One of the first albums I ever owned was the soundtrack to The Muppet Movie. I'd spend hours laying on the floor, giant headphones plugged into the record player, singing along with "Rainbow Connection."
And so I wonder if I'm temperamentally predisposed towards sentimentality, towards going mushy too much and yet really not often enough. Or can I use the frog defense, and blame it all on the hours of Kermit?
I finished knitting my first ever pair of mittens yesterday, and wore them out last night. As is the case with most cold-weather things, I had no idea how complicated mittens actually are. It turns out that, for one, you have to put them on before you put on your coat, otherwise the cuffs get all bunched up and annoying. Also, they have to be taken off in order to do anything, which means that when you put them back on the coat issue comes up again. It's altogether terribly confusing. Fortunately, my mittens are fantastic.
And lastly, the hand turkeys. I made them, in 1999 right around Thanksgiving, into a symbol of my frustration with the work of the artist Rothko. My humanities teacher and I argued constantly about abstract impressionism, until one day I led a hand turkey uprising and convinced all of my classmates to make them so that we could cover her room in my point. She bribed a group of younger students to tear them down, but the obsession had already started. (At the end of that year, we gave her a photo album full of hand turkeys, as well as a hand turkey manifesto that I wrote. Yes, I have always been this girl.)
Every Thanksgiving since then, we've made hand turkeys. We made them all the way through college and the last couple of years in Seattle. When the Peach People came to town, she left a hand turkey on my wall. I keep them all, of course, in a file in my filing cabinet. They go back up on the wall for Thanksgiving each year.
Of course, they have to come down by the beginning of December, because then it's time to make the Postmodern Christmas Tree.
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