For Thanksgiving, I went back home to the distant suburbs of Buffalo, New York, a place snowy on a level that Poughkeepsiites simply don’t understand. Last Saturday, I wanted to go see the movie “Conclave,” the one about all the Catholic guys, but the roads were so snowy in Buffalo that I couldn’t drive 40 minutes out to the Regal multiplex.
I ended up spending a lot of time at home working on school stuff. One thing I really like about being home is that there’s food in the house. This was exceptionally so because we had Thanksgiving leftovers. At the TH, we’re lucky if more than half of our fridge has stuff other than the alcohol. No shade on alcohol, but nothing quite satisfies hunger like food.
I have hard time believing anyone who tells me that they got a lot of school work done and had a good break. Those two things are incongruous. I’m saying that as someone who got some work done and had a somewhat decent break (very congruous). I started this article on Friday, when most years I frantically write my post-Thanksgiving piece Sunday on the train ride back (couldn’t have even done that this year, the train got canceled).
As a halfway decent break implies, I did enjoy parts of it. I walked downtown on Black Friday and went to two cavernous antique stores. One of them had a cavern dedicated to 200 or so childrens’ dolls lined up on shelves. I didn’t buy anything there.
Later that night, I met up with a friend. We trudged through a foot of fresh snow just to get from my house to the car, our footsteps muffled by the first 12 inches of lake-effect snow. While we were eating dinner at a restaurant, he told me that he works in the sports section of Walmart now—more specifically, the firearms counter.
He also told me that for Halloween this year, he dressed up as pregnant Garfield, which I thought sounded like a pretty nifty idea. Of course, the only place that he wore his Halloween costume for one occasion: work, which, might I remind you, is the gun counter at Walmart. The most frequent question he got that day of course was not, “What kind of gun should I get?” or “Are you dressed as pregnant Garfield?” (which of course, would be rude, as you really should never ask someone whether or not they’re pregnant). It was, “Do you work here?” with the obvious answer being, “Yes, of course. I am Garfield. And I sell firearms at this Walmart.”
You might be wondering at this point: Why was he dressed as specifically pregnant Garfield and not just regular Garfield? To this I’d say, technically he was essentially dressed up as regular Garfield, but he specifically bought and wore a pregnancy belly costume underneath the costume to fill out Garfield’s dimension, so I think it’s fair to call him a pregnant Garfield.
Why a pregnancy costume? Well, Garfield is a corpulent cat, so it’s worth trying to fill out his figure in a costume. My friend told me that a traditional Santa-style fat suit was too burly for Garfield, and that a classic pillow under the Garfield onesie looked too boxy. So he bought a fake pregnancy belly, specifically a five-to-seven-months option. This was a cheaper variant than the eight-to-nine-months and noticeably more visible than the three-to-four-months bump. Simple maths really. If you’re going to fake a pregnancy bump, it might as well be cheap and visible.
I would agree that of all these options, Garfield’s build most resembles a pregnant woman in their second trimester. If you were not well-versed in Garfield’s silhouette, you might easily assume the costume was depicting pregnancy, but again, one should not assume. That’s up to Garfield to decide if and when he decides to announce such a thing.
Last year, I watched this documentary about O.J. Simpson, the guy from “Naked Gun,” that compared playing football in Buffalo, New York, to being exiled to Siberia, and I haven’t really gotten over it. I didn’t really notice how oppressive snow is in Buffalo until more recently when I became an adult that wants to do things that involve driving, but it’s very true. I’m not O.J., I’m not from California, and I’m not a flashy football player, but I’d like to be able to go to the multiplex when I go home for Thanksgiving.