Sunday, August 23, 2009

Weekend adventures: double birthday edition

By my calculations, I have not been alone—meaning truly, physically alone with more than an hour of unstructured free time—in our house in over a month. Until today.

I'd spent the weekend entertaining my friend Jeff, who was visiting from Iowa for a big birthday adventure weekend in Chicago. The domestic partner had to work on Saturday, but Jeff and I managed to have fun without him by working together to keep the Boystown economy solvent. Jeff spent more money on Saturday but I came home with more stuff, so I totally win. Plus I now have two new shirts to model this week at work. Including this one, which features a really cool print of the Brooklyn Bridge on the front, but I don't have any front pictures of me wearing it so you'll just have to imagine its frontal coolness using this side view, which is the risk you take when you buy last-minute cheap seats to Opening Jars With Jake:

Jeff earned his keep this weekend by helping me fix our bedroom ceiling fan, which had stopped talking to its remote control. For the last few months it had left us with only two setting options: fan on/light on (which is OK for summer days and great for summer evenings) and fan off/light off (which is never great in summer, especially at night). Once we got the fan working—and then shampooed out the dust buffaloes that had migrated from the fan blades to our hair—we had a lovely birthday dinner in Boystown (you're welcome, Boystown!) and then went to a friend's birthday party, where we stumbled into a hidden universe of attractive gay people I didn't know existed in Chicago. But now I'm Facebooked with some of them so they can't disappear again into a fog of tartan plaids and bagpipe wails for another hundred years.

Then this morning we hosted a big gay birthday brunch for Jeff, complete with mimosas and fruit and four kinds of frittatas. But not my mom's fabulous fruit dip because I tried to make it fat-free and it just turned into a sticky, gloppy soup. So forget what you read in the papers, kids; fat is good for you. We started the birthday brunch with four bottles of orange juice and five bottles of sparkling wine ... and we ended with three bottles of orange juice and six bottles of sparkling wine. Because when the gays meet for brunch, they bring all the mimosa fixin's with them to make sure nobody has to go without. Gays do not kid around in the mimosa department.

The brunch was a smashing success, except people ate only two of the frittatas—the two I liked the best, natch—so we'll be eating a lot of sub-delicious egg-based leftovers this week. Which I guess cuts down on this week's food preparations.

And then.

Jeff hit the road home to Iowa. The domestic partner had to go back to work. The last brunch stragglers helped me put the house back in order. And suddenly I was left alone in the house with a huge bucket of sweet, sweet silence ... punctuated by the occasional soft click and whir of the dishwasher. Which hardly counts as non-silence, but I'm including it here in the interest of full disclosure.

And what did I do with my newly alone self? Well, I started cleaning the bathroom. And in my scrubbing and organizing I stumbled on a forgotten trove of skin-care potions. And before you could say the domestic partner can scrub the damn shower this time, I was up to my crow's feet in a fabulous home spa day complete with a bright blue mud mask for my face, pumiced rubs for my runner-calloused feet, minty body scrubs for my non-face and non-feet skin, and a world of wrinkle creams and lightly scented ablutions. And in only an hour I was refreshed and relaxed and I'd shaved weeks off my appearance and years off my progress toward becoming "ex gay."

But we all know "ex gay" is just a shorter way of spelling "still gay," so as long as I ex-gayed myself into a state of younger-looking skin, Pat Robertson would just look even more ancient and ridiculous by comparison. And that's really the best birthday present a couple gays could ever ask for.

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