Smorgasbord #59
Thanksgiving | Types of Fun | Wrongroni
Thanksgiving
For everyone reading in the US, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and for everyone else, I hope you had a great Thursday. We started our Thanksgiving celebrations on Wednesday night when we attended a Thanksgiving Eve Soiree at our friends’ house, potluck style. The hosts had a crockpot full of Italian elk, meaning elk cooked as Italian beef—slow-cooked meat with pepperoncini, ranch, and aju dry dressing.
We watched Free Birds with Owen Wilson and Woody Harrelson since Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was plain weird—since when is Kyle Minogue a family act?—and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is only available via AppleTV+, sigh. Diana and I like watching Dan in Real Life on Thanksgiving because most of the story revolves around a family celebrating the holiday over a weekend.
I started thinking about what I’m thankful for, a common practice on this day, and I began to feel a little silly about what I was coming up with. I’m thankful for my wife and children, the family that Diana and I have built together. I’m thankful for being able to breathe, move, and have all my limbs, not needing assistance to move around. I’m thankful for having a roof over my head, clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in, and more than enough food to eat. I take a lot of things for granted, and that’s what makes me feel silly.
I have noticed that turning to gratitude helps me realize how dumb my tantrums are. It is almost as if all of my problems are first-world problems; you know that meme, right? It’s not really a problem, but we make it a problem, i.e., A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is only available via AppleTV+. So, if you’re being silly, like me, maybe this is a good invitation to go a little deeper and maybe give yourself permission to laugh at how small our complaints are in the bigger schema of things and how we can bear these small annoyances better by combating those with gratitude. Let me know how it goes.
Also, I’m thankful for everyone who subscribes to and reads Peregrino. Be assured of my prayers and I would ask you to include me in yours.
Types of Fun
I recently learned about the types of fun or fun scale, a term coined by Dr. Rainer Newberry, a geology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.1
Type I fun is fun to do and fun to remember. It makes you want to keep going and go back for more.
Type II fun hurts a bit to do, but it is fun in retrospect and the most fulfilling in the long run.
Type III fun is not fun to do, not fun in retrospect, but it makes a great story.
The fun scale made me think about our family’s first camping trip and how, unbeknownst to us, we were engaging in some Type II, maybe borderline Type II, fun. Although this scale is mainly used for outdoor activities2, I think it can be applied to everyday living.
I think this framework can help me be in the moment and consider how I will perceive events in the future. This whole newsletter runs on retrospection, so having this scale handy in the back of my head makes sense. Sure, type I fun is plain fun, like enjoying a cocktail or going to a concert, but I’ve slowly been gravitating towards more type II fun activities like writing and working out, and I would even include parenting in this category.
I’m extremely risk averse, probably because I’m in my forties, so I don’t see a lot of type III fun in my future, at least when it comes to outdoor activities. But, if I could have a poetic liberty about the meaning of type III fun, wouldn’t living a good life be a lot like type III fun? We’ll have to do things that aren’t fun, but hopefully, in retrospect, it makes for a good story. Climbing the mountain, facing adversity, and experiencing loss, pain, or suffering is part of being human; if we change our disposition, we may even benefit from thinking that we’re just going through a chapter of our story and things will eventually get better. Or at least we can hope.
Wrongroni
Legend tells that the Negroni Sbagliato, or Wrong/Mistaken Negroni, was born in 1967 in Milan at Bar Basso when bartender and proprietor Mirko Stochetto grabbed a bottle of Prosecco instead of gin while making a Negroni for a customer. The customer didn’t send it back, so a new riff on the Negroni was born.
The Sbagliato gained popularity around 2022, thanks to TikTok and Emma D’Arcy, an English actor who said it was her favorite drink in an interview. I don’t know who these people are and have zero interest in that show, so this is merely a reference point.
A negroni is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari. For the sbagliato version, swap out the gin for prosecco. I would even bump the prosecco to 1.5 oz and pour 1 oz of the other two ingredients. You can build this cocktail directly on the glass; simply add ice, sweet vermouth, and Campari, and stir until chilled, then top with the bubbles. This cocktail falls under the aperitivo category, meaning that it’s best served before a meal to awaken the appetite in a person, but you can really drink it whenever you want.
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Sobremesa
What’s your favorite Thanksgiving side?
When was the last time you had Type II fun?
Would the negroni sbagliato be, in the words of Bob Roos, a happy accident?
While we don't have this holiday in the UK I do think a day of thanksgiving is admirable. We should make an effort to give thanks more often.
Although mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweat potatoes, cranberry sauce, cornbread are all delicious; Stuffing is the only side that is exclusively ‘thanksgiving’ and thus, the best.
I would say all my substack posts are type II fun haha. I really have to force myself to do them but they are enjoyable to look back on.