The Evergreen State College<\/a>, known affectionately by the student body as “TESC” and by local citizens as “that goddamned pack of bleeding-hearted hippie lunkheads.” TESC has many hallowed traditions — the spelling of “woman” with a “y”, offhandedly referring to cops as “The Man” because they once asked you not to urinate on the post office, the widespread belief that the world would markedly improve if everyone dropped acid at the same time — but none so cherished as “The Autumnal Orgy of Self-Righteousness,” a festival which begins on the second Monday of October and reaches it’s apogee on the fourth Thursday of November.<\/p>\nActually, is starts a few days early, as students create banners and signs in preparation for Columbus Day — or, as it is popularly known at Evergreen, “WHY DON’T WE CELEBRATE HITLER TOO WHILE WE’RE AT IT??!! Day”. When the date arrives, student gather to march in protest, picket calendar stores, and speak passionately about the plight of the Native American which they know first-hand because they once rented that movie by Sherman Alexie. They also write letters to the editor of The Olympia demanding that the name of the holiday be changed to “Legalize Hemp”<\/p>\n
Then, about a week later after everything has settled down and the people who got arrested for assaulting pedestrians with giant puppets have been released from jail, everyone eats one last “Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s Thin Crust Special” and then announces to all their friends that they are vegan now, and, in fact, always have been. (“But I saw you eating a Reuben sandwich last week!” “No no, that was a ToFuben™”) This allows them to not only join in the campus-wide, month-long denunciation of carnivory that precedes Thanksgiving, but also to wear t-shirts that say things like “Give Thanks That You Are Not A Turkey” and “I Am So Hardcore Vegan I Won’t Even Watch Animals On TV” or whatever. The net result is that everyone spends Thanksgiving either (a) consuming an entree sculpted from soy, or (b) consumed with guilt as they gnaw on their murder. I mean “meat.” Same thing.<\/p>\n
So I got in the habit of withdrawing to my bunker on the second Monday of October and pretty much just hanging out in there until the end of November. (Luckily, at Evergreen you could miss 6-8 weeks of classes before anyone noticed or cared that you were gone.) Unfortunately, I can’t seem to break myself of the habit. Last Sunday, for example, I unthinkingly went to my Fortress of Solitude and hunkered down, watching Fox News for three days straight. I was only jolted out of my reverie by the realization that I was running low on pork-flavored Mountain Dew.<\/p>\n
And that’s the completely true reason why I haven’t been posting. Well, you know. True enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whoa! Everyone is probably wondering where the hell I went. Well, maybe not “everyone,” but I know my boss and wife were. I probably should have warned you in advance — this happens every year. You see, I was a student at The Evergreen State College, known affectionately by the student body as “TESC” and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}