Sunday 29 November 2009

A Three Hour Tour

I tried making vegetable and barley risotto yesterday with portobello steaks. I accidentally bought wheat berries. Did you know that making risotto out of wheat berries takes approximately two hundred hours? Neither did I, until I served my boyfriend dinner just in time to watch SNL. In the meantime:

- My roommate watched a movie "with several breaks."
- My boyfriend designed a website.
- Someone arrived, unpacked, and moved in across the street.
- I sang the entire cast albums of A Little Night Music, Company, and Follies.
- I fogged up the apartment until everything condensed and it began to rain indoors.
- I ate two bowls of cereal because I was too hungry to wait for dinner.
- I washed dishes three times.
- I started to hallucinate in the sweat lodge I'd created over the stove.

I sort of resent any meal that takes so long that it would have been easier to work at minimum wage for a fraction of the time and just buy the stupid thing myself. It was kind of good, though.

Friday 27 November 2009

That's a Dealbreaker

So I just found out that my boyfriend is not remotely interested in the Muppets. YOU THINK YOU KNOW A PERSON. He was not even impressed when I found the Muppets vs. Sesame Street soundtrack on iTunes, because it turns out that he thinks that Sesame Street trains children to be audiovisual learners and sets them up for a life of being zombies.

I, on the other hand, am more or less proving his point by giving up on all of my productive work this evening to watch old clips of Dr. Teeth and Janice singing blues standards on the Muppet Show. I'm doing this with headphones in, except it is not working because I am so tempted to sing along to Movin' Right Along because I still remember all of the words from when I was eight:



(My childhood was also profoundly shaped by The Muppets Take Manhattan, especially this part where Rowlf flips shit on the piano. Rowlf was always my favorite because even as a first grader I felt like he was totally underappreciated.)

Thursday 26 November 2009

Happy Thanksgiving

"Whoever invented the iron needs to die."

- My boyfriend, worried that he is not hegemonic enough for Lee's Thanksgiving party and ironing a sweater.

Monday 23 November 2009

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.

Saturday 21 November 2009

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."

Wednesday 18 November 2009

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.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

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.

Thursday 12 November 2009

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."

Tuesday 10 November 2009

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.)

Saturday 7 November 2009

The More You Know

B: "So where are you guys going camping?"
R: "I don't know, somewhere in rural Virginia."
B: "Didn't you learn anything from Eliza Dushku in Wrong Turn?"
R: "Honestly, no."
B: "It's Appalachia. The Hill People lay barbed wire across the road and then kill you when you walk for help."
R: "I'll keep that in mind."
B: (Sighs.) "If you blow out all four tires, call me immediately for help. Do not get out of the car. I'll be in the city, where it's safe. Hill People don't go into the city."
R: "Thanks."
B: "Oh, yeah, and have fun camping."

Friday 6 November 2009

Things You Do Not Remember

I've watched V for Vendetta on both of the last November 5ths, but I blanked on Guy Fawkes day this year - partially because I met Emma for dinner at Roots and Vines and then saw Jemina Pearl and Islands at the Bowery Ballroom, and partially because I wasn't helpfully reminded by fireworks exploding directly outside my window. Literally the only thing you are supposed to do on Guy Fawkes Day is remember it, and I couldn't even do that. Sorry, Natalie Portman.

Wednesday 4 November 2009

Seasons Change

I went to Starbucks on my way home from work, a focus group, and a very long and ambulatory conference call that I was on from 29th and 5th to 56th and 9th, and I looked around and all of the cups had turned red. And I realized that one year ago, I was walking back from a celebratory breakfast feeling good about the country but upset about a certain referendum repealing same-sex marriage, and realized that the cups had turned red. Well, turn, turn, turn.

I've thought about not blogging anymore, partially because doing fieldwork at a 9-to-5 job and writing a dissertation by night leaves precious little time for snarky updates about my life. And I feel like this blog has served different purposes throughout my life - exhibitionism, vengeance, bragging, self-promotion, preserving memories, communicating with friends, etc., etc., but I'm finding that as I grow older, I'm finding more nuanced and mature strategies for shameless self-promotion. It's been such a huge thing over the past few years that I'm not really ready to cut the cord yet, but I do always wonder why I keep blogging on the rare occasions that I go a week without it and don't miss it at all.

(In that week, I finished tons of stuff at work and I was a zombie for Halloween and there was sweat and glitter and blood and I saw a female Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle ironically almost die in a sewer grate and I found a library to work at and wrote an pointed letter to the New York Times and was sad about the elections but still hopeful and today, I saw red cups. That is all.)