Queer Thanksgiving

When I was on the board of the BGLTSA, we invented this holiday called Queer Thanksgiving which is basically like a traditional Thanksgiving except that it's a potluck and everybody brings foods they think are awesome instead of bringing food that conventionally invokes the end of November. (Past highlights have included kugel, fried plantains, and whole chickens.) For no apparent reason, I became obsessed with the idea of breaking in the apartment with our own Queer Thanksgiving this year.

And we did! I invited a bunch of my friends, and then Brady was coming home on Saturday and realized that a pair of twins that he went to college with just moved into the apartment below us in our seven-unit building. And he invited them, and I was like, good, because this is Queer Thanksgiving, and nothing says Queer Thanksgiving like an unexpected set of twins. (Preferably as guests, but a guest going into labor and suddenly and dramatically giving birth would be appropriate for the occasion as well.)

It was four hours of awesomeness with some of my favorite people ever, and a spread that was so shockingly good that I think I actually distended my belly. Because the foods are so unpredictable, the anchor for Queer Thanksgiving has traditionally been vegetarian chili, and I made a vegan chili recipe that is a) about the easiest recipe ever, and b) so good that even Brady said he liked it after vowing to hate it because it was vegan. David mixed a bag of blue corn tortilla chips with whole wheat tortilla chips that we made ourselves using such tools as "Pam" and "a microwave," and there were Queer as Yolk deviled eggs, a crazy delicious sweet potato and swiss chard gratin, pumpkin bread, a festive salad, hummus and brie and homemade guacamole, sweet potatoes and marshmallows, canned cranberries, a cornbread recipe that Mischa makes but Emma brought to Thanksgiving, fruit cups, and enough red wine to anesthetize a whale.

I think everyone had a blast. At some point, I tried to explain how I knew everyone and how a bunch of the guests knew each other, but it became too hard to do without a chalkboard and I gave up. Which was good, because then the twins arrived and it turned out that they were friends with the older sister of one of my guests, who I only knew because she's friends with my brother's best friend from Macalester (who was also there, and who I lived with in early September) and four years ago when I was living in New York, we saw Dar Williams and got pancakes together. This is how lifelong bonds are forged.

I Should Grocery Shop More Often

David and I were going grocery shopping to get stuff for vegan chili for our Queer Thanksgiving tomorrow, and I glanced up on 9th Avenue and realized that I was looking into the face of Cheyenne Jackson. And then I spent the next five minutes gushing to David about how I think that people playing Canadians are inherently sexy and how his jawline is even squarer in real life than it is on TV or the Xanadu soundtrack and how maybe he lives in my neighborhood and we can become best friends. This can be filed under "Things Your Boyfriend Does Not Like During Your One Year Anniversary Weekend."

Being a Grown Up is Kind of Exhausting

I've been working on this protest tomorrow like a crazy person, which is extra stressful because I have a major deadline at the end of the week that I want to meet so that I'm not totally intolerable when David and I celebrate our one year anniversary this weekend. I got back from meetings tonight around 9pm and was so tired that I literally ate two fistfuls of bon bons and fudge for dinner. The last thing you want to hear under these circumstances are "by the way, we need you to go on the radio tomorrow morning." I hope nobody minds five minutes of soft weeping over the phone.

A Very Paula Deen Birthday

The first sign my boyfriend knows me too well: David showed up this weekend with a box of Funfetti mix and a can of frosting in his bag. The second sign my boyfriend knows me too well: the next morning, we had a cup of egg batter left over from french toast, and he proposed making french toast out of birthday cake. You would think that the frosting would burn in the pan, but no. It just fuses with the egg to make a kind of hybrid awesomeness membrane. It was delicious.

No Teflon Poisoning in 2010!

Me: "I just added 'digital recorder' to my list of depressing things I asked for for Christmas."
Intern: "What else is on the list?"
Me: "A jogging armband. Luna Bars. A frying pan."
Intern: "Um, a frying pan is important."
Me: "Don't patronize me."

Birthday Success

I have been popping Advil like Pez today.

Camping!

I turned 24 surrounded by drag queens at Halloqueen, and I turned 25 somewhere in Delaware on a seven hour bus ride from DC back to New York. Progress! I will probably turn 26 under a bridge.

But the upside is that camping was a blast - with enough fire and carbohydrates, you can withstand a surprising amount of cold. The campsite was like if Burning Man mated with a bear, and that bear was a member of a frat. We got out to the campsite and they were dishing up scraps of the 300 pound pig they had ordered, and they were like, "here, have the remains of this barrel of coleslaw and this massive pan of beans" and instead I had cake and s'mores for dinner. (The cake had bacon in it, which I studiously and successfully avoided.) We played some harmonica, I bumped into a guy I went to college with, we hung out around the fire and made s'mores, there was a bluegrass band, and there are photos of us riding a rocking horse at some point? The cake was half buttercream, and I woke up in the middle of the night and was torn between getting out of my sleeping bag and being exceedingly cold and staying put and possibly being $3 wine and s'more sick in a tent full of people. I decided on the sleeping bag and just focused really, really hard on contracting my stomach muscles selectively and eventually fell back asleep, and then in the morning we packed up the tent and had avocados and chevre and flax bread, because a) it turns out that we can put together a tent, which surprised me, and b) it turns out that it was the yuppie tent, which did not. (I had a tiny packet of Via and a couple of emergency packets of Sweet n' Low in my jacket that I did not have to use. I am a well-educated MacGyver.)