Thanksgiving Traditions

     Every family seems to have special traditions for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure what it is about this holiday in particular but every family seems to put their own spin on the special occasion. Since there is only a week until Thanksgiving, I decided to talk about my own family Thanksgiving tradition.

     Interestingly enough, my favorite tradition doesn't even take place on Thanksgiving! The day after Thanksgiving, a large portion of my extended family go bird feeding at Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. You might think that sounds incredibly boring, but it has actually become something I very much look forward to every year. It always start with meeting together in the parking lot and waiting for everyone to arrive as we throw around a football. Some of us were always together just yesterday for Thanksgiving, but for many of us who didn't spend the holiday together, it’s the first time we've seen each other since the summer. Once everyone is there, we all head of into the woods; kids, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all equipped with a bag of bird seed.

     When we were younger, it was always a competition to see who could get the most birds. I can't be sure but I'm pretty sure my record was in the upper three hundreds one year.  The parents also loved the experience because they always told us the only way to get a bird to land on our hand was to be perfectly silent and still. As you can imagine every kid stood perfectly quiet. As the years have gone on, it has become less about the actually feeding of birds, and more about just taking a nice walk in the woods with the family. Of course it is still a rush when a bird lands on your hand, but that is only a small part of the adventure. There are specific spots where we all stop to take pictures, such as the bridge or the big tree. Even when the walk is over, the tradition is not. We always go back to my grandparents house to enjoy a great combination of pizza and Thanksgiving leftovers.

      This year is especially important because it is the first year that my older cousin will be bringing her little kids to the family tradition. This will mark the first of the newest generation of Dieselman to participate in the tradition. Although it might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, it has become an important part of our Thanksgiving traditions and something that I really enjoy every year.

Halfway to History

      As the first quarter at Reading Memorial High School comes to a close, so does the first half of the NFL season. Although I have always enjoyed sports and especially Boston sports, I tend not to get excessively invested.

      This is year is the one exception.

      The Patriots are a perfect 8-0 half way through the season! But anybody who lives in New England and hasn't been living under a rock for the last 9 months know that this season is not just about football. The problem is the Patriots are just too good. Patriots fans always say "They hate us cuz they aint us". Patriot haters will always say it's because the Patriots cheat, but the only reason they make a big deal of it is because the Patriots are so good. Other teams cheat too; last year the Atlanta Falcons were caught pumping artificial sound into their stadium to make it hard for visiting teams to call plays. Nobody talks about that anymore and you know why? Because the Falcons aren't that great. So when it was discovered that the Patriots maybe deflated footballs, the league came down hard. Not just the NFL, but the media, other owners, and basically anybody not from New England. They punished the team itself and then Roger Goodell tried to take down the greatest quarterback of all time, Tom Brady. The NFL spent 5 months and millions of dollars on an investigation that concluded it was "more probable than not" that Tom Brady was "generally aware" of the deflated footballs.  I could have told you that the day after the game. The NFL is a hilarious joke of an organization. Goodell suspended Brady for four games, which was the same amount of games that Greg Hardy ended up serving for domestic violence charges! But I'm getting off topic.

      The NFL tried to take down the great Tom Brady, but instead Tom showed them up in federal court and beat them down. Now every week when the Patriots step onto the field, not only are they playing against their opponent, they're playing against the entire NFL. Tom Brady and the Patriots are pissed off, and their playing with one goal in mind, show up the NFL one more time. More so now than ever, Patriots Nation has an "us against the world" mentality, and I love it!

      8-0 is an impressive start, and I would love to see the Patriots complete the perfect season. But more importantly, on February 7th, I want to see Roger Goodell stand up on the podium, look Robert Kraft, Tom Brady, and all of Patriots Nation in the eye, and congratulate them on winning their 5th Super bowl Title! 

Loosing Sucks

                  First off, I know this is a couple of days late. I forgot about it on Thursday because the only thing we've been doing all week is working on our essays. I told myself I would just write it the next day after our soccer game. Unfortunately, we lost and now our season is over. Like everybody else on my team, I was pretty upset and I was in no mood to try and write a blog post.  

                A few days have gone by and although I'm still pretty upset, I figured I should probably write this post anyway. Our soccer team had a really great regular season, so we really thought we would have a good chance to make it far in the tournament. None of us expected to be out in the first round. Although Freud probably wouldn’t classify this event as the type of trauma that causes our subconscious to use defense mechanisms, I've able to identify some of the behavior that I saw from my team and myself over the last few days.

                There was certainly a lot of displacement, especially right after the game. Cleats and shin pad were slammed onto the turf, and many locker doors in the locker room were shut with an irregularly high amount of force. As I was unloading my car when I got home, a soccer ball fell out of the trunk and I struck it hard into the open garage. For the rest of that night, I suppose you could say that I sublimated a lot of my anger onto the soccer video game FIFA. I didn't bother to change the difficulty at all, so a spent the night dangling and running scores up to the high teens; I showed no mercy.

                As that unfortunate day continues to go further into the past, I'm beginning to realize that that the only defense mechanism left is going to be acceptance. This is hard because growing up, we are always told not to accept defeat and use it to motivate us going forward. Unfortunately there is nothing left going forward for me and Reading Soccer. I'm sure I speak for all the seniors when I say that it sucked to accept that that was the last time we would play for Reading. Loosing sucks, but we have to just accept it and move on.