Thanksgiving

2002-12-01 - 12:12 p.m.

Ok, so recently someone who I consider to be relatively intelligent made a statement that has been bothering me. I've been trying not to comment on it for two days now, but now you're going to hear about it. We all know I'm a dork already, so we'll dispense with that bit and move right into it. Ok, that statement was that celebrating Thanksgiving in California is silly. Ok, yes, the first Thanksgiving in America happened to take place on the east coast, but then the first just about anything in America took place on the east coast. It's a geography thing. But Thanksgiving is not originally an American holiday. Thanksgiving is a holiday to celebrate a bountiful harvest. This holiday was celebrated in ancient Greece, Egypt, and China. As far as the bountiful harvest goes, I'm willing to bet that California has much more going on agriculturally than all of New England. And finally, just because California's citizens happen to live farther away from the site of the original American Thanksgiving, does not make them farther away familially speaking. People from the east coast migrated to the west coast. And many more people came to both coasts of America from foreign lands after the first Thanksgiving. We're all the same people. Let us eat our turkey in peace!

Ok, thanks, I feel better now, but now I'd like to move on to another comment made by the same person, but much longer ago. This one was the comment (about which I've already talked) stating that I don't omit from my entries little facts about myself that I don't want to share with the world. I wonder if he still feels the same way. It's usually not an effort to include the little facts. I guess I don't have a particularly high opinion of myself and I don't feel the need to delude people about me. People delude themselves sometimes, but that's not my fault. But besides trying to make people think more highly of you than they should, there are other reasons to omit facts from a public journal entry. And I've been coming up against one of these reasons more and more often. That reason is to spare the feelings of others. Maybe spare isn't the right word. How about protect. Or insulate. As more of my thoughts have been turning towards Somnambulist, I've had to use a finer filter when writing here. I'm not saying that I'm filtering out bad things, I'm saying that I have to be more careful about what I do and do not write because things may be taken as too unenthusiastic or too enthusiastic or who knows what. I've been thinking lately about the folly of having a public journal. How can I really work out my thoughts in a journal if the subjects of those thoughts will be reading it and possibly be taking it the wrong way? The idea of starting a second, non-public journal briefly crossed my mind, but I barely have time to write in one journal, there's no way I can keep up two. And no, I'm not asking any of my fans to stop reading me, I'm just pondering journaling and I let this bit of ponderment through the filter.