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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.