Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
THIS IS WHAT THE GREAT HAM INCIDENT OF THANKSGIVING 2021 LOOKED LIKE
Please tell me more about the Great Ham Incident of Thanksgiving 2021. I wish to be amused by your calamity.
OK SO
We have a couple of people in the family who either don’t care for turkey, or really like ham, so at family holidays where Turkey is traditional, we usually have both. In this case, my father bought a honeybaked ham (that’s precooked, for non-US folks).
“There isn’t enough room in the oven for that and everything else I have to cook,” said my mother.
“That’s okay,” said my father. “We’ll warm it up on the grill.”
Cut to:
I’m sitting across the table from my cousin’s wife, who 1) is well known for her love of ham and 2) has a view out the window to the deck, when I see her eyes widen.
“The ham is on fire!” she cries.
“WHAT?” cry assorted family members.
“SAVE THE HAM!” she shouts, and runs out the back door.
My father does the most American thing he has ever done in his life, and I’m counting his military service in this: he walks calmly outside to the grill and douses the ham with a can of beer.
“If the ham and I were both on fire, she probably still would’ve been yelling ‘save the ham,’” Cousin mutters.
“Obviously,” I say. “You can put yourself out and the ham cannot.”
“YEAH, KEVIN,” says Cousin’s Wife.
We all turn to the Canadian guest who came to the party along with Cousin and Cousin’s Wife and is watching all this with fascination. “Well,” I say, “now you can tell everyone you’ve been to a real American Thanksgiving.”
one of the best i’ve gotten “actually david i’m pretty sure it’s pronounced froodian slip”
There’s a town called Lima in Ohio (made famous by Glee) and it’s pronounced like the bean. We also have roo-shee (Russia) and ver-sales (Versailles). Tragic
There is a town near me named Chili. It’s pronounced Chai-lai.
In the USA, it’s 100x cheaper to take an Uber to the hospital instead of an ambulance.
I don’t know if this is true or.. Like, having to pay for an ambulance that is taking you to the hospital? That doesn’t make any sense. What kind of distopian world is that?
It costs thousands of dollars to ride in an ambulance
In America some people with chronic health conditions like epilepsy literally have to wear medical IDs that say “don’t call an ambulance/911”. Some well-meaning person calling an ambulance for you will turn into a thousand (or couple thousand) dollars that YOU are on the hook for, even though you didn’t make the call. So, PSA: if you see someone having a seizure, look for a medical ID! You should only call an ambulance if: the person is elderly, pregnant, or the seizure lasts more than 4 minutes. Otherwise, wait for the seizure to pass, then ask the person if they want an ambulance when they regain consciousness.
wtf
I have epilepsy and I can attest that this is true. I usually only have one or two seizures a year. But all my family and friends know not to call an ambulance, because when you have a chronic condition, there’s next to nothing the hospital can do for you. Last year, I had a seizure in the middle of a restaurant and they called the ambulance without my friends knowing and I was so mad when I woke up in an ambulance. It cost me over $2000 for them to say, “Whelp, you’re fine. Get in touch with your neurologist. Have a nice day.”
-seriously from california to new mexico is terrifying like it’s eight straight hours of pale red desert and the sky is so large that everything, even your car, even your hands, looks like a tenuously small and fragile diorama placed on an endless pale red table and left there to dissolve.
-a gas station that for some reason has large dinosaurs made out of scrap metal. they are 1000% awesome. sometimes they move. take a million pictures.
-a fruit stand that sells the best fruit you have ever eaten. later you won’t quite remember which fruit. strawberries, maybe? peaches?
-small black birds, subtly different in every state. some have gold eyes and some are a little iridescent and some are black from beak to toes. the sparrows they compete with for crumbs look exactly the same wherever you go.
-a completely empty rest stop. no one eats at the concrete tables. no one plays in the tiny strip of grass or gravel. you will find a small and beautiful stone.
-a hawaii license plate, somewhere around ohio. i still don’t know how they get the cars across the ocean. i don’t know why anyone would leave hawaii for ohio. i don’t know why anyone lives in ohio.
-an incredibly weird duck. you had no idea ducks could look so incredibly weird, and you wish you were still ignorant of how incredibly weird ducks can, apparently, look.
-a small folksy roadside waystation that sells fudge and incredibly tacky statues of eagles and wolves and cowboys. if you like fudge, eat the fudge from here.
-a lizard doing pushups. if you are particularly fortunate: many lizards doing pushups.
-approximately one gajillion starbucks shops. don’t bother counting them. it will make you angry.
-a storm somewhere around oklahoma, if you’re lucky. the clouds tower up in fantastic fluffy castles miles and miles into the air and are painted pink and gold and purple and the sky turns a dozen impossible shades of blue and when the rain comes down over your car it sounds like the world is ending.
-weird burrs will stick to your legs. you’ll flick them out of the car eighty or eight hundred miles from where their parent plant was grown, and not be sure whether you should wish the little hitchikers well or not.
-a dog wearing sunglasses with his head hanging out of a car window. this will be the high point of the trip.
-the world’s most depressing restaurant. you will know it when you wind up there and have to eat the terrible food, and listen to the terrible music, and look at all the listless waiters and want to tell them get in my car, for god’s sake get in, i’ll take you out of whatever crapsack little town this is that you can’t get out of on your own. but you won’t say that because it’s rude. maybe they have family here. maybe they even like it here.
-a painting of a sailboat in a motel located at least a hundred miles from any significant body of water.
-several genuinely hilarious postcards. buy them.
-a cat that will not let you pet it. this will be the low point of the trip.
-corn. so much corn you will get scared. who the fuck is going to eat all this corn?
-a small stream in some small woods and the light will come down perfectly and the water will be beautiful and the grass will be beautiful and there will be flowers maybe or the leaves of the trees are starting to turn gold and there are birds chirping and it will be so perfect you will want to stand there and stay forever and live in this little magical painting off the side of the highway and be some kind of highway druid. but instead, you’ll get bored after a while, and get back in the car.
if anyone ever wonders why i love america so much despite its many political and cultural flaws, this is why. this post explains it perfectly.
It’s like watching a car repeatedly drive straight into a wall. It’s unexplainable, it looks like it hurts a lot, but ultimately it ends up being darkly, ironically funny.
From my personal experience being an American on tumblr is like being the person in the BACK of the car praying that the person driving will STOP ramming into the wall.
A lot of us know this shit is stupid and we’re looking out the window like “LOOK THOSE OTHER CARS ARE DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD LETS BE LIKE THEM”
But the driver is like “FUCK YOU! BUILT FORD TOUGH! USA USA USA DONT LIKE IT, GET OUT!” but the doors are locked and the car is now smoking and threatening to catch fire.
The gun problem in the US is exhausting. We are all exhausted by it. And terrified, of course. So I do this with reluctance; but let me just say a few things about the category “Americans” and the gun problem.
First of all, although actually *banning* private gun ownership in the US is certainly a minority position, in fact, a majority of Americans DO NOT WANT guns to be as easily available to as many people as they currently are. Obama complained about this quite bitterly after Newtown: up to 90% of Americans polled support some restrictions on gun use, such as universal background checks–but you cannot get a bill asking for that through Congress. You can’t even get it to a vote, because the Republicans will block it. Even gun OWNERS, even some actual NRA members, agree that our current way of doing things is insane. So why do we not have what our very timid politicians keep calling “common-sense gun control”?
Because 1) our political institutions are broken 2) large numbers of politicians are so afraid of taking on the gun lobby that they don’t actually care whether their constituents might support some forms of gun control 3) there is a significant chunk of the US population who believes, or at least pretends to believe, that the best way to deal with gun violence is to arm EVERYONE, and 4) this chunk of the populationtreats the entire world as their GamerGate.
Please do not assume that most Americans think that this level of gun violence is an acceptable price to pay for whatever libertarian freedoms universal gun possession is supposed to protect. Most of us do not. We are the ones being shot at. We know this is horrible. We are scared. We are scared because we cannot protect ourselves against the armed and dangerous community, and because our government refuses to take steps that would reduce the number of armed and dangerous Americans who have the means and opportunity to shoot the rest of us.
#please take away our guns #we obviously cannot handle them
