Meet the squad: Georgina, Grace, Victoria, Ami, and me! You might have seen their names appear on the blog here and there. They’ve stuck with me since freshman year, but over the years, as we’ve been getting deeper into our majors (all different!), we haven’t had as much time to hang out as before. If the squad wants to all hang, we need to plan weeks in advance to coordinate everyone’s schedules. But Thanksgiving is the one time of year we can all count on. It’s our most sacred tradition to spend Thanksgiving in NYC, during which we storm Georgina’s house, her parents cook us up luxurious spreads, and we pop by Koreatown a hundred times in one weekend.
But this year, I wasn’t sure that I could handle the trip. *cue horrified gasp*
I know I’m getting old, because whenever I get short breaks, all I want to do is stay home and relax instead of jetsetting to another city (don’t worry, for longer breaks I’m all about traveling). For this Thanksgiving break, I just wanted to stay home. I knew I would need the rest. Traveling (like, the commute) tires me out. NYC tires me out (all the people, and even worse, all the slow people). Thanksgiving meals make me feel tired and heavy. In my current state of mind, it just all felt so extra.
Ultimately I decided to go because I knew it meant a lot to everyone else, especially as it’s our senior year. My heart sank when we started planning and were looking at Megabus tickets. As expected, ticket prices spike around Thanksgiving. They weren’t crazy expensive, but in comparison to the weeks before and after Thanksgiving… Let’s just say that I didn’t need another reason to not want to visit NYC over Thanksgiving break.
Whilst planning the trip, I tried to come up with something that would work for me. I thought, why don’t I just go, but make it a short trip? We got our tickets to arrive in NYC on Wednesday evening and depart NYC on Friday afternoon — the shortest we’ve ever stayed in NYC for Thanksgiving. I was feeling guilty because I felt like I was cutting everyone’s time in NYC short, but after some discussion, we found that we all preferred to get back early to get school work done. The only difference is that I’m pretty sure they all actually wanted to go to NYC.
But then I couldn’t help but think, then why even go at all? Why don’t I just stay at home? Celebrate Christmas! Thanksgiving is a fake holiday anyway. Save that bus money! But after I thought more about it, I realised…
If I skipped all the little moments, there would be no life left to live.
So I went to NYC and did all the things we could have done in Philly, but I’m still glad that I made the trip. I’m surprised that the vlog is more than 30 seconds long because all we did was sleep, eat, and watch TV shows in Georgina’s house, save for the first evening in which we had dinner in Koreatown upon arrival and followed up with karaoke, and the last afternoon in which we walked along Central Park to our bus stop.
But watching this vlog back, all those little moments hit me. The bad jokes. The lazy moments. The crazy laughter. The bad lighting. The still moments. The moments I would have missed or forgotten if I was just concerned with getting pretty photos to document for the blog. I don’t know if this vlog is of the slightest interest to anyone who doesn’t know me and my friends in real life, but at least to me, I see precious moments together, and for that I am thankful.
PS: thanksgiving 2016 (nyc), thanksgiving 2015 (nyc), thanksgiving 2014 (sf)