dear reader,

technically, obversity is not a word. what are your thanksgiving plans? do they involve football? (mine do, actually. believe it or not.)

thankfulness is one of those things that 1) i only notice when i really don’t have it and 2) i really need when i really don’t want it. i am stopping deliberately this morning to be very, very thankful, because i believe it’s right; but as is always the case, when i decide to be thankful i realize how truly good my life is. i’m not going to talk now about the specific circumstances for which i might be thankful or thankless these days, but i am going to share a bit of a new song.

i’ve talked, or typed, long-windedly here about my fetishization (also not a word!) of change–i want it, i need it in all forms, i never want it to stop. since there is now a whole lot o’ french spoken here and i am not particularly enamored of french, it’s been very helpful to cast the torrent of new words, phrases and wanton genderization (technically a word, but only if you are a linguist) in my brain as change. it’s new. i can express certain things, albeit just a few at this point, differently than i could before. in some cases, the francophonic (say it with me… not a word) lens lets in a little more light.

change! cultural mash-up! bilingualism! it’s fantastic, isn’t it?

except that for most of history, learning a new language is something one did most often because he or she was far from home, and probably didn’t get there happily. i submit a sad page from early american history involving some of that kind of relocation [say “‘cadien” with a fake french accent (unless you have a real one handy), and you’ll have a big clue].

from the chorus of a new song:

i’m gonna flow down south
and learn that prairie french
make some cajun friends
in the country’s mouth
so long a derangement
they’ll never find me out
when i write it down
in my new language

if my longing for change, newness, is so acute that i can desire true dislocation, as it were, then frankly i am missing something. to value what i have so little is truly thankless, and that’s the obverse: it’s my bizarre, slightly unstable propensity for launching the escape hatch into black space that feeds back somehow into an understanding that i must be really blessed.

ps: i am thankful for my family, my musical family, my job and my cats. i’m thankful for our apartment. i think i’m thankful for french. i am not thankful for nancy pelosi, but i am working on it.

pps: happy thanksgiving.