Unqualified Advice: Going Home For Thanksgivig

Living home is like being in prison on Rockefeller drug charges. You have no freedom, tons of rules, and you probably didn’t even do shit wrong. Coming to college is like getting paroled and dropping a multi-million dollar rap album about the experience. All of a sudden you have independence, options, and choices. Life is good, but even Young Buck has to meet with his P.O. every once in a while. At least you get to meet with yours’ over turkey and yams.

Going home for Thanksgiving is a pivotal point in a person’s adult development. For most freshmen, it is the first time they will be forced to deal with their parents, face to face, since entering the wonderful world of college. Many of you may have a new tattoo, piercing, or random drunken injury to explain. Best of luck with that. You may be surprised to learn that your “totally un-cool” parents are actually aware that having a tongue ring means you’re a slut (and/or gay.) They may also be displeased if you’re Jewish, and can no longer be buried in a religious cemetery because you needed a tramp stamp on your lower back. Priorities.

In the case of explaining body modification, it’s important to play it off as a way of expressing yourself, becoming your own person, and celebrating your individuality. People of your parents’ generation eat up this hippie bullshit. When you live at home, your parents try to be in charge. It is their job to get you into college, period. If they can keep you off drugs, away from scented glue sticks, and get you into a facility of higher learning without a child of your own, their job is done. You can die from a heroin overdose before they’ve pulled out of the parking lot on moving-in day and it’s not their problem anymore. Now it’s the school’s problem, and your parents are just the innocent victims of a “preventable tragedy.”

And so it begins, a slow transition from authoritarian to friend. It doesn’t matter if, come Thanksgiving break, you’re halfway to academic probation with a bum liver and frustratingly irritated genitals. You are a successful adult in your parents’ eyes, at least for now. The new parental prerogative is to convince you that they are not actually as uncool as they have been pretending to be all these years. In fact you are soon to learn that your parents are actually quite hip, as is evidenced by your dad handing you a solitary beer with Thanksgiving dinner, in exchange for your car keys of course. So you’re sitting there stranded, surrounded by your family, holding a beer and waiting for a funnel that isn’t coming.

Your parents start to get rowdy following several glasses of boxed wine, and the shit really starts to fly. When your parents start reminiscing about their college years, it’s time to start counting the ways you can kill yourself with the gravy boat. Any sentence that begins with “You know, when I was in College,” is a sentence you do not want to live through. The same can be assumed for any sentence containing the phrase “Your mother an I,” “made love,” or “once took the pot.”

To make matters worse, Thanksgiving Eve is the biggest night out of the year. “Blackout Wednesday,” if you will. That means you must enter into the Thanksgiving nightmare with a headache that rivals the one your parents had after failing the pregnancy test that blessed them with you. Luckily, there are a couple of strategies for dealing with the uncomfortable ritual of unwanted disclosure that accompanies the Thanksgiving feast. Option A is “The hair of the dog that bit you.” Upon waking up to the feeling of an Amtrak crashing in through your nose and out your temple, immediately begin drinking the previous night’s beverage of choice. After about three drinks, your headache should miraculously be gone, and you’ll simply feel an overwhelming sense of euphoria, the likes of which even awkward family obligations cannot scathe.

Option B is the reason we have Thanksgiving. Marijuana. If the Native Americans hadn’t been so into herbs and peyote, maybe they wouldn’t have fought like such pussies. Thankfully for us, they did. Now we celebrate their decimation by gluttonously gorging ourselves under the pretense of giving thanks for that which we have but assuredly do not deserve. Pot may not have the same ability to alleviate a hangover as alcohol, but food does. And Pot will make you eat more, allowing you to focus on the deliciousness of the gravy, turkey and stuffing combo, not on the mom, dad, college special now airing on The History Channel.

Regardless of how you choose to handle the Thanksgiving dinner situation, you will probably return to your room feeling physically ill, mentally disfigured, and emotionally disturbed. You will be in no shape whatsoever to tackle the hangover that has miraculously returned since your buzz wore off. For this, no advice can be offered. Dealing with these issues is part of growing up. It teaches you to look to the future. In less than a week you’ll be back at school with a newfound enthusiasm for the college lifestyle, a complete remedy from any homesickness, and the disturbing thoughts of what influence your parents “once taking the pot” might have had on your conception.

**Originally Printed in the Albany Student Press