' greed, completely live up to their names. Hordes of people, quite literally, bust doors down to get one of the perhaps 5 items that the store actually has in stock for the items with "bargain" prices that have been advertised to be available, IF ONLY one is willing to go shopping and fight through crowds... right after they finished talking about how they have everything they could ever need.

Gluttony and greed. Our compatriots really do excel at those two things. It's a bit of holiday irony really.

I refuse to buy into it. I can still move after dinner and I don't feel compelled to rush out to a store and buy things.

Don't worry. I'm not dumb enough to believe I'm the only one either.

I don't have a picture to attach to this post. Didn't take any pictures of my meal and I wouldn't post them even if I had.

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