It’s the night before Thanksgiving, my neighbor is at a sing-along “Sound of Music” at the Castro, my married friends from college are probably getting a good nights sleep in preparation of their Thanksgivings with their new babies and their aging Filipino grandparents, and my bear friends are probably fucking each other in the basement of a bar somewhere on Polk Street. I am in none of these places. In two days, I’ll be taking a red-eye flight to Miami to visit my boyfriend for a couple of days, but that’s in two days, so I’m sitting here on the couch alone.

Alone? Lonely? Something.

This quiet — the high pitch of the television, the hum of the laptop fan — it’s unsettling, because there’s always some sort of noise that goes on; the ADHD three year old throwing a tantrum, the lesbians at the corner bar, a bunch of douchebags going all “whoo” at some random passing taxi or truck. Maybe they’re all at home getting ready for Thanksgiving. Maybe that why I’m so unsettled. Or it can be the fact that Thanksgiving has always been kinda shitty for me.

(If this was an adapted screenplay, this is where the montage would begin: scenes of my sister throwing tantrums in various restaurants, scenes of my sister thinking that dinner has been poisoned by the devil, dumping it in the sink after being told to by the voice in her head named Jesus, scenes of my parents screaming at each other in front of a garage about Grandma somewhere in cookie cutter suburbia and getting stared down by the trashy Samoan neighbors across the street. A Chinese school Christmas pageant is in there too for some reason, but I think I’m just mixing up my traumatic childhood stories.)

And that leads me to tomorrow, I guess. In the morning, I get to drive to my cousins to have a Thanksgiving lunch with my dad’s side of the family. Dad’s girlfriend will be there; the one that he’s known for years because she’s the widow of his naval buddy, the one he went to Argentina and Brazil with shortly after my parents got divorced. The one who’s gotten him to soften up, unless he’s suddenly got the memo that if he yells at his children for thirty or so years, they probably won’t like him very much.

She’s nice. She speaks fluent English, and out of a mix of Chinese guilt and respect, I respond in Mandarin. What kind of fucked-up maternal alternative universe is that shit?

“It’s her, isn’t it?” asked my Mom in Chinese, inferring that her casual acquaintance over the past 40 or so years is my father’s new girlfriend. It is, but I keep my eyes glued to dinner, shoveling rice in my face. That’s my usual M.O. when I’m eating at Mom’s house: come in, eat dinner, listen to Angela talk crazy, chain-smoke on the drive home. “That’s fine. What makes him happy.” She pauses. “Your sister thinks she’s ugly, though, although I tell her that’s not a very nice thing to say.” My mom savors saying that last sentence.

I get to visit mom and Angela shortly afterward. Gone are the days of turkey and Chinese food; now I take them out, one year to a fancy American restaurant where my mother heaped her portion of her Caesar Salad directly on my lobster bisque soup to the horror of the snooty white waiter, another year to a Muslim Chinese restaurant where Angela was tired of her “Missionary work,” her code name of spending hours walking up and down Berkeley conversing with the voices in her head. I had resigned myself to taking them to Hometown Buffet so we could stew in our pathos like all the other old people eating there on Thanksgiving, but my co-worker Shali convinced me to take them to classier restaurant, one that doesn’t serve green jello with a Cool Whip garnish. We’ll see how that goes. And in two days, well, in two days there will be less quiet discontent, less awkward situations that I have no control over.

But until then, it’s just me and the hum of a laptop. I just hope my mind will quiet down like everything else.