Day of Thanksgiving

The lessons appointed by the Episcopal Church for use on Thanksgiving Day.

I really should write a fic, since Thanksgiving is totally on the liturgical calendar (as evidenced by the lectionary entry above). But then, so is the Fourth of July, and the problem with American holidays is that my Watcher!verse fics mostly take place in London, so it'd be the C of E's liturgical calendar I should be using, and not surprisingly, Thanksgiving isn't on it.

Yesterday was my brother's birthday, so I didn't make it to the Thanksgiving Eve mass last night at my church.

In any case, I give thanks for the chance to be a student--both a student of the world, and more formally, as a grad student. I'm grateful for being able to work towards some end goal. For being able to stand in a school building and say, "I go here," to use an academic library that's ten stories tall and feel at home. That my remote access to JSTOR and the OED is back again.

I give thanks for the schools I've attended in the past, for the knowledge I learned, the person I was shaped into, and the friends that I made.

I give thanks for my family, for my parents and my grandparents, for what they have given me, both genetically and through nurture, for the sacrifices they have made. For my brother and my cousins, for friendship and companionship.

I give thanks for the source texts of fandom, for young women who fight vampires, who solve mysteries, who discover gardens, who save the world, who are awesome, and/or who should or at least could take over the world. I'm grateful for characters who are problematic like whoa, who rig elections, who have secret supercomputers in their attic, who belong to not-so-secret illegal extragovernmental organizations which amount to monarchist conspiracies, who decide who lives and who dies. I give thanks for lesbian subtext, for postmodern ironies, for will-to-poweriness, for the adolescent fantasy, for minor characters who return to play small but integral parts, and--once again--for heroines who rock.

I give thanks for the transformative works of fandom, the collaborative process which takes works and re-visions, which radically manipulates the wonderful world of textuality. I give thanks for the radical possibilities of pleasure. I give thanks for goggles of all varieties, but especially 'cest and femslash ones. I give thanks for fanfiction, for fanvids, for fan meta, for tl;dr and for people spamming their flists.

I give thanks for the world, for all that is the case, for the limits of language, for the never-ending process of signification. I give thanks for the slippages, for bastard reasoning, for the poetry of living, for revolution, for metaphor, for the cry of philosophy, for play, for bricolage, for Brownian motion, for language games, for religion and for religions.

I give thanks for my church, for my parish and for my church community, for the ECUSA and the Anglican Communion, and for the Church, one, holy, and apostolic. I give thanks for chora, for the pharmakon, for differance, for the crucified God and the mysteries of the faith. I give thanks for, and to, Ego, Chaos, and the Divine Mind of Our Goddess Eris Discordia.

I give thanks for each and every one of you reading this.

( full text of the lectionary readings linked above )