The following is a post submitted by guest contributor James Remington.
Thanksgiving is a time when relatives come together to argue while eating good food, usually enough good food to keep them exercising regularly until Christmas, when they will eat too much good food again. I used to think this was the only reason for having Thanksgiving; my teachers may have told me some other reasons, but I was probably asleep (I’m a night owl - you know, sleep during school then play Halo all night).
Anyways, until I was about 9 years old this is what I thought, although now that I think about it, I do vaguely remember seeing lots of potbellies lining the couches in front of a TV while I rolled around in pain wishing I hadn’t eaten so much pumpkin pie. As I was saying, when I was nine my stomach finally caught up with my mouth, making me completely unable to fill it. That is when I noticed something new about Thanksgiving, namely, the football game.
Since that fateful day my eyes have been glued to the screen every Thanksgiving afternoon. Not that I enjoy football, but it is a tradition and who am I to break tradition? Besides, it's the only time I can drink six beers in three hours without getting arrested for under-age drinking.
All these fond memories were quickly shaken out of place the other day when I was looking at my sister’s pictures. Somehow, I had stumbled into a folder labeled “Thanksgiving_pics.” As I looked through the pictures moving from one year to the next, I noticed something almost too horrible to speak of: a watermelon had been growing in my gut, getting larger and larger every year. Why hadn’t I noticed this before? Why didn’t my doctor ever tell me about this problem? Surely he had seen this in some of his x-rays? Should I have listened to my mother's warnings about not eating the seeds, after all?
As these questions flooded my mind, I felt a cold, icy hand creep up my neck, slowly gripping me, making it harder and harder to breathe.
“What do you think you're doing, looking through my private pictures?”
Man, I hate sisters. They always seem to break in on the most solemn moments of thought and ruin it all. Then it happened. “What happened?” you ask? Well, I really don’t know, but suddenly I was flying through the air towards the antique piano on the other side of the room. Did I mention that my sister is both a body builder and a karate black belt? I hate that kind of sister even more, especially when I got the short genes and she got the tall ones. All I remember about my subsequent touchdown is that for two minutes all I could hear was very loud ringing, almost as though my head was inside a piano, which it was, then I took my hand off the pedal. What a relief!
The doctors say I only have minor brain damage, but they must be wrong because I have an inexplicable magnetic pull that seems to force me to exercise, a sensation that is very new to me.
Oh, and as for Thanksgiving, from now on, no more watching football games and drinking beer. Instead, I'll watch golf while riding my exercise bike and eating tofu pumpkin pie.
