Morning After Pill anyone?

Well, it's not even morning, or even the next day, but I think I speak for many when I say that I am going to need some sort of medication to get me through Turkey Day.

This year, I have surprisingly limited my intake of food. Normally, I just stuff myself silly, but this year, it wasn't very hard to stop eating. Not that the food wasn't great -- the food's always great. But this year, it was just the family, my grandmother, my uncle, aunt, their two kids, my mom, my brother, and myself. No friends of the family or other extended family members. It was quiet, and almost morbid! And everyone was done pretty fast and started clearing, and when everyone's starting to clear the table, you really can't continue eating!

And there's my uncle -- he's a wonderful person, really. He's done so much for me, and I appreciate it whole-heartedly. He was, perhaps, born into the wrong place at the wrong time -- he is a philosopher and an enthusiast of humanities and science, and especially, economics. With the hard economic times, he has always given mini-lectures, if you will, on how to make money, how to keep money, and how to make money work for you, every year. Every year, Thanksgiving and Christmas! And I don't know if it is because my cousins and my brother doesn't understand Korean well enough to follow his lecture series, but I am the only one subject to this mild torture.

I am not really a rebel -- I am a push over, as I've stated numerous times, and I'd rather just sit there and listen until my ears fall off, rather than to make any suggestions about the topic at hand. But about a decade of these lectures, I've had it. A few years ago, I've told my uncle that I plan to move to Africa as soon as I can and devote my life into working for the AIDS/HIV infected population. It probably shocked him a little, because that year I didn't get as long a lecture as I normally do, but my uncle is a resilient man; he found an outlet to reach me. And in the next few family gatherings that followed, he has increased his level of preachings to me.

Tonight was no exception -- just as soon as the food disappeared off the table, he went into lecture mode, and my brother and my cousins went into their room, while I was stuck. In the last few years, a new twist in the lectures had developed, and it was one where my granny would chime in now and then, emphasizing the importance of these real life lessons, and also the urgency in which I need to find myself a husband and get myself married. The lecture momentarily dips into the whole, "Haemi is getting old and she should seriously consider marriage soon" bonanza, then returns to the economical topics again.

I had tried to re-use that same tactic of "I'm moving to Africa" to deter the marriage discussion -- I told everyone that I had no interests in being married or having children. and would feel much better off living single. Of course my grandmother would have none of it. My uncle actually mellowed on that topic though -- tonight, he said that it is ok not to be married, but that I should at least have a boyfriend, because while life without marriage is perfectly acceptable, living life alone has its deficiencies. And that was one thing we managed to agree on. And then the rest of the lecture went back to how economic prosperity and independence is a necessary requirement to freedom, and yada yada yada. It's not that I want to be rude, but most of this is just way over my head. And it really isn't as though I had planned to spend my life working at a fast food joint flipping burgers all my life! Well, that's what my family's like. I know everyone's got some quirky side to their family. Mine's not too embarrassing -- just boring as hell, and each individual is too intelligent and too well-read for their own good! Everybody should just shut up and watch some TV or something. Sheesh.