Uncertain employment prospects, finals and the general gloom of Winter Quarter’s encroachment remind me why I love Thanksgiving. Well, I love Thanksgiving for a lot of reasons, but the one that isn’t a side dish is that for one day, we unabashedly focus on the bright spot in a superbly bleak narrative.
Faced with a future in which smallpox, land disputes and nor’easters were the only certainties, the Pilgrims and Indians took some time out to celebrate a good harvest and enjoy a nice dinner. On Thanksgiving we don’t talk about the despair, we remember that we’re all just happy to be here. It’s a lesson worth remembering on a college campus when it seems like we’ll never get through finals just to never get an internship just to never get a job at a time when seemingly no one is happy to be anywhere.
Over the weekend a boisterous game of Jenga quickly deteriorated into a Seinfeld-style “Festivus” airing of grievances, in which four fellow seniors and I lamented our collective unhireability. Right now, even my questionably accurate retelling of the first Thanksgiving might not be enough to pull us out of our wallowing, but pull us out I must. Wallowing is counterproductive. So I’ll turn instead to a more contemporary example, my end-of-quarter road trip back to New York and my parents’ sage driving wisdom.
Each of my parents has a catchphrase that applies to stressful drives and daunting tasks in general. My dad says, “There are a lot of ways to get to the same