College does funny things to people. It tends to polarize some people’s political beliefs, justify others’ deep-seated elitism, and generally turn AV nerds into alcoholics. Some people even change their entire identities once they get to college. Maybe this is point of college: to turn us into things our parents don’t recognize and are ashamed or hesitant to acknowledge. And while this change is all well and good when talking about independence and personal growth, it does tend to make for awkward conversation during Thanksgiving dinner.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love my family very dearly. It’s just that I have a sinking suspicion that the reason my family never visits me during Homecoming Weekend isn’t that they don’t love me, it’s that they’re deathly afraid of Wesleyan and what it’s turning me into. Since moving me in my freshman year my parents have made a habit of never staying on campus for longer than five minutes. When they used to pick me up for vacations my father made sure to keep the car running at all times. But I forgive them. I realize that my parents just aren’t Wesleyan people. They’re Swamp Yankees.

It may seem a little harsh to call my parents such a thing, but I am leading a movement to take back the name “Swamp Yankee.” Being a Swamp Yankee isn’t really anything to be ashamed of; Lord knows they aren’t ashamed of it. A Swamp Yankee is a certain sort of Yankee that wants nothing to do with any other sort of Yankee. Frugal past the point of being cheap, stubborn, obstinate, hard-working, rugged to the point of being stupid, Swamp Yankees are the sort of people who really did walk two miles each way to school every day, barefoot, uphill both ways, carrying their brother, in the snow. They love machinery, working with their hands, firearms, and sometimes NASCAR. I have only seen my father cry twice: the first time was during “Godspell” and the second was when Dale Earnhardt died.

All of this makes for an interesting Thanksgiving dinner. The kind where, being the only person at the table to vote for Kerry, I’m called all sorts of creative names that involve contortions of the human body I’ve never considered. The kind where everyone makes fun of me when I start swapping recipes for homemade cranberry sauce with my aunt. My family is a lot of wonderful things but intellectual isn’t one of them and of course thanks to Wesleyan I happen to be an obnoxious, arrogant, pretentious bastard of a Northern liberal. My family can’t understand that gender is a social construct, why postmodernism matters, or how exactly a dental dam works. I don’t even know where to begin telling them about my alarming new habit of making out with boys as a purely asexual activity. In fact I don’t think I will be telling them about that. Ever. Also, it has nothing to do with my family, but it feels strange to eat a brownie that isn’t vegan or laced with pot.

This all used to bother me when I first came back from school, but it doesn’t anymore because somehow or another, this is the way things are supposed to be. In every TV show and movie I’ve ever seen, Thanksgiving was about family getting together and just barely managing not to kill one another. Everyone fits into some sort of terrible obnoxious stereotype and throughout the course of a single meal everyone is guaranteed to get offended at least once. Sometimes there is also some sort of comical incident involving the turkey. But somehow, at the end of every Thanksgiving episode of every sitcom I’ve ever seen, everything manages to be okay and we all realize the true meaning of family. So you see, I’m just playing my role as the bombastic and absurdly naïve college student, a necessity for any Thanksgiving dinner. And though I am still waiting for that ultimate epiphany to come upon the Aubreys, I’m pretty sure it’ll happen any minute now and my family will burst through the door of my apartment, hug me, then over a warm cup of tea I will explain to my parents the intricacies of post-structural analysis. Or something. Because in the end, it’s comforting to know that no matter how far I stray from my Swamp Yankee roots, I’ll still be welcome at Thanksgiving. Without me, who would they secretly suspect of being gay?

And also, I believe everything I see on TV.