design-newyork.com

Happy post-Thanksgiving, y’all! I haven’t written anything for a while due to a combination of nothing interesting happening to me and being worked to the bone, but I’ve had a few days off and I have recuperated, and I also went to see the Thanksgiving Day Parade again from my office, which I will delve into momentarily. But first, I hosted the festive feasting at my apartment this year, and I cooked everything myself for the first time. I’ve never had that much raw dead poultry in my personal space before, I wasn’t really prepared for the sheer ookiness of the whole thing. I got parts-of-bird instead of one giant turkey because most of my family likes dark meat, so I was marinating the many legs and thighs and the one breast in a variety of vessels in my fridge overnight. I would forget they were there, and I would stumble into the kitchen for a drink in the middle of the night, open the refrigerator door and – AAAHHHHHH! Corpses! Corpses littering my – and then I would remember, that’s right, I put them there. This happened at least three times. Then I had to rub the skin with butter, really massage it in there, which caused me to have a total Silence of the Lambs moment, and the worst part of the directions was “put the remaining butter in the chest cavity.” Dear God, cooking can be so gross. But dinner went smashingly, except that I couldn’t find all of my grandmother’s fancy cutlery and that caused a few small problems. Have you ever watched people eat jello mold with herring forks? It does not go well. It looks like they are all unwillingly participating in an obstacle for a Nickelodeon game show. But the next morning I got to go with my father and see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade from my office, and that was delightful. I’ve covered it before, and everyone has seen it live on TV, so I’m going to only talk about specific bits that were of importance to me. Many of the pictures are mine, and the rest are taken by my beautiful co-worker Lor who was stationed on the ground and often had a better view.

Because they’ve changed the parade route, they performances no longer happen right in front of my building, but around the corner, so the only way I could see the dance routines was to watch the reflection in the mirrored building across the street. If you look above the Foot Locker sign, you’ll see the reflection.

Pokemon went by and he had a really great preceding float. I believe all of the balloons had little floats before them or following them. I thought this one was shnazzy.

My favorite float was the Jimmy Dean Breakfast Food Items float. While I actively dislike his breakfast food items, specifically his sausage, I am enamored of the commercials and this float. Damn you, Jimmy Dean, and your sub-par product! You taunt me with rainbows and solar systems! You are like the Lisa Frank of pork sausage!

There were two castle-type floats that caught my eye. One was the Office Max float. Why they picked a Foster’s Home of Imaginary Friends-type house as their float, I do not know, but I thought it was great. Then there was the pink castle. Now, I am a female, I have always been (despite some rumors to the contrary) and I like girly things just fine. But this pink castle, it was just so, PINK. I was overwhelmed, like I had been slapped in the face with a uterus. Filled with glitter.

There were two costumes/floats I desperately want to be on or in some year. One was at the base of the Murakami balloons. Here are the Murakami balloons.

And here is the costume.

Maybe they’ll let me borrow the headdress part and I can wear on the weekends while I run my errands. I think that would be super.

The other thing I wanted to be a part of is the small following float of Spongebob Squarepants. There was a very nice mermaid riding a lobster.

I MUST RIDE THE LOBSTER. I would wave so hard, my arms would fall off. Mayor Bloomberg, let me ride the lobster please!

This girl had a hell of a job, walking in front of the Big Apple float with Kanye West on it. I wonder if people threw stuff at her.

And here’s Kanye.

Following the Big Apple/Kanye float was a herd of people dressed like cops and robbers because…crime in New York is up? Or down? Maybe Riker’s Island paid for the float? I don’t know.

The other bizarre combination was a Statue of Liberty float (okay) covered with the little minions from Despicable Me (huh?). My father has not seen the film and insisted they were salt shakers. What was neat about them is they were all little people in there, but I don’t think there was any way for them to see out, so the ones on the float were fine, but the ones wandering around the street waving each got their own handler who would hold their hand and gently steer them around.

There were two balloons I had never seen which looked like the die (dii?) from Dungeons and Dragons. They weren’t really near anything else recognizable, so I wonder why they were there.

I was really excited about this float: you all know that I painted a piece based on the story of the world being on the back of a tortoise, and then there was this! And I was there with my dad, who told me the story! I felt like singing “Circle of Life” from The Lion King.

I also loved the Ukrainian ball balloons.

And that’s about it. I’ve spent the rest of the weekend so far working on my own artwork, so hopefully soon I’ll have a cool post about that. In the meantime, I hope everyone has a healthy and happy Thanksgiving weekend.

Addendum: The person in front of the Murakami float was, in fact, Takashi Murakami. So the chances of me getting to wear that costume are slim to none. Someday, though, I would like to be as happy as he is in the second picture. So. Happy.

(These two photos of Takashi Murakami are from slamxhype.com.)