Thanksgiving '07: Happy Birthday to Me

Thanksgiving was supposedly started as a feast and joyous celebration of making it through another year, of acknowledging the toil and strife and the people that helped us along the way. Lincoln (a personal favorite) made it an official holiday and although it originally was August 6, it now falls in November and this year on my birthday. I am grateful to be born. Life is precious. I am the mother of two adopted children so birth and and the giving of life is monumental in my home despite it's political toolmaking.

I am grateful to my mother for laboring on my behalf despite her secret desire to get back into her size 17-inch waist that I stretched out.

I am grateful to her and my father and my step-father's patience and guidance and complete disregard.

I am grateful that there is life out there for someone who isn't a scholar. I wear my combined 760 SAT scores like a medal around my neck that ANYONE can make it despite being a round, square, gay, alcoholic, liberal, pampered peg in the proverbial square hole of what is the norm.

I am grateful that I am aware of the terrible legacy this generation has created and the wonderful technology that support this apathy.

I am grateful that someone wanted to share his life/heart/mind with me and that we have been able to raise our children in an attempt at our own family and not that we just perpetuated our own family histories.

I am grateful to have arrested and faced down my alcoholism and drug dependency and that my children and their children will not see me in an altered state, other than Idaho.

I am grateful for my friends who choose to know me and secretly see my snarky side and still let me be part of their lives. I am grateful that my children appreciate that I am trying, that I am FAR from perfect (a terrible name for a movie BTW) that I am locating myself while trying to help them locate themselves. I am grateful that there is love around me from them.

I am grateful that I live around trees, that there are books and music and photographs and movies and yes, I am grateful that there is musical theater. I am grateful that my dogs trust me. I am grateful that I trust me.

I am grateful that I can question our government and HATE the policies it is enforcing in my name and still love our country and its great promise. I am grateful to be alive and aware and up at 5a.m. on my birthday. As I was taught or read in the tabloids, I can't remember, that giving is better than receiving I get to give you all a gift. It is one of MY favorite things and it is free:

"Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man (and woman). Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man. And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."

- John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Birthday, Tell the Truth, Make Good Choices.

Comments

[ianrthorpe]

I think those of us who understand it is not all about money, status and power are slowly turning the argument around Jamie.

Holy City
http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewpoetry.asp?id=203592

[Ravenlea]

Belated Happy Birthday. Here's hoping that by your next birthday (or shortly after), this country will be in better hands and on the road to recovery.

[jamieleecurtisonline]

Herzlichen Glueckwunsch zum Geburtstag liebe Jamie.
Or just
Happy belated birthday Jamie Lee.

I am grateful for being able to use my mind and express it. Because this is truely the highest gift. Without that I wouldn´t be able to recognize the beauties of this world (art, music, art, love, honesty, art, literature, nature, selflessness, art, and oh i forgot, art) and enjoy them. And I won´t be aware of the inhumanity in the world to fight it.

Thank you Jamie Lee for not being "perfect".
Thank you for just being "wandaful".

And thanks for just being the most inspirational person in my own little world right now.

[AntonBursch]

Thanks for the blog and the quote.

I never took the SAT. I thought I wasn't smart enough. Now I'm a computer scientist. I never passed a computer science class in college.

[peonyharp]

Belated wishes but still heartfelt: Happy Birthday, Jamie!

I appreciate your candor, your openness, your perspective, and your work. Please write more columns!

~Kristine

[Hugo de Balsac]

i am thankful that love is not hopelessly lost in this world despite man's persistant intellectual effort to deny it's existance.

[Uselessboy]

Happy birthday! And I love your work.

I'd hate to run up against you on a stage anywhere, despite SAT scores most of the way to double yours. Bet I wouldn't screen test very competitively!!

But seriously, was your test run by Diebold?

[MrCoffeeCup]

As Humphry Bogart would say in the movie
Casablanca,"of all the bars, in all the ports..."! "Here's looking at you Babe!" Tell me sweetheart(Bogie Accent) why didn't we meet and fall in love two life times ago?

"Continuing in the Bogie accent" And thanks to you Sweetheart for all the great eye candy for us in these last 35 years".

It is in thanks back to you that you also cherish freedom of the mind, soul, and body. In the mid-east, there are millions that do not want you to have these priviliges any longer. Did I say privileges? No Rights to say what we want to say in a responsible, courteous way. The religious term "Chastisement" means to correct or purify. Persons and government get better when they purify themselves in goodness, mercy and love.

Please keep up the good work and Thank you as well.

[LucianaA]

After a while...

"After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul
and you learn that love doesn't mean possession
and company doesn't mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts and presents aren't promises

And you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of an adult not the grief of a child.
And you learn to build your roads today
because tomorrows ground is too uncertain for plans and futures have ways of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much
so you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure
that you really are strong
and you really do have worth
and you learn."

Veronica A. Shoffstall

I think this prose look like you...
You learned and practice
Your acts prove
You is a example of life to me.
I admire your love and and interest of helping the people,adult or children.
I Love You
God Bless you and family.

Luciana =)

[meowarf]

OUCH !!
So much for collaboration !! Never knew JS was so cynical...and he wrote "Travels With Charlie"; guess he preferred dogs to people.

Anyway, HB to you Jamie, and thank you for taking the time to express how thankful you are. Saw you @ the Gov's conf. for the second time, and again, you're willingness to be real and visable is refreshing.

[Faircloth]

Not often am I so moved by an article that I go to the trouble to respond, but yopur T'Day article was certainly one of those! It was beautiful, and it came from a beautiful person; beautiful in every way.

[SPQA]

I feel it would be presuming on our rather brief sense of modesty and charity to let out that we are not thankful enough. That only when we reach a year older we take pride of place. Or that at least we reconcile. I simply grow. I want to be aware, absolute, less imperfect than the prior year. I too woke up early on Thanksgiving Day. But not to beat the traffic on our way to the old family reunion. I had to work that day. See, it takes more than a celebration to be this much reflective. As an American who lives and works in the Middle East I am not this lucky. I can"t find these insights written anywhere. But that morning on my drive to work, I felt disconnected from all that unbalanced us. I felt disconnected from America, the Teacher. And from Hollywood, reality shows, the news...
Don't wait till Thanksgiving to feel you have sampled what we all deserve. Go and wake up the person next to you and say you're sorry and that you love them. Even if it sounds corny. That's much too incisive and giving in simpler words.

[debra99]

Thank you for being honest, for being true to yourself and expressing what is important to you. The very act of being grateful brings forth the best in us and creates the reality we wish to both see and be in. It is not thanksgiving here, but any day is a good day to live with gratitude. so, thank you.

[Arielman]

I am not so thankful for John Steinbeck's legacy almost stolen from his son and family by legal "strategery" like a "black pearl". He lived out near Mattituck on Long Island, NY (Jamie's dad, Tony Curtis, is from where I type, in the Bronx, named for Swedish settlers with a library, which like many English words, once ending in -cks have become -x) with his wife and had a nice little sunroom to sit in. His son I recall was a reporter in Vietnam during the undeclared "war" there.

Being George Myers, I'm kinda of thankful for the "Halloween" series and how it might have inspired Mike Myers. Thanks for being all those interesting characters, Jamie Lee, and those you starred next to should be thankful too. You know who they are, Governor A.S., Elwood Delaney, Eddie Murphy, Ron Silver, the fish named Wanda...

[deminmo]

Ms Curtis, Thank you. And Happy Belated
Birthday. Oh 44 years ago was another important
event that shaped how life is now.