The monday after Thanksgiving is always hard. Holiday weekends last just long enough for you to remember that you once had hopes and dreams, but not nearly long enough to heal the empty abyss created when you sold your soul for  dental coverage and stock options. Added to this considerable mental anguish is the unavoidable torment of having every single coworker, customer, and above-average office plant ask you “how was your Thanksgiving!?!?!?!?!”

Bit of advice: They don’t  really care about your Thanksgiving. Not one bit. If your answer isn’t monosyllabic, and doesn’t rhyme with “wood”, they will resent you for life, which luckily won’t be all that long, because they’ll also probably kill you to death with their bare fists.

Everybody in the relevant part of the world celebrates Thanksgiving exactly the same way. They don’t need to hear your version of “I went to my relative’s house, ate too much, and took a nap under the table while loud pets and louder children ran around fighting for table scraps.”

Do you really think your weekend was extra special because Grandpa Harold fell asleep watching football and didn’t even know he had some of that canned cranberry sauce stuck in his beard? I’ll give you a hint. It was not. Shut your pumpkin pie hole you narcissist, and show some class. Like me.

I wouldn’t waste anybody’s time with asinine stories about my holiday weekend. I’m not that much of a grundle scab.

So my holiday weekend was pretty cool. I spent Thanksgiving day at my cousin’s house, where a lovely meal was prepared, and we all sat around for a few hours being bored by each other’s company. I’m pretty sure Grandma turned her hearing aids off after being asked her 6th or 7th puzzle related question. My pre-holiday-dinner weight was a modest 176 lbs. Post turkey meal weigh-in, a respectable 179.8 lbs. And then post-Thanksgiving dinner poop weigh-in was 173.4 lbs. It was an ordeal. I’m fairly certain the extra pounds lost were on account of one of my kidneys dropping out of my stink-chute. Maybe a liver? Who knows. All that is certain is over the past couple of days, i’ve been afflicted with an annoying case of the bubble gutts, and their unwelcome cousin, the drizzling shits.

Friday was a rebuilding day, involving an abundance of sweatpants, cold pie, and regret, and absolutely not involving retail shopping. Then we went out and drank beers with friends, and ate more pie. Saturday, my friends and I discovered that we are older and more pitiful than we had ever suspected through the course of a friendly football game, which ended up leaving us more thoroughly crippled than an unnamed American president who served between 1933 and 1945. Sunday, we ate more pie.

Lessons learned over the weekend:

1. The technical skills learned during ten years of playing football competitively never leave you. Your body’s ability to apply those skills, does.

2. Stuffing should never have fruits and berries in it. It is an abomination. Cranberries are useful only in vodka cocktails, and for lubricating a lady’s period machine.

3. There IS a such thing as too much pie.

That’s all i’ve got on that subject, so…how was your Thanksgiving weekend?