Sometimes I don't feel like an American at all. Last night I carved a pumpkin for the first time in my life. I don't know how that happened... maybe it wasn't huge in Puerto Rico when I was growing up? We did have Halloween though... no clue. I never did it in college either. There are a lot of American traditions or pop culture thingies that I absolutely didn't participate in, growing up. I haven't seen 90% of the 1980s movies that everybody quotes all the time (although I did fanatically watch
Flight of the Navigator over and over for years). I just saw
The Breakfast Club in 1999. I just saw
High Fidelity this past summer. Name the movie and I probably have not seen it. Same with television shows (that one is even worse).
Anyway, it was definitely about time for this pumpkin thing. I did it at my apartment with my roommate and our mutual friend, Hobart.
I made one to match my mood.
I toasted these with salt afterwards. Also something I had never done (or eaten).
I'll take more photos when they're lit; they'll be on my
Flickr photo stream.
Last year was actually the first time I did a pumpkin carving too! I grew up in Florida, but wasn't allowed to participate in Halloween type things. :X Punk neighborhood kids ended up destroying it though. My heart is still too broken to want to go through it again this year.
ReplyDelete'Flight of the Navigator' was a great movie.
Hate to be pedantic, but High Fidelity is based on the book of the same name by Englishwriter Nick Hornby. The book is set in England. So it's not really a quintesential American experience. ;-)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification, Stan. I never read the original book so I didn't know that the Chicago part of the movie was inaccurate (or was it Boston?).
ReplyDeleteAlso, someone told me later that the movie was released in the early 1990s, so I'm wrong twice!
Arguably though, since the movie did take place in the U.S. and it was a semi-significant piece of American pop culture at the time, I still feel left out when people around me say that it "changed their lives."