You try living here.

It's Claudia's birthday today. She's 27.

I've been giving her Birthday Choice all day.

For dinner, my goofy vegetarian roommate wanted to eat the tofurky, dressing, and gravy, which have been sitting in the freezer for weeks. I agreed (reluctantly), despite the fact that non-meat that tries to masquerade as meat frightens me greatly.

Yeah, I know. Scary stuff.

I'm not a vegetarian, mind you, but I don't eat beef or pork, which in Texas is practically vegan blasphemy. I'm on pretty friendly terms with tofu. I consider it to be kind of like mushrooms -- innocuous with a harmless texture, and able to absorb the flavors of the foods cooked with it. But when they start texturing it like chicken (or turkey) and adding meat flavors, I get really grossed out. Just give me a potato to bake, will you?

We talked about movies showing around town. Secretly, I was hoping something fabulous would be playing at the Drafthouse so we could eat dinner there, but there was nothing interesting showing.

So Claudia and I went to Central Market to buy potatoes for mashing and some cheap sparkling wine. Nothing goes better with fake turkey than sparkling wine, you know. As usual, the two of us spent close to $40 by the time we left the store. Shopping with Claudia is always an adventure, as she can't make up her mind and I'm easily distracted.

So we came home and Claudia took the tofurky from the freezer. Turns out, the instructions are far more complicated than for a regular turkey. You have to thaw this thing for 24 hours, then roast for several hours while basting the tofurky with soy sauce and orange juice. Needless to say, we didn't have tofurky for dinner tonight. Instead, we had cheese sandwiches, watermelon, and sparkling wine.

Anyway, the tofurky package deal came with tofurkey jerky wish sticks. You know those sentences where you understand each of the words individually, but when you string them together they lose all meaning? Yeah.

So these wish sticks are meant to take the place of the wishbone in the turkey tradition. I had to explain this very American concept to my Romanian roommate.

"Wait, so only the winner gets a wish?" she asked.

"Well, both people make a wish, and then the winner's wish is granted," I explain, as though it actually worked that way.

"But that's not fair!" she exclaimed, putting the wish sticks back into the refrigerator.

Um, yes. Socialism at work.