Open letter to the vegetarian option.

Dear The Vegetarian Option,

Because there was no fish option, which is what I usually opt for at the occasional institutional dinner event, you and I met again last night, The Vegetarian Option, at the round table on the far edge of the room, the giant ballroom filled with dignitaries and rich people and a bunch of us employee types, who were there to season the conversation and decorate the event. I keep thinking that things have changed--that "vegetarian" is actually a cuisine, maybe, at this point. I know I've eaten vegetarian food that has the imagination, the inventiveness, the je ne sais quoi of cuisine, that still fits the criterion "vegetarian." I cook this kind of food all the time.

But not you, The Vegetarian Option. No, there you sat in the bowl, all overcooked penne and saucy sauce, and cut up green-and-yellow summer squash and the occasional incongruous carrot chunk.

First of all, penne pasta: you are not optimal for this non-optimal dish. You are hefty where you should be subtle, and you are tubular and in general, suitable for other treatments, such as baking in cheese. Al forno, penne pasta: you are optimal for that.

Second of all, green-and-yellow summer squash: you are not currently seasonal, and you are in fact usually tasteless. You are a veritable place-holder of a vegetable. Not even the fancy decorative cut-outs in the shape of leaves with leaf-vein divots on the tops of them can address your deficiencies, vegetable-wise.

Thirdly, carrots? I love carrots. But a carrot, particularly in chunk form, is not--how shall we say?--relevant to this dish.

But most of all, The Vegetarian Option, you are lousy with thoughtlessness, rife with lack of care, with I'm-just-here-to-fill-a-dish-ness. You imply that the vegetarian, because she does not care for meat, does not care about food at all. I am taking it personally, The Vegetarian Option. From henceforth you are my nemesis and I shall not rest until you, The Vegetarian Option, behave like actual food, rather than the fodder you actually are.

I mean it,

lisa b.

Faculty life.

Signs that it may be a long, long year, and then another long year after that:

1. I have started dreaming about administrators, and not the one I'm married to.
2. I find myself carrying on lengthy, involved, never-ending arguments with certain people in my head.
3. People have started dropping by my office to tell me true and alarming stories of Things Gone Dreadfully Awry in their respective areas.
4. The classroom I'm teaching in is deluxe but very, very warm.
5. I wore overly ambitious shoes today, an error I'm prone to, which means that by the end of the day I was not only overheated but footsore.
6. I am measuring the year by holidays.
7. I have started referring to myself as "aka, Sucker" when people ask me about being a faculty leader.
8. Many, many of the necessary instructional artifacts for me to teach these classes have yet to be made. Did I say "many"? I meant "endless amounts. Gobs. A whole heap. Incalculable numbers. Myriad. Multitudinous loads. The necessary instructional artifacts yet to be made are legion. Are numberless. There's a whole passel of them. As far as the eye can see would be full of the necessary instructional artifacts I have yet not made, had I yet made them. A whole slew. A zillion."
9. I may possibly be teaching two entirely new classes, as in classes that have never been taught before, in the spring.

I have started every day this week with a loud and encouraging rendition of "Stop Your Sobbing," but at this rate, I may need to play it several times a day. I may need to rig something up so that every time I open my laptop (how many times a day is that? a lot of times.), I can hear these words, in the immortal voice of Chrissie Hynde:

Each little tear

that falls from your eye

makes, makes me want

to take you in my arms

and tell you to stop all your sobbing

--and while I'm at it, I should also stop enumerating The Dreadfuls, aka the reasons why things were, are, and will always be terrible. No: Stop stop, stop stop. It is time for me to laugh instead of crying.