So, it is no secret I love comedy series. There is this comedy TV series titled “Happy Endings.” I think I mostly like it because it is such a simple show. You know, you don’t have to think when watching it. It is not like The Big Bang Theory where they are always talking about a scientific concept, or Two and a Half Men where everything had sexual innuendo. Don’t get me wrong, I love Chuck Lorre. He is a comedic genius. But if you ever need to just sit, stare at your screen and get entertained, Happy Endings is the series to watch. So one of the characters, Dave, in this series discovers he is one-sixteenth Navajo (a Native American tribe). in one episode, the characters are having an all American thanksgiving. So Dave decides to integrate the Navajo culture to this thanksgiving. How? By adding clams to the menu. So he sets to go get clams but he is a very gullible person so he ends up losing his car and all his money before he even gets to the store. So when he finally gets to the store, seeing as he has no conventional form of currency, he has to appeal to the store keeper’s emotions by getting into how his people (the Navajos) had to endure all types of tribulations just to get to the first thanksgiving. But the storekeeper is really confused, like, “You’re white.” To which Dave replies, “you who focus on fifteen-sixteenths of a man.” I don’t know why, but that statement has stuck with me.

So I have been a little ticked off lately. Why? First, I am suffering from an acute shortage of hard copy material to read. Because yeah, I am one of those people who still prefer physical books. There is something about turning actual, tangible pages that is just immensely therapeutic. I like to think of it as a metaphor of sorts. A sense of closure, if you may. Plus I also feel like downloading books in a sense just compromises the material, not to mention illegal most of the time. Second, I have been forced to rely on blogs and Instagram captions for my reading material. I mean I love reading people’s blogs. I have to, especially since I need you guys to love reading my blog. But I just miss books. Plus, I feel like the universe has been aligning a series of slightly annoying posts for me to find. Get this, over the last few days, I have run into a lot of pasts and articles referencing Jhene Aiko’s line in Post To be, “you gotta eat the booty like groceries.” What annoys me about this is most of this people probably haven’t listened to any other of Jhene Aiko’s songs. Because if they have, they would know there is a lot more to her music than “eating the booty like groceries.” And I guess it just bugs me that she has been singing about peace and love and souls and weed for years only for her most famous line to be “you gotta eat the booty like groceries.” Because if you ask me, she is the very definition of soul. And I realize Adele just made the world emotionally unstable. But I also know it is one thing to appeal to people’s emotions and another to appeal to someone’s individuality, their spirituality, who they are as a person. And I feel like Jhene Aiko does that. She is like a singing Kendrick Lamar.

So why am I bringing this up now? It is the holidays and a lot of us are home. And maybe it is just me, but home is a little boxing. Sure, for the first few days it is fun and nostalgic and comfortable. But after a few days, you have done all the catching up you needed to do and all the excitement sort of just dies down. It is especially harder for me because I grew up a quiet withdrawn kid. And overtime, I think my family mistook that for a shy, weak personality. And maybe I was. But I have grown up and I think I can say I am very opinionated and I feel very strongly about things. I am not particularly shy, I just like keeping to myself. I don’t have a weak personality. If you ask me, I have a strong personality in my own way, it is just not loud and in your face. So every time I come home, I feel like my family expects me to fit into this image they have of me in their head. I think they expect me to be the person they think they know. And that is mind-numbingly exasperating and somewhat hurtful. And so my point is, human beings are complex and layered. There is so much to people that what we used to know about them. And I think the world, or at least this coming year, would be slightly better if we understood that. If we made an active effort to understand people, not as what we want them to be, but as who they really are, who they are becoming.