This Week [#3: Family]

This holiday week/weekend was a time of figuring out what "family" means, and what it means to me. It really feels like that's what this week was about, because from beginning to end, that's the message that kept cropping up.

 Mondays: Watching great shows and having adult realizations that make you want to lay on the floor, give up, and die.

 Tuesdays: Watching The Mindy Project while you bake, which you feel like Mindy would definitely approve of.

Wednesdays: Reading great graphic novels, reuniting with friends, and going to impromptu Friendsgiving gatherings with the great best friend love of your life and getting Panera at 10 pm because you're cool like that.

Thursdays: When your favorite holiday always falls on your favorite day of the week and you have a kind of crappy day but you eat pie and hang out with a two year old who loves you despite the fact that you're imperfect and it makes it all better.

Fridays: Watching a movie about emotions with your family, crying your eyes out, and then going to bed early.

Saturdays: Telling your friends you're in aisle 20B when you're actually sitting at a table waiting for them and you didn't think they'd actually go there but they did. And then playing a card game you've been playing with your family for years and feeling like this small group of weirdos just might be your new family.

Sundays: Watching TV and napping. Eating. 

(Rinse and repeat until it's 10 pm and you're too tired to do it anymore.) Question: If it's a Sunday and you're actually a productive member of society, was it really a Sunday?

 It's weird when you get to an age where "family" is no longer the extended family you were born into, but the extended family you choose. I think how our culture defines family is arbitrary. I think we make our own families, and I think it's pointless to love people just because you're supposed to. It means a lot more when you choose them yourself, when you choose to love people despite how hard it might be sometimes. My family has become much more than my parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles. It now consists of: Starbucks employees, coffee shop owners, musicians, writers, artists and generally beautiful people (inside and out). It's people who call you on their break when you're having your third existential crisis of the week, it's people who you'd drive an hour and a half just to see for two hours, it's people who sit down and help force you to write because they get that you're having trouble doing it on your own, it's people who play cards with you in an emptying Wegmans on a Saturday night because there's nowhere else to go. These people are my family. 

 -Fran