(Un)Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving during law school was always a wasted holiday, since the break was conveniently used as the reading period leading up to exams. Wednesday was the last day of class, and exams started the following week, so any sort of long distance travel or time spent with family seemed highly reckless and irresponsible. So as a 1L, for the first time ever, I had to tell my mom I would not be coming home for Thanksgiving.

The only thing worse than being alone on Thanksgiving, I thought, would have been having to spend the holiday with my roommate. We had recently gotten into a bit of a fight. It was your typical skirmish between roommates: He was trying to study for a Criminal Law midterm, and I was watching his DVD copy of Matrix 2 with the volume up a little too loud, so he couldn’t concentrate on classifying the different degrees of murder with all that gunfire coming from the living room. He waited patiently for the movie to end, and then he approached me:

“Did you know I was studying upstairs?”

“Oh sorry. Was it too loud?”

“Yes. And did you know that I just bought that DVD yesterday, and I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet?”

“Uhm. I didn’t think you would mind.”

And then he used the opportunity to bring up everything I had ever done since I had moved into the apartment that had bothered him. Obviously, he had not gotten much productive studying done in his room, because he was too busy brainstorming about all my faults. Since I had just watched one of the Matrix movies, I had an incredible urge to jump, hang in midair while the camera rotated around the room, and roundhouse kick him in the face, all in slow-motion. But I wisely decided against it, since I would have probably pulled my groin, quite possibly broken the coffee table, and hurt myself more than my opponent. I was so preoccupied envisioning my roundhouse kick, that I missed most of my roommate’s comments:

“You don’t clean the bathroom . . . blah blah . . . You leave the toilette seat up . . . blah blah . . . You don’t wipe the kitchen counter . . . blah blah . . . You dropped some popcorn kernels in the couch . . .blah blah blah."

But he mentioned one thing that immediately snapped me out of my daydream and made me realize that I was living with a mad person, as opposed to just an insanely clean one. He thought my recycling was too dirty.

“I don’t know how you people recycle in Indiana. But here, you’re supposed to rinse out your bottles and cans and make sure they’re clean before you recycle them.”

He was basically telling me that I had to clean my garbage before throwing it away. But I figured if that’s what it would take to keep peace in the house, I could take the extra effort to do it. So from that day on, I couldn’t just toss an empty beer bottle into the recycling bin, I had to first rinse it out thoroughly, and make sure it was spotless.

On Thanksgiving Day, the thing I was most grateful for was that my roommate would be out of town for a few days, leaving me with the apartment to myself, so I could get some studying done without having to worry about whether I had left the toilette seat up. I called up a few of my friends whom I knew were in town studying, and we got together at my place for our own Thanksgiving dinner. The supermarket had, by then, sold out of turkeys, so we bought some lamb instead. We had a lovely little Thanksgiving dinner, with a nice lamb and plenty of wine, and for a few hours we forgot that we were stuck in school, away from our families.

When we were finished, my friends – well aware that I lived with an obsessive compulsive Nazi – volunteered to help me clean up. I was grateful for the help, but I should have been more vigilant in their supervision, because I failed to notice one of my friends empty his plate of leftover lamb and mashed potatoes into the recycling bin. There were two trash cans next to each other – one was for garbage, and the other for recycling. My friend, didn’t notice a difference, and dumped his food all over the empty bottles of wine.

On Saturday, after my roommate returned, I walked into the living room and found him steaming with anger. He looked like he was about to turn into the Incredible Hulk.

“How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked.

But he ignored my question, and in turn asked me, “Did you have a party while I was gone?”

“I wouldn’t call it a party. Some of the guys came over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Oh Yeah?” By this point, he was screaming, “Well, one of your buddies vomited all over my recycling.”

I took a look at it and concluded, “It’s not vomit. It’s lamb.”

“Lamb?”

“Yeah. We cooked a lamb.”

“Who the hell eats lamb on Thanksgiving?”

“They were sold out of turkeys.”

“I don’t care what it is. I want you to clean it up.”

I asked him to stop and think about what he was saying. That he was actually suggesting I clean the garbage. That a reasonable person would not request another human being to do such a thing. But he insisted with his request, so I told him f**k you, and suggested that instead of cleaning his garbage, how about I just roundhouse kick him in the face in slow-motion.

Even the Pilgrims and the Indians were able to put aside their differences during Thanksgiving. Why couldn’t we?