In Which I Wonder At Marching Bobble-Heads

After almost four months in the United States, I've readjusted in many ways. I no longer use the Greek words for 'Excuse Me' and 'Thank You', I expect the stores to be open on Sundays, I no longer think 27/11 is a date in a strange new month, and my red wine consumption has rapidly fallen. This saddens me constantly, but I console myself with Indian food, the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
However, American holidays are still a novelty. Perhaps a better way to say that is this: holidays are still a novelty, no matter what their nationality. When you live abroad, you become used to regarding holidays with a mixture of curiosity and anthropological objectivity. When it's not your holiday, you don't have any of the nostalgic excitement for it that you associate with the holidays you have celebrated since childhood. Instead, you just spend a lot of time staring wide-eyed and wondering and trying to figure out why everyone is dressed up today. (Or, in Greece, you wonder why all of the stores are closed and discover that it is the day of a saint that you have never heard of.)
So now that I'm back in the States, I don't think I've quite stopped looking at holidays as objects of curiosity, even when they are as familiar as my front door. Anything is a novelty when you've been away long enough, and a normal Thanksgiving is something I haven't had in a while. Last year I was in Greece. Two years ago I spent countless horrid hours fighting through delays in Des Moines and O'Hare due to a snowstorm and arrived home just in time for the turkey, completely exhuasted. Three years ago I had a minor passport problem at London Stansted airport and ended up taking a very long unexpected overnight train ride to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh completely exhausted and just in time to spend Thanksgiving touring castles and kilt factories.
As holidays go, I generally think Thanksgiving is a good one. I know that if you look back into history, you will not find that the story of the first Thanksgiving is as happy as many Americans would like to believe. I know that Europeans did terrible things to the Native Americans. I know that the traditional "First Thanksgiving" story has some real historical inaccuracies in it. However, I also think that for many Americans, Thanksgiving is only vaguely associated with pilgrims, and very much associated with food. That's the way holidays work, isn't it? Christmas is supposedly about the birth of Jesus, but most people are much more concerned with trimming their trees and exchanging presents than they are with the religious aspect. Easter is also supposedly Christian, but the eggs are Pagan in origin, and I haven't the slightest idea where the bunny came from. And somewhere along the line Halloween stopped being an night where you stayed in and hid from evil spirits, and started being a night when little kids wandered the streets and ate themselves sick.
This year, I tried to look at Thanksgiving as a foreigner might. Some aspects of the celebration can be universally appreciated, I think; people from all nations can appreciate good food and spending a day with family and friends.
On the other hand, there's the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Now, for the first nineteen or twenty years of my life, I attended the parade every year, without fail. I would wake up at dawn, head down to Central Park West in the wee hours of the morning, and spend five or so hours in my pink snowsuit, or my ski pants, or my puffy coat, drinking hot chocolate and watching inflatable cartoon characters and high school baton twirlers who look like their legs are going to freeze off. I think I might have given up at the age of fourteen or fifteen if it weren't for those baton twirlers. It can be pretty cold out there, but if they could smile with bare arms poking out of their sparkly bathing suits, I could survive in my parka.
For those years, the parade was just a normal part of Thanksgiving, like cranberry sauce and lasagna. (Yes, my grandmother makes lasagna on Thanksgiving. We eat it after the mozzarella and pepper and before the turkey and stuffing. That might sound odd to someone who does not have Italian heritage, but I've talked to people of Scandinavian descent, and trust me, they have some much stranger holiday foods.) In over twenty years, I've never slept in on a Thanksgiving. I always either rose at the crack of dawn for the parade, or because I was in the middle of a transportation nightmare. Last year, in Greece, I think I awoke at 7am. It was the latest I'd slept in a lifetime of Thanksgivings.

This year, I had a traditional Thanksgiving; I woke up at 5, walked my neighbor's dog, and went to the parade, in the rain. I was not overly enthused by the prospect, but I was due to meet a large number of good friends there, and I succumbed to peer pressure. Some people succumb to peer pressure and wear stupid clothes, some end up hooked on nictotine, and some end up very very wet at an early hour on Central Park West.

After four years, the parade seemed both nostalgic and new. I remembered Thanksgivings of my childhood, watching the high school marching bands back when they looked so old and glamorous. I thought of seeing the giant Garfield when he looked not just big, but larger than most houses. I recalled the excitement of seeing Santa Clause and feeling that Christmas was in the air.

I also looked at Bobble-headed pilgrims and thought, wow, what a completely bizarre way to honor one's ancestors. Is there any other nation that honors their founders by having normal sized people walk around with giant inflated ancestor faces? Is there any other nation that celebrates their heritage by parading very wet pop stars down the street on giant rolling castles and pirate ships? We are really weird, aren't we?

I recently read the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, which is essentially an indictment of the way American history is taught in our schools. I agreed with many of the criticisms made by the author, but when he criticized Thanksgiving for minimizing down the cruelty of Europeans toward Native Americans, I had mixed feelings. We absolutely do need to a do a better job of recognizing the horrors in our own past, but for me Thanksgiving has little to do with pilgrims, and much to do with my own personal traditions. If we attack Thanksgiving for being a celebration of cruelty, we should also attack every religious holiday on the calendar for doing something similar. I particularly like Thanksgiving because it does (or can) cross religious and cultural borders, that it can belong to everyone, and because appreciating the things you have is usually a good thing. If you look back to the Native Americans, it's a holiday that is probably rooted in the absolute worst of American traditions, but these days I think it can embody the best of American traditions. After all, it was really started by Abraham Lincoln as a celebration of unity after the Civil War.

And maybe the pilgrims had bobble heads for a metaphorical reason. Those pilgrims and their inflated egos! They thought they were better than everyone! Oh, those big-headed ancestors of mine! Thank goodness I'm more culturally aware than they were!

(I'm trying, anyway.)

In Which A Little Red Dress Becomes a Big Problem

I really hate shopping. I know I have mentioned this before. I like having new clothes, but the actual shopping process always leaves me feeling irritable. Part of the problem is that I am short. Jeans and skirts that are not in petite sizes usually have about four inches of fabric hanging off the bottom of my feet, which require wide shoes. Sleeves hang over my hands, and straps are always two inches too long. Finidng something that looks good usually requires me to spend lots of time trying on things that look awful, and that does not generally make me cheerful.
So, though I've known for months that I'm going to a wedding in December, I completely avoided worrying about a dress, hoping that perhaps something would magically appear in my closet, or perhaps a personal-shopper-fairy-godmother would come out of a pumpkin and create one out of thin air, and I would avoid the process of trying things on and making decisions.
Finally, however, I realized I had to get it over with, and I went to Macy's and tried on three dresses. At this point, A Miracle Occurred. Three dresses fit me, and looked pretty nice. Not one, three. I actually left the store feeling good, and the whole process didn't take more than an hour. I decided I wanted the red halter dress, but I thought I would look for it online at a cheaper price before I went ahead and purchased it.
And then my sister, home for Thanksgiving, entered the equation. My sister loves to shop. She can spend hours agonizing over small purchasing decisions. When I explained that I was planning to buy a dress, she insisted that we depart on a long shopping journey, spanning two and a half miles of Upper West Side storefronts and countless images of garments on the internet.
"I think I'm going to buy the dress at Macy's," I told her repeatedly.
"No!" She exclaimed every time. "Look at this one, with the nice flowery pattern on the skirt, and it comes in petite sizes..."
"I think I'm going to buy the dress at Macy's," I repeated.
"Halter tops have been done," she told me. "Look at that one!"
"I'm going to buy the dress at Macy's." I announced. "But oh, all right, I'll try it on."
This was my mistake.
We were at the Banana Republic, and the dress was a little red strapless dress, suitable for weddings and other formal occasions. Because they didn't have my size, I chose the next size down and began looking for a fitting room. After about five minutes of poking my head into various corners, I found one, all the way across the store, by the men's sweaters. I didn't see any store employees about, so I just chose a room and tried on the dress.
It was one of those dresses that's tight in all the wrong places, and loose in the wrong places, and I did not trust it to stay up. Some dresses fit, and some dresses are too big, or too small, and some just don't fit. They were formed for someone else's body. This was one fo those dresses. Plus, it would leave an awful lot of myself exposed to the Iowan December, and trust me, that's a bad idea.
I stepped out of the dressing room and displayed the awkward dress to my sister, who was satisfied. She left, and I went back inside to put my clothes on once again.
Unfortunately, this did not go as planned. I unzipped the dress as far as my waist, and then it stopped. I mean, I kept pulling, but the zipper was not going anywhere. I yanked. I tugged, I begged, I cursed, and I tried again. It was stuck solid.
I tried pulling up, and that worked. I could zip myself into the dress again, but once the zipper hit my waist, it stopped working. Something was stuck, or broken, or otherwise malfunctioning, and I hadn't a clue what the problem was. I tried wriggling the dress over my head, but it wouldn't fit. It wouldn't slide down over my hips, either. The feminine figure has some serious disadvantages.
"Hayley?' I asked, hoping my sister would come to my aid. "Hayley!" She didn't answer. I continued to tug the dress downwards. It wouldn't budge. The zipper had managed to become stuck at a very inconvenient spot.
"Hayey!" I howled again, and again. "Hayley!" Eventually I gave up trying to be discreet and let out a long wail of "Haaaaaaaaaayyyylllllleyyyyyyy!" that would have made Marlon Brando proud. There was no answer.
I slipped my t-shirt back over my head and opened the dressing room door. I found myself face to face with a Banana Republic Employee, who was regarding me with a bemused expression.
"Who's Hayley?" he asked.
"My sister," I answered.
"Oh!" he said brightly, as though this explained why a young woman in a t-shirt, half a cocktail dress and bright blue socks would be howling like a cat locked in a bedroom. He turned and walked out into the store.
"Hayley!" I heard him yell. "Hayley!" There was no answer.
"Sorry," he shrugged.
"No problem." I went back into my dressing room cell and continued to pull on the dress. What would happen if I tore it? I wondered. Would they charge me for it? Would I have to pay one hundred and sixty-eight dollars plus tax to get out of this thing? It was an unsettling thought.
I was approaching frenzy mode when I heard on a knock on my dressing room door.
"Emily!" my sister exclaimed. "What the hell is going on in there? I've been waiting, and waiting, and I kept thinking, well, I'm not going back in there-"
I yanked her inside the dressing room cell.
"I'm not going back in there," she continued. "Because I realized that something. Actually, this is the Men's Dressing Room. But then you didn't come out."
"I'm stuck." I showed her the zipper. "This is the what?"
"Well, it didn't have a sign," she said as she tugged on my zipper. "But it is in the Men's section. The women's dressing room is on the other side. What is wrong with this thing?"
We spent several more minutes yanking and cursing, but that little metal thing just would not move. It didn't appear to have anything wrong with it, it just would not yield to any external pressure whatsoever. It was definitely the Fidel Castro of zippers.
"Should we ask someone for help?" I wondered. I was thinking of a store clerk. I wondered if I should dare to venture past my cell, and just hope there were no men in their boxers hanging around.
My sister decided to try a different tactic. "I'm calling Mummy," she announced.
"OK, " I sighed.
My mother was informed of the situation via cell phone, despite the fact that she and my father were off somewhere in the wilds of Connecticut, driving home from a weekend trip. I don't know exactly what my sister expected her to do, exactly, but I guess calling your parents is just one of those things you do sometimes when you're in a tight spot. I called home when I realized I was going to end up in Romania unexpectedly, and Hayley called home when she realized her sister was caught in a strapless dress unexpectedly. Why I'm always the trapped one is another question.
My mother informed my sister that she should retrieve a store employee. The store employee, a tall young woman with green shoes, spent the requisite few minutes tugging before she announced "Shit. I'm going to get the manager." At that point I decided it might be prudent to put my pants on under the dress, just in case it was removed publicly.
Luckily, the store manager declared that all necessary measures should be used to remove the dress, including the breaking of zippers and ripping of seams. A pair of scissors were retrieved, seams were chopped open, and I was finally emancipated. I celebrated my freedom by marching out onto Broadway and announcing that I was definitely, definitely going to buy the dress from Macy's.
"No!" My sister exclaimed. Then she paused. "You know Emily," she remarked. "That's exactly the kind of thing that would happen to you. I mean, I know it wasn't your fault, but it is exactly the kind of thing that would happen to you."
I can't really deny this. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to buy the goddamn dress from Macy's.

In Which I Keep Writing

I've been gone for a long time now, partly because every time I put my fingers on the keyboard, I had to resist the urge to write mournful statements about how much I miss traveling, and I thought that might get boring after a while.
But I also miss writing. And, though I still have mixed feelings about the United States, I have a lot to say about it. New York is a place that gives you a lot to say.
So, without further adieu, I'll tell you some things about the past few months, and we can consider ourselves caught up, and then go from there.
Thing #1: I now work as a tutor to 7th graders at a public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Many people think that New York City Public schools are places to be avoided, but I am having fun. And honestly, seventh graders are very much like seventh graders, regardless of economic status or nationality, or whether they call themselves seventh graders, or gymnasium students. Many people also think that seventh graders are to be avoided, probably because they remember being in seventh grade, and how horrible it was. But I like seventh graders so much more now that I'm not one of them.
Thing #2: There was actually good news in American politics last week. Can you believe it? Good news! I don't know if I believe it. I think I might be dreaming. Any minute now a dwarf is going to walk by in a tutu and a dolphin is going to speak Greek to me, and then I am going to wake up...
Thing #3: My blog needs a new name. It needs some cool banner at the top, and it needs some actual writing about events that have taken place in recent memory. I'm working on all of these things, but if anyone has suggestions about the more technological items on this list, that would be great. I haven't the slightest idea how to put in a masthead, and when I look at the html, it makes me feel vaguely seasick.