ThanksVegan-inity

Thanksgiving is coming up. This means that I will have a three day break from teaching which will provide me with dull and shortlived sanity. This also means that I will be baking frantically in order to attempt the most wonderful vegan dish that anyone has ever had the pleasure to shove greedily into their mouth.
This also means that ThanksVegan is very soon.

Every November I throw a party called ThanksVegan. It started out years ago in a vain attempt to make friends come to my house and celebrate with me. It also means that I am generally annoyed and/or slightly intoxicated by 8 p.m. on some Saturday or Sunday evening, waiting for my guests to show up and freaking out a little bit because, truth be told, I kind of hate social gatherings, especially the ones where I play hostess. I have held this party for many years at this point and it still slightly frightens me.

ThanksVegan Year Two
This was the year where GZ and I made traditional Thanksgiving fare. Tofurkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, pumpkin pie and green bean casserole. (Undoubtably the hit of the evening.)
This was the first ThanksVegan in my own house and therefore I had no friends to really get nervous with. GZ usually leaves me to simmer in my own nerves on such occassions. I usually take two showers, spend an hour getting dressed, changing my clothes, taking off my makeup, putting said clothes back on and then finally opening a bottle of wine and reapply my makeup into a bit of a devil may care expression.
Parties like this make me nervous because inevitably there are many people whom I have invited whom I'm not quite sure I like. I invite them out of some Miss Manners sense of hospitality and then have to bite my tongue when they show up with one plate and say "Yeah, I didn't bring anything to your potluck, except this plate. But you can keep the plate!" The plate is usually one of those disgustingly plastic ones that may have at one point been red but seems to have become a dark shade of salmon. It usually still has a few spots of brown, crusty gunk on it from the thrift store or perhaps the person's inability to wash dishes properly. I can only assume that s/he had pulled it out of the trunk only moments before. I grimace an insincere "Thank you" and take a list out of my pocket 0n which to write this person's name. Later, when I am by myself I divide the group into the "Invite Again" list and the "Shun in social situations" list. Inevitably the latter is longer than the former and I have to take back all of those feelings of hatred that I have toward that person and send out another invitation the next year. But I do it with a proud sense of reservation.
Yet another characteristic of these parties is the inclusion of the "Crap" dish and the local crazy boyfriend that happened to wander in because I forgot to ask probing questions.

The "Crap" dish of ThanksVegans Past:
1. crackers
2. carrots still in bag
3. Warm carrots that were warm because they were sitting in a car all day.
4. Cheap store bought hummus that had been half eaten by the time it arrived
5. Non-vegan onion dip
5. Non-vegetarian soup
6. A plate

There, of course, is always the "I didn't bring anything" group. I'm really torn on how to feel about this group. They are much like the "I didn't wear a costume" group at the Costume party. S/he will show up twenty minutes late, empty handed except for the beer that s/he brought for him/herself and will proceed to eat as much as possible.
On the upside, I feel free to blanket the person with as much derision as I please. I am still unsure as to how I should feel about people who do not bring food to a potluck.

One year the night ended in some random hippie guy running through the living room with pretend horns on his head in imitation of an animal whose name I cannot recall. He caused about half the party to relocate to a bedroom with a lock. Many took shelter in the room and refused to come out until the guy left. His friend had spent the entire evening telling me that I would die if I traveled anywhere into Mexico.

But the next year my boyfriend brought a dead, mummified dog from the attic and onto the front porch thereby frightening most attendees. Most of these guests did not return the next year.

I belive that I will begin preparing for ThanksVegan tonight. Recipes will follow.

Lolita with a Pen Knife

I've been away for quite some time obviously. For the most part I've been attempting to make some sense of how to throw myself into all of the separate parts of my life without transmogrifying myself into a lost sense of self- or at the very least losing a finger.
So, I've decided to give this the old college try- just in the non-traditional student type of way.
I'm now teaching English as a second language through my local university. And I think I might have decided to stop caring yesterday.
Most of my class trouble seemed to start around the day that I decided to buy new glasses.

I have large orange glasses now. When I tried them on for the first time, the lady at the eye doctor's office said to me, "You know, when I looked at these I wasn't sure that you would be able to pull them off. But look at you! You're doing it!" She then motioned for her fellow employees to come over and take a look at how well I was wearing the glasses. They "ooo"ed and "ahh"ed at appropriate times, gesturing and nodding at my face, glad that Betsy had brought them over to see the new glasses. One girl looked at me and then looked away. I wondered if perhaps she thought that the glasses were ugly. I wondered if she was thinking to herself that I should have stuck with my old scratched up glasses because now I looked like some extra from Twin Peaks.
Rather than look at them all, I chose to watch a young man, who across the room was trying on his new glasses. Quietly looking at himself in the narrow mirrors. Turning left, then right. Left, then right.