I don't get why Gluttony is a sin

Yesterday was my first Thanksgiving away from home. Considering that 3/4 of my family are Taiwanese immigrants (the remaining 1/4 still living in Taiwan), we're not a particularly American group. Traditionally, my mother invites a couple of my cousins who also live in the area over to our house for dinner, and we have a big hot pot. For those of you unfamiliar, "hot pot" is a style of eating common in east Asian countries where everyone sits around a central pot of broth and everyone dips in various raw meats, frozen foods, vegetables, etc. to cook and eat. Think of it as fondue but without all the cheese clogging your aorta.

[Side note: I once convinced my friend Maxident that "hot pot" is actually a Chinese New Year ritual in which the entire family seals up every crack in the house with specially blessed tape, then gather to burn a traditional herb typically only found in the high mountains of China, inciting effects similar to smoking massive bowls of weed. After this initiation, everyone cooks anything and everything they can find in the house and then just eats nonstop for six hours. For a moment, he thought it was the greatest tradition ever, and even entertained the notion of giving up being Jewish in order to join my people. I guess he'll have to wait until next year's racial draft.]

Fortunately, we didn't spend Thanksgiving alone. My whole house stayed, and we invited many other displaced Californians over in what became a comically irresponsible feast. The amount of food that we had was absolutely obscene. We had two four-pound chickens (Thomas Keller recipe) – that's right, CHICKEN, because turkey is a tasteless, overrated bird - six different desserts, a sourdough stuffing that included a pound of bacon and two udders' worth of butter, ten pounds of potatoes served two ways, four pounds of a roast vegetable medley, a gallon of hot cider spiked with rum, over forty beers, four bottles of wine, and countless other gut-busting aromas I can't even remember. "Obscene" is an understatement. Seriously, I think I need to go get checked up on Monday to see if I developed adult-onset diabetes. If I didn't, I'm going to sell my body to science for boatloads of cash, because I would be a medical miracle.

Around Thanksgiving, I always like to e-mail/call/text certain people to truly thank them for being an important part of my life. Considering that my entire life is currently consumed by the Georgetown School of Medicine, I feel I owe her one as well.

Dear Georgetown,
Thank you for trying to make us stronger by putting us through insanely-paced classes that make us lose sleep over minutiae of how an embryo's heart develops. Thank you for stimulating America's economy by making us re-buy all the laptops that are stolen from us on campus. But most of all, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for trying to improve our immune systems by having your buildings fall behind health safety codes involving asbestos:

This is a hallway in the Preclinical Sciences Building, a hallway we walk past daily to get to our lecture hall. All this plastic containment stuff you see here, probably formerly used by Ridley Scott as props for Alien, is meant to contain the asbestos while they try to get rid of it. This magically appeared, I kid you not, on Tuesday – right before our Thanksgiving break. The way I see it, the school did its holiday shopping early, and we're all getting mesothelioma for Christmas!

In all seriousness, this asbestos thing isn't such a big deal, but the recent increase in thefts on campus is quite alarming. Please be smart about leaving your property alone, lock your doors, and exercise CONSTANT VIGILANCE! about watching your stuff. Be a friend to strangers and watch their stuff too.

'90s Dance Party at The 9:30 Club tonight: Come, reminisce, dance awkwardly like you did in middle school.