A Collection of Mini-Thoughts

There have been a lot of silly mini-thoughts that have almost been posts recently.

The inanity of Black Friday and the irony of beating each other to death over half-price TVs a the same night that we've spent telling our families how thankful we are.

A comprehensive list of what I'm thankful for (friends, school, family, not being dead all currently topping the list).  A response to Carrie Hope Fletcher's Boys in Books are Better in which I attempt to create my best book-based boy (my alliterative skills are off the charts).

But I think instead, I'm going to talk a bit about family.  I was always raised to think that family is important -- to respect members of my family, to have people's backs, to love family.  But I also learned that blood alone is not the be-all-end-all of what it means to be family.

Family is made up a lot by choices.  Marriages, divorces, re-marriages should be enough to give some insight into what I mean here -- nothing fundamentally has changed in the physical makeup of a family, but a lot has changed in the choices that defined what "family" meant.

Sometimes the choices aren't always very easy, and sometimes, it seems, the choices end up being wrong.  But my family, over the years, has been a series of add-ons and removals as it seemed necessary, and it makes me kind of happy to finally see some representations of chosen families in media, rather than a reinforcement of the idea that "because they're blood you have to love them."