It has become our tradition to make our completely oversized Thanksgiving turkey the day after Thanksgiving. The first two of the past three years, this was because we forgot to buy a disposable roasting pan, or we forgot to start defrosting the turkey. Now, though, we have simply accepted that we actually enjoy having a day to decompress between work and making a 13-lb. turkey for two people. We’re weird, and we’re just embracing that.
I hope all in the U.S. enjoyed a safe, socially distanced Thanksgiving – with only a handful of people – yesterday! Have a Brevity is the Soul of Apathetically while we enjoy ours today.
We’ll be embracing the sin of gluttony by making all of the following for two people today: 1) one 13-lb. turkey 2) stuffing (made from Partner’s homemade bread that we staled) 3) mashed potatoes and gravy 4) cranberry sauce (this will be my first time making this!) 5) corn casserole 6) garlic and herb green beans 7) deviled eggs 8) macaroni and cheese 9) apple pie with ice cream and 10) a whole lot of craft beer! (Okay, we won’t have actually made the beer ourselves. But, we did rent a car to go pick it out from a fancy store. After researching what craft beer styles would pair best with our menu. Does ‘picked it out ourselves’ count?)
A couple of these represent vaguely NSFW humor topics, so read at your own discretion!
Also, please unofficially consider this post also #2 in the “Sh!t My Partner Wants to Know About Neurotypicals” series. (Better title to come eventually, I swear!)
*Lavender goes to look for a site to send a birthday e-card to someone because she forgot to buy stamps to send a real card*
Lavender: “Why is everything a subscription now? How many people do people normally know that they need a full-on subscription for ecards?! Why aren’t there any more free sites? Ooh…this one will work! It’s a subscription, but it has a three-day free trial period. Let me set this card to send in two days, and then set myself a calendar invite to the ‘cancel’ party on day three…”
Partner: “So, do these things work that you set up a site to send cards to all your thirty-five friends throughout the year all at once? So it looks like you actually remembered their birthdays on the day of? When, really, what you remembered is how to pay a bot to send things for you so you get bragging rights?”
Lavender: “Yeah, that seems about like how neurotypicals would work…”
Partner: “Seems like a pointless social obligation to me.”
Lavender: “So, how neurotypicals work?”
Partner: “Touche…”
*Partner tries to give Trauma Kitty thirty days’ worth of thyroid pills the vet wants her to take. Trauma Kitty becomes more and more adept at figuring out how not to take those pills: from holding them in her mouth until we think she’s swallowed them and later hiding them somewhere after we’ve let her go, to spitting them across the room, to knocking the bottle the pills come in under the couch where we can’t find it…*
Partner: “That was impressive…”
Lavender: “What?”
Partner: “She managed to just spit it. Pretty far, too…”
Lavender: “Yeesh.”
Partner (to Trauma Kitty): “But I need you to swallow, okay? Will you swallow for me?”
Lavender: *laughs*
Partner: “Okay, I’ll admit that is a kind of a weird conversation to be having with my cat…”
*Partner takes cuttings from our Peace Lily that has somehow survived life with us for five whole years but has now reached the end of its natural lifespan unless – per the Internet – we quickly learn how to take cuttings and grow them from seedlings*
Partner (potting three cuttings into three different garden pots and putting them in front of the grow light of our hydroponic herb garden): “Here’s the harsh truth, little plants. I only care if one of you lives. So, grow for all you are worth.”
Lavender: “Are you pitting our children against each other in a battle of survival of the fittest?”
Partner: “Yes, is that wrong?”
Lavender (considering): “Probably not. I mean, we are only ever planning to have one child…”
Partner (deadpan): “Okay, here’s the thing, kids. There’s only enough college money for one of you. IMPRESS ME!”
Lavender (burning her mouth on hot soup bao): “Oww! Hot! Hot! Hot”
Partner (almost immediately after this picking up and eating his own hot soup bao and also burning his mouth) : “Oww! I watched you burn yourself, and then I thought that wouldn’t apply to me!”
Lavender: “Did you ever consider…”
Partner (cutting Lavender off mid-sentence): “Learning from other people’s mistakes? No! I want the right to set myself on fire!”
*Lavender wants Partner to do something that he said he would do. She lies on the couch looking up at the ceiling*
Partner: “Stop staring at me!“
Lavender (looking up at the wall): “I am literally looking up at the wall!“
Partner: “You’re metaphorically staring at me and you know it.”
Partner: “If kitties ever develop little opposable thumbs, within three or four generations humans would have taught them everything we know about computers and everything else because they are cute. And they’d take over without even having to try.”
*Watching old movies on t.v.*
Lavender: “Wow. Those characters are literally smoking after sex. Now there’s a thing we, fortunately, don’t see much anymore…”
Partner (deadpan): “If you smoke after sex, slow down and use lube.”
*Lavender looks confused*
Partner (slyly): “Friction…”
Partner: “At some point, you should start a blog series of ‘Things my Partner Wants to Know…”
Lavender: “Okay, what’s the first one?”
Partner: “I have another question to ask your neurotypical blog people: how many tabs do they have open on their computer at any given time? Or their phone? I have thirty open right now, and I just made a conscious effort to close some.”
Lavender (counting): “I have 31. Assuming you count that I opened a new tab on Evernote right this moment to write down your question. I know I had started fresh today, so those tabs were all opened today. Hey, have you ever run out of tabs you can have open on your phone and had Android send you that ‘you must close tabs to continue’ message?”
Partner: “Yes…”
*Days later Lavender sees a meme going around about DMs being weirdos because they have fifteen tabs open at once.*
Lavender: “So, I think we have an answer to your question. This meme suggests that neurotypical DMs are weirdos because they probably have fifteen tabs open at any given time…
Partner: “Fifteen?! Fifteen?! That’s not possible! Nobody can live like that…”
If I had that many tabs open, I would spend large amounts of time going back and forth between tabs and wondering huh?
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Here I am, late to the party. People seem to be commenting about the same thing I was thinking about. I like your response: “You’ve done a really good job of illustrating the potential problem with using “neurodiverse” as code for “ADHD and autism.”
I can’t handle a multitude of tabs. It is disorganized and stressful for me. I am also totally neurodiverse 😉
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I have uhhh… 10 tabs open..I consider myself slightly neurodivergent though, due to complex trauma lol. Also thats a lot of turkey… my country doesn’t celebrate thanksgiving so we have turkey on Xmas. Got a recipe?
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Hmm. You’ve done a really good job of illustrating the potential problem with using “neurodiverse” as code for “ADHD and autism.” Certainly trauma, dissociation, etc. change the brain, but it’s hard (for me, at least) to see any positives to them. Same for me with depression, anxiety, etc.
“Neurodiverse” used here is explicitly a way to avoid the particular trauma triggers associated with calling myself “autistic”, which is a word still too heavily associated with prior abuse in my mind. I was deeply conditioned through abuse to view “autistic” traits as somehow both shameful in and of themselves and simultaneously “not mine.” My sibling might be autistic. I was just a selfish freak who could be normal if I really wanted to, supposedly. And, I paid for not being able to be normal. Calling myself neurodiverse both sidesteps the triggers associated with directly referencing my autistic neurotype and is simultaneously an explicit rejection of the idea that just being autistic and/or ADHD are, in and of themselves, deficits vs. just less-prevalent natural evolutionary neurotypes. It’s an attempt to embrace a social model of disability for those identities in direct rejection of the prevailing societal idea that those neurotypes in and of themselves are disabilities for me.
Yes, they make my life harder when I’m functioning in an NT world. Yet, when we’re left to build our own neurotype-friendly spaces and adapt our environments to them, ADHDers and/or autistics often outperform NTs in a lot of domains. The more I embrace ADHD and autistic-friendly spaces, the more I feel like I could see a world where I wouldn’t have to feel like every day the world was stacked against me. And, it sucks so much that the changes that would be required to let me finally just relax for once in my life and stop feeling like an alien all the time are so damn simple. Yet, NT society can’t be bothered to make them. I have to imagine that’s how anyone with a non-standard identity feels. It could be so easy to just let us be us, so why won’t the true ‘neurotypicals’ in all senses of the world just let us be? As I read once in a meme, “neurotypicals love to tell each other to embrace being themselves – because everyone else is taken – while they turn around and try to force us to become them even while it permanently traumatizes us.” (Just to be clear, though, ADHD and ASD are neurotypes, not super powers. I argue they aren’t inherently ‘deficits’ the way NT society labels them, but I also don’t go the overcompensating route that some traumatized autistics take and say they’re better either. I understand the impulse to want to embrace the other extreme and act like our ND cultural norms are actually somehow “better,” but I don’t agree. They are neither inherently better, nor inherently worse. Just different. And something that should be allowed to just exist without having to endure beatings, shame, abusive ‘therapies’ like ABA that are based on the same junk science as gay conversion therapy (yet are still somehow the norm in public schools!?) and all the other things NT society forces upon us…)
But, at the same time, I’ve certainly been traumatized enough to recognize that a dissociative brain isn’t exactly “neurotypical” either. If you magically could give me the choice, I’d choose to remain ADHD and ASD – as they feel like a part of who I am, not just conditions superimposed upon my baseline identity – but I’d jettison my EDS, trauma, migraines, depression, etc. in a heartbeat. I need to figure out a way to write a post on why the medical model of the specific types of neurodiversity that I’m referencing implicitly when I say “neurodiverse” feel like they deserve a label that recognizes “my brain was different from birth, but that shouldn’t have been treated as shameful, and I should have been allowed to embrace those identities as identities even though they are outside the default” in a way that doesn’t accidentally make it seem like I’m denying that there’s also a lot of other disorders (many of which I have as comorbidities) that can and do change the brain as well. Trauma brains aren’t neurotypical brains. But, they aren’t autistic or ADHD brains either. All I can say is there’s a lot of conditions that can make a person “neurodiverse,” and I’m not questioning that. I am now, finally, questioning why being ADHD and autistic is viewed by society as a deficit in me instead of just a difference in me akin to any other natural variability among humans.
Not sure if that makes sense? But, I guess on this blog when my Partner or I ask what “neurotypicals” typically do in a given situation, we just mean “what do folks who aren’t ADHD and autistic typically do in these situations?”
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You make a lot of sense and I pretty much concur. 👏❤
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My recipe, btw, is super easy. Buy a turkey and lots of butter, fresh thyme, dill, rosemary, sage and parsley. Grind the herbs (we actually have an herb mortar and pestle, but any sharp knife will do.) Let the butter sit out until it gets soft and pliable. Stir the herbs into the butter to make herbed butter. Wash the turkey, pat dry, and slather it all over with the herbed butter. We do stuff our bird, though we are super careful about making sure the stuffing is cooked all the way through. Our stuffing is basically a loaf of sourdough bread, staled and diced up. Coat the bread with enough of the herbed butter to make it glisten. Toss in carrots, celery, onions and garlic. Add two eggs and enough chicken broth to make the bread feel soft and squishy. Stuff the bird, and toss some lose carrots, celery and onion into the turkey pan with about a cup of chicken broth to keep the bird moist and provide aromatics while cooking. Bake for however long the internet says to cook a stuffed turkey of appropriate size should take. (My oven doesn’t run as hot as the internet thinks. The internet thought a stuffed 13-lb. turkey would take about 3 hr. 45 minutes. It actually took about half an hour longer.) Cook for that amount of time, test with a meat thermometer for both the meat and the stuffing. Keep cooking longer than the internet says if needed, until it hits whatever temperature on the meat thermometer the internet says is correct. (I just baked one Friday, and I’ve already forgotten and would have to look up again!) Enjoy!
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Oh, and baste the turkey ever 30-45. min. or so while baking with the broth in the pan to continue to keep it moist while baking!
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I love herbed butter hahaha. Don’t think I’ve ever had a stuffed turkey… never understood the USA tradition of cutting a hole in the bird to do that :O
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Huh. Our birds come with that hole when we get them. I never knew you could buy turkeys that *didn’t* come like that. The idea is the turkey keeps the bird moist from the inside, so the meat is tender. That’s what I’ve always understood at least!
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Ah! 😀 stuffed turkeys or chicken aren’t really a thing here so my aunt would make a big deal of carving the turkey.
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This will be my first Christmas dinner. I’ve enjoyed reading about yours but mine will be smaller. My mom has always hosted but this year we are locked down to family only. The list of what I need and don’t have keeps expanding. I have napkins and crackers, but upon reading realized I am missing two vital things: cranberry sauce and I’ve yet to pick up a turkey.
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