So.

I've spent this entire month aware of Thanksgiving and its approach, but I didn't really care because it's just another day to me and my mom (just with more food). At around 10:30 tonight, I was just doing normal "at home" things when I just had this sudden rush of memories from other Thanksgivings I've had, and I realized that it was something that I always thought was special because my mom and dad would make nice and she would invite him over and we'd play board games and eat pie. Then I realized that this is going to be my first Thanksgiving without my dad being alive.

Now I'm just sitting here and everything is reminding me in some way or another of my dad, but it's such small things. I'm eating applesauce and I'm remembering how he would like to put applesauce on his potato latkes on Chanukah, and how now I'm the only person in my family who does that because the rest of my family is my mom's family and they're all WASPs or really Catholic (apparently there's some Tudor-esque religious turmoil in my heritage which I was not aware of).

Anyway, during all these memory flashbacks, I had one of when we were driving around in Fort Lauderdale at night when I visited him. It was after I got my first tattoo and we had the window down and the night was warm with a cool breeze. We were listening to Rory Gallagher, and that's it. I just don't remember a lot of my time with him, so I started trying to find the song we had been listening to. I don't even remember how the song goes, I just know that it was Rory Gallagher.

So I've spent the evening crying into my applesauce and listening to snippets of countless Rory Gallagher songs, trying to figure out which ones might have been songs my dad mentioned or played for me. Sometimes life is tough.

I'm really lucky though. Because of him I can afford to go to college, I understand a lot of different sports, I have thick curly hair, and I like good music (not to say that my mom didn't help out with the first and the last), but my dad very subtly instilled a great appreciation for the blues in me, which is pretty cool.

...

Okay it's been about an hour since I wrote that. I'm feeling a lot better now. I was feeling pretty depressed earlier not just because of my dad, but also because I feel pretty lonely lately and I feel like my friends are blowing me off. Miles is always busy with his dude friends, which I don't mind because he NEEDS to have dude friends. Alana is in town and she doesn't really respond to messages from me anymore, which is weird. When she does, she's always busy. Not so weird, considering it is Thanksgiving break and her family is pretty tight-knit, and large (by my standards). I'm going to force myself to stop here because I want to keep a positive mindset and being all sad like this isn't going to help.