how to make pumpkin pie

The assumption is that I will comport with the last minute Thanksgiving invitation by the family whose son doesn't have the guts to send an email or call himself but who has the audacity to orchestrate the rearrangement of my vacation time at the behest of his ideas of a future, with the heavy hand of the mutual friendship of our parents. This is not how I function.

On my side, the parents will acquiesce because the closer I inch towards 30 the larger a liability I am on their own ideas of their responsibilities. I am the unlatched door towards something called "being settled." (And it doesn't help that his parents name-drop his job prospects everytime they call. That is the easiest bait to throw out to hyperventilating parents.)

And really, this is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the Decade of Water. Or strikes in Dubai, the workers demanding more than a slightly larger pay than what they would recieve at home and living like cattle, herded here to make this fantastic island in a desert or that phenomenal hotel to host upper middle class europeans and americans on a weeklong frolick to an imagined middle east. Or I want to talk about young kids growing up thinking the internets is life, spending 17 hours a day online, punctuated only by sleeping and eating. Or I want to talk about rebels leaving the deserts for this funny idea called peace.

Really, this arranging and coordinating with the purpose of marriage is so bizarrely at odds with who I am. I want to shred these traditions. In a food processor.