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Location: Work.
Listening: "Absolutely Fabulous (remix)" ~ Pet Shop Boys.

I'm ashamed to admit that I abandoned my last entry for a lengthy game of Civ III. I am contrite. It won't happen again. I swear.

To resume where I left off, the Tori concert was affecting, as always. On the drive home from San Diego, Peter and I discussed, among other things, the "creative process"--our ideas and habits when writing compared to those of other writers we know. It was very reassuring to know that Peter, with all of his discipline, often just sits down and writes, without outlines or character sketches, unless he feels like creating them. After talking with several others in my circle and having them tell me about their various rituals of having one certain time each day to write, always writing from a full outline, etc., I had started to feel incredibly undisciplined and naive in my approach to writing. I'm not saying that I'm not--I just now know that I'm undisciplined and naive for entirely different reasons, which is comforting on some level. It was agreed that I really just need to stop thinking so extensively about writing and simply get to it, as I used to. I think that prospect terrifies me much more than having to draw up a complete outline, because it basically comes down to "put up or shut up". We'll see.

Thursday morning, Thanksgiving at 1260 began with both of us sleeping until almost noon. We had gone shopping for supplies at Bristol Farms the evening before and so were pretty well-stocked for the one day of the year on which is seems mandatory that one suddenly acquire vast cooking knowledge out of thin air (or perhaps it just seemed that way for myself and my friends). Peter washed down the kitchen, we both did dishes, I scrubbed surfaces, and finally, we faced the making of the meal itself.

We had acquired a turkey from the grocery butcher who, when he had seen us staring in horror at the five 35 lb. birds (all that Bristol Farms had left in their case) the night before, had gone rummaging in his back room. We had drifted away from the meat section and were comparing fresh vegetables in the produce area when he walked up to us, smiling, his hands behind his back. "Who loves you?". He then presented the bird, which seemed so petite next to its behemoth counterparts under glass. It had been special-ordered, but appeared to have been abandoned by the assignee, and he was very proud that he had been able to retrieve it for us. We thanked him, he returned to the meat section to put a price tag on the bird, and we contemplated what in the world we were going to do with twenty pounds of turkey between the two of us.

So Thanksgiving afternoon ultimately came to Peter sitting cross-legged on the den floor, chopping celery and mushrooms for his mother's stuffing and me staring at a very large, very naked turkey in the kitchen. Epicurious.com to the rescue. Austin had recommended this site for some bread recipes I was trying to track down, so I returned to it for instructions on how to handle my first turkey. Their recipe was simple, the instructions were easy-to-follow, and, after a last-minute dash to the store, I had slathered the turkey with butter and freshly chopped marjoram, rosemary, and thyme, Peter had stuffed it, and we had slipped it into our small oven. I then set the giblets and neck aside for gravy stock, we poured two glasses of cabernet, and sat down to watch Season One: Episodes 1-4 of The Sopranos, which we'd just gotten on DVD from NetFlix. We set Peter's cel phone alarm to remind me to baste the bird every half hour, fielded family phone calls from England, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, and nibbled on sandwiches. We played Civ III and danced around to mp3's of the Pet Shop Boys. When we finally got around to eating dinner, it was getting close to nine o'clock.

The dinner itself was, in my opinion, delicious. The turkey turned out golden and juicier than expected. Peter prepared herbed carrots with onions and brussel sprouts; I had steamed some asparagus with lemon slices and then some green beans with mushrooms. The stuffing, cooked in the bird, was very different from my grandmother's cornbread stuffing, but yummy nonetheless. We filled our plates, opened a bottle of red wine that Peter's parents had brought to us from their last trip to Oregon, toasted to what each of us was thankful for (*yay*), finished watching the Sopranos, and then shared stories until we realized that we couldn't eat any more. There was simply too much food. We covered everything, Peter somehow managed to make it all fit in the fridge, and we dropped off to sleep immediately (tryptophan is a harsh mistress).

I've been spending Thanksgiving away from my family for several years now. During my sophomore year at USC, my parents decided that it was simply too expensive and impractical to fly me home for what amounted to three days only to fly me back to California for one and a half weeks before Christmas. My mother and father are both Virgo's and, if nothing else at all, imminently practical.

So I was effectively left to my own devices in LA for Thanksgiving from sophomore year on. The first year I spent watching a friend put his hand in the 35 pound turkey he had bought and dance it across my apartment bar. In my junior year, I spent Thanksgiving with my S.O. in San Francisco, in a restaurant in Chinatown, eating a vegan meal of huge shiitake mushrooms and seaweed, watching the Macy's parade on a TV mounted on the restaurant wall. Last year, I went up to a friend's house in LA, where the cook ended up drinking a bottle of wine and chasing me around the house, to everyone else's amusement. There have been more since then, but this was, by far, the coziest and most peaceful.