Transit and travail

at the airport bound for France

by J J Cohen

Here's hoping that those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving are having good travels and restful times. If you're bored there is plenty to read here, such as Bonnie Wheeler on peer review. Look for another guest post early next week by MOR as well.

I'm spending this day before the Festival of the Basted Fowl combing over an essay and frightening myself with the amount of labor I've committed myself to in the spring. More of that anon, but first -- because T-day is all about family* -- two Cohen family vignettes.

1. Alex departed for ten days in Bordeaux last weekend. Since he's in French 3, he hads the chance to live with a native family as an exchange student. The goodbye at the airport was not satisfying: he deployed as much adolescent aloofness as a 13 year old is capable of mustering. Yet when he called from the family's house upon arrival, his voice belonged to the vulnerable boy he remains beneath all that pubescent armor.

2. As an exercise in transforming a task into well articulated directions, Katherine at school composed a recipe for cooking turkey. I reproduce it below:

INGREDIENTS
8 lbs turkey
4 pieces pizza
100 bags stuffing
1800 bags oreos
2 lbs gravy
5 boxes of gum
2 pieces of cornbread
500 pieces of red licorice

DIRECTIONS
Slice the turkey in half with a knife. With a cutting board and knife slice the pizza in half. With a fork take some stuffing and put it in the turkey. Pour the oreos in a plastic bowl. Mash the turkey with a turkey baster. Put gravy in it. Cut the two boxes in half and take the gum out. Put it as the turkey's mouth. Grate the corn bread and put it behind the turkey. Pour red licorice on serving spoon and place on turkey. Cook for two hours at fifty degrees. Bon appetit!

Katherine, I should note, has never eaten turkey in her life. Perhaps that is obvious.

*"Nothing ruins the holidays like family" is in fact one of my patented gnosticisms.