Be Most Thankful for Small Things

Go back in time to Sunday night about 1 a.m., and here I sit. My column is written, but I don't like it. But who cares; we can all be thankful to leave this hell-bent palace called UNC.

Yes, we're all thankful. Blah. Blah. Blah.

And why do I feel compelled to have a central theme when all I want to do is ramble? Then I realize the beauty of writing this column. I can say precisely whatever the hell I want to. How could life be any more grand? (If I got paid.)

Sunday it snowed. I woke up, not having gone to church since about 1997, but it was like God was saying hello. And I stopped for one second in my life and said, "Thank you, God. I really needed that."

Backtracking further, Friday night was like a breath of fresh air. It's great when you find out who your friends are.

Fast-forwarding to Saturday, I spent five hours working on my most favorite thing in the whole wide world, and no, I won't tell you what it is. Sunday night, on a total whim, I went to Cat's Cradle and saw Joan Osborne. Does anyone remember her? She pretty much rocked.

And getting through Monday and Tuesday just didn't really matter because I knew that soon I would be sailing down the interstate for a few blissful days at home, lounging in my own laziness.

These are the moments I'm thankful for. They often are nonexistent in Chapel Hill, but every so often, something small, something simple happens, and I'm thankful.

Some of my friends will soon be trail-blazing the planet (including little happy camper me during New Year's). Looking forward makes me reminiscent of my time studying abroad.

Ah yes, the lovely teatime "L" that stands for London in my mind .

The British commonly stereotype us as "loud, fat Americans" and David Bowie proclaims that he's "afraid of Americans."

Not only are those not very nice things to say, but they're totally true, just like the English are a bunch of stuffy, snooty prisses. (I said I was going to try to be sincere for one entire column, but sincerity is so overrated. And, besides, sarcasm is my specialty.)

When I moved to the island, I didn't know what to expect. Stereotypes aside, though, living in London was all good.

There were a few things, however, that I still don't miss. For instance, I don't miss living in the substandard housing provided by the University and a management team that didn't consider having heat in February a necessity. Moreover, I'll always be thankful that we have the finest and freest toilets on God's green earth.

I also became aware that nobody knows food like Americans. Germany, therefore, should be the diet capital of the world. I never found anything to eat there that wasn't some form of ground-up white Wiener Schnitzel. Needless to say I was grateful for the beer, which became my primary source of nutrition. Back in homey England, I also bowed down with raw idolatry to the forces of McDonald's, entering its Golden Gates of Grease often, and with a ravenous appetite for anything American.

But it's not heat, toilets or food Americans should be thankful for because we can all safely take them for granted here in our country. What I was thankful for was the freedom to be a stranger in a strange place and to separate myself from my normal reality. In that short time span, rambling abroad forever changed my life and, more importantly, my direction. For that, I am most thankful. (Damn it, there is a theme after all.)

London is an awesome place, like an unreal kingdom, the ancient pinned up against the new. Everything gray with gold. The red double-decker buses; the crazy cabbies; my favorite little Italian restaurant, Trattoria Da Aldo; nearly getting yourself killed because you forgot they drive on the wrong side of the road; hoping to spot a glimpse of my (and every other girl's) future husband, Prince William; the plethora of five-story clothing stores; the workmen I passed every morning en route to school who yelled, "Gooood Moynin!"; the pubs and pints of Kronnenburg 1664; the flower vendors on the street; the tube; and the underground homeless musicians contrasted against the unimaginable wealth of a millennium of royalty. Life thrives there in its quaint mixture of antiquity and cosmopolitan nature.

So this is my sincerity, and these are the things I'm thankful for: the little things, the simple things in life. And even though I no longer thrive off the ecstacy of living in a big city, I find myself even more thankful for my friends here now, who listen to my crazy dreams and who remind me to keep my chin up.

OK, enough mush-n-gush.

Go home and do whatever it is you do and be thankful for whatever you can find to be thankful for, but, above all, bask like a pig in a mud bath of laziness during the Thanksgiving holiday because it won't last long.

Anne Marie Teague is a tired, haggard and severely overworked senior business

administration major from Lumberton who

is already enjoying the holiday in the rural wilds of Robeson County doing absolutely nothing and savoring every precious moment of it. E-mail her at teague@email.unc.edu.