There's several Thanksgiving/Hanukkah celebrations planned this week among the math students. I went to one yesterday with some folks - I knew the people who were hosting, but not many of the other people who came. There were about fourteen of us - not many in the group were close friends. It was several sets of roommates, a few classmates, some significant others of those classmates or roommates, etc - and something really neat happened. One of the hostesses said apologetically as we sat down with food (also, it must be said, cooking for a potluck Thanksgiving is a lot less work than doing it all by yourself! Turns out we can cook pretty well, too.), "Guys, do you mind if we briefly go around this circle and everyone says something that they're thankful for?"
The cheesiest, most traditional family-style Thanksgiving thing to do. We all giggled a bit awkwardly, because what's more stressful in a social situation than being honest about your own gratitude? Who wants to be that authentic with people they barely know? Plus, you also want your gratitude to sound cool, for people to go "oh, wow! What a good thing to say..." when you say your piece. So, this is buzzing in all of our heads, and then the hostess offered to go first. And we went around the circle - these crazy students, all of us slightly weird 'cause we're math and computer science people, some having Thanksgiving away from home for the first time - and everyone took this seriously. Everyone was sweet, honest, even made eye contact with other people in the circle while talking. A hush fell over the room as we went, and it was such a lovely moment. I really hadn't been expecting it. I guess we really are all people with real feelings, no matter how often we feel that we, ourselves, are the only ones really alive. It was enough of a moment to drive thoughts of Number Theory, Combinatorics, and grad school applications out of the minds of the people present, at least for those few minutes all together.
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