The Black Sheep FR
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Volume 3, Issue 11 11/15/12 - 11/29/12
Thanksgiving is Depressing Brady Knutson wrote this
What’s the worst day of week? If you said Monday, you’re wrong. It’s Sunday. On the Lord’s Day you wake up, peel yourself off the wood floor of the house in Como (where they never said you could sleep after the party last night but they never said you couldn’t either), squint at the daylight, and maybe head to Blarney to suck back a couple Bloody Marys. Then you go home and spend the day sitting around in dread of the weekend coming to end before biting the bullet and starting that homework at 11p.m. Yes, just like Friday is the best day of the week even though you may have class, Sunday is the worst even if you have nowhere to be all day. And Thanksgiving is the Sunday of holidays. Think about it: It’s churchy, filled to the brim with football, and the U only gives us a four-day weekend so you spend the whole break praying for more time and watching it waste away. “Time off is time off,” you may say. “And the holiday season is one of perpetual joy!” Yeah, Thanksgiving is just like Christmas…except without the decorations, music, spirit, presents, shopping, chocolate, or joy. And instead of a plump, juicy, delicious ham, you’re forced to scrape some “meat” off a turkey carcass. This foul fowl is easily the driest excuse for a main course found in Western cuisine. Corn, potatoes, and stuffing are palatable, but given the dismal choice of food centerpiece, it’s no wonder this holiday never really gets off the ground. “You heartless bastard!” you cry, “The tradition of giving thanks is a sacred and important one!” Yes, this is a time of year to realize how fortunate we really are, especially relatively. If anything will make upper middle-class suburban white kids realize there’s deep suffering in the world, it’s pretending they’re grateful once a year and then eating until they throw up. If anyone took it seriously and let it inform their actions for the whole year, the being thankful thing would be truly special. But alas, holidays aren’t magic (well, Christmas, New Year’s, The Fourth of July, and St. Patrick’s Day are) and any real gratitude in our hearts fades away by the end of the Peanuts special. And don’t even mention what the holiday is supposed to be commemorating. The “pilgrims and Indians” getting together as one big happy family? But we didn’t start celebrating it until like, 200 years after the fact. By this time, nobody remembered what the Puritans were actually like. Which, by the way, yikes. The English settlers who helped build this country were committed to ideas of religious freedom, as long as it was freedom to practice Christianity so conservative that even
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Richard Mourdock would be a little hesitant. They’d probably disapprove of everything that’s ever happened in Superblock after 11 p.m. And if European Americans were so thankful for the natives, why did they begin perpetrating one of the largest mass genocides in history against them? So Thanksgiving is basically all about thanking people for their invaluable help, and then watching them slowly die as you stand idly by. Ungrateful college students and their parents should be able to relate.
what’s inside
Still not depressed? Let’s hear from you after you park it in a stiff dining room chair at your aunt’s house for a three hour dinner before being treated to screenings of cousin Jed’s wrasslin’ matches. If you’re not bawling your eyes out after that, you’re incapable of sadness. Or maybe you just have an unshakable belief that Thanksgiving, while not the best day of the year, is just A-OK. And you know, all in all, there are worse prospects than ringing in the fall harvest amid loved ones. Like living through another Valentine’s Day. Don’t get us started on Valentine’s Day.
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Fall break is too short to enjoy, but just long enough to cause a mental breakdown.
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