The Fine Art of Pretending

I was walking to the grocery store and I saw some people caroling. They were not just caroling though. They had costumes that looked like they were from the sets of historical films, and they had fake English accents and horses with white carriages.

Ugh, I thought to myself as I crossed the road. To me, the general collective unreason that fuels the Christmas season in my culture seemed exemplified by the actions of these actors. These people are living in a fantasy world, I concluded.

Of course, as I was having these typical, western, self-righteous thoughts, I was on my way to buy supplies for the tabouleh, hummus, and falafels I was making to serve along with platters of olives, dates, and halva in a furniture-less, frankincese-fragranced room strewn with cushions, where there would be toy camels overlooking the burqa, sari, and headgear-wearing guests partaking of the hookah pipe, with Xinjiang Uighur music on the stereo and mini tealight fires winking from across the vast sand dunes we were drawing with crayons on windswept sheets of newsprint.

Yup, at my party I used random desert symbols (objects that just scream "desert" at me) to simulate the generic desert of my imagination, as if there could ever be such a thing as a generic desert... Yes, I combined objects and foods of diverse provenances under this one exotic, catch-all generic term, "desert."

The idea of all this was to celebrate my 30th birthday in a way that would allow me to get something out of my unwillingly-abandoned (poor ME!) plan to be on a camel trek in Rajasthan.

And I accuse these carolers of living in a fantasy world? At least the carolers were doing it on purpose, whereas I was proving once again that you don't need a snooty English accent to play a snooty role.