NoFo

23 years ago today

2011-12-21T07:00:00.002-06:00

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and an extraordinary revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last 23 years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about epic tragedies like the 9/11 bombings ... but I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Kodak commercials.

Twenty-three years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-three years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-three years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions. I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour newscycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-three years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for five presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and five houses and six jobs and three cities and one engagement as he grows into a successful, confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves, and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you feel when you finally see images of Moammar Gadhafi’s bloodied, abused corpse feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Famous actress? Influential journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother just published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m pretty much in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and helped her decorate her baby’s room and given her a prominent link on my blogroll and kept her on my speed dial from the moment I got my first cell phone.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-three years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular. It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Nobody thought it would be one of the kids

2011-11-03T09:58:00.002-05:00

Nobody probably thought the Boat Crew would last this long, actually.

When four young couples from the same Cedar Rapids Lutheran church rented a houseboat and sailed up and down the Mississippi River for a long weekend in the summer of 1971, nobody probably even thought it was more than a one-time vacation.

But the couples invited more couples and did it again the next summer, and the next. Over time, a few couples came and went, but the tradition lived on summer after summer. Eventually a core group of seven couples emerged, and the Boat Crew was established … and a vital extended family was born.

Unofficially (or officially, depending on your personal opinion) the group’s name was the Mississippi River Marching and Drinking Society. But “Boat Crew” was easier to say. And less complicated to explain to the couples’ children, who were all about the age of the Boat Crew tradition itself.

As lives and careers evolved, many of the couples moved away … but everyone came back summer after summer for what had become an annual gathering of Boat Crew family with bonds as strong as any biological family.

And that family bond extended beyond the relationship between the seven couples; their children often spent the Boat Crew weekends together in one couple’s house, under the probably exhausted watch of two or three weekend-long babysitters.

Naturally, the kids developed a family bond as strong as their parents’. They were unofficial siblings in an extended family network, and they felt confident in the parental love they received from every member of the Boat Crew.

As the summers passed, the Boat Crew bond continued to grow and strengthen, especially over a developing collection of in-jokes, funny stories and traditions that became almost sacred. The most prominent tradition was Joy. It started when one couple brought a large white flag emblazoned with the word Joy in bright colors and displayed it on the ship’s mast. The flag appeared every summer, and eventually it inspired the regular exchanging of Joy-festooned knickknacks, shirts, Christmas ornaments (all collectively over the years described as "Joy shit") and even one summer little bottles of Joy dishwashing soap.

Music – an integral part of the Lutheran church where they all met – was just as important to the Boat Crew. The group contained many talented singers, and as they gathered under the stars with a guitar and a couple bottles of wine each summer, they sang hymns and folk songs and show tunes and whatever else they could think of. Their unofficial anthem was “Beautiful Savior,” which they sang together – in full, glorious harmony – on every gathering.

As the kids grew over the next four decades, the Boat Crew also started convening off-season for confirmations and graduations and weddings and grandchildren and the occasional family tragedy … and the inevitable deaths of the Boat Crew couples’ elderly parents.

And through it all, the Boat Crew became a bit of a statistical anomaly: seven couples who lived into their 50s and 60s and 70s … and stayed friends … and stayed married … and stayed alive.

As they started to retire from their jobs and prioritize grandparent obligations over Boat Crew gatherings, the group wasn’t always able to find a summer weekend that all seven couples could attend. And the “boat” part of Boat Crew became a bit of an anachronism; the summer reunions were happening now in Bed and Breakfasts overlooking the Mississippi instead of boats on the Mississippi.

And as they started to navigate the medical infirmities and physical indignities that come with age, the Boat Crew members started to contemplate their own mortality. Never ones to face life with fear or even reverence, they were realistic that eventually they were going to start dying … and they were not above having betting pools over who would go first.

But it never occurred to anyone that the first to die might not be one of the adults.

Robbie (who was now calling himself Robert but I’d known him since we were toddlers and I could never think of him as anyone but “Robbie”) was 42, pretty much right in the middle of the range of ages of the Boat Crew kids. He started getting sick two months ago, but he didn’t think it was much to worry about: just some lower back pain, fatigue and abdominal discomfort. But then the guy behind the deli counter where he went every day told him he looked yellow. And he became constipated. And on a trip home to see his parents in Iowa, he decided to see a doctor.

And that’s where he found out.

Colon cancer.

Stage 4.

Colon cancer patients at stage 4 have an 8-15% chance of being alive five years after diagnosis. And Robbie, forever the optimist, dove right into surgery and chemotherapy while his parents took care of him in their home.

But it quickly became obvious that he was losing the battle. And as he eventually slipped into a coma, his parents – buoyed by the love and calls and texts and emails of Boat Crew members across the country – kept a vigil by his bed.

And six weeks after his diagnosis – six weeks after driving himself seven hours from Chicago to his parents’ house, five weeks after walking into the doctor’s office with what he thought were just stomach pains, three weeks after cheering on friends in the Chicago Marathon via Facebook – Robbie drew his last breath, sending waves of shock and devastation throughout his extended Boat Crew family.

Robbie’s father had died of cancer 40 years ago, before the Boat Crew had been officially established. His mother and the man who eventually became her next husband had been regular Boat Crew members from nearly the beginning.

While she was still single, though, she and Robbie had taken vacations with our family a number of times, often to Adventureland amusement park in Des Moines and once on a Bicentennial road trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell and Washington, D.C., to see pretty much everything else associated with America’s birthplace.

Robbie and I went to different high schools and colleges, but we eventually both found our ways to Chicago. We kept seeing each other at Boat Crew gatherings, but we’d slowly drifted apart … as had many of the Boat Crew kids as we scattered about the country and built our own families.

Robbie’s parents and mine, of course, had stayed fast Boat Crew friends. And when Robbie was facing the first weeks of his cancer treatments, my parents made a trip to Des Moines to provide support.

When Robbie died last week, I was more choked up than I’d expected. We hadn’t seen each other in probably five years. And I knew that he was no longer suffering through an excruciating illness. But his death – especially as a Boat Crew kid and not an adult – was a shock to all of us … and no doubt an indescribable devastation to his parents. And it was probably the first of many more as my peers and I start to move through our 40s and beyond.

But for the first time in many years, the entire Boat Crew – along with a handful of Boat Crew kids – dropped everything in their lives and appeared at the funeral. Forever part of the family, we walked in with Robbie’s parents and biological family members and were seated right behind them. And when the congregation sang “Beautiful Savior,” the Boat Crew’s beautiful harmonies rose above the music as if to lift Robbie to whatever awaited him in the afterlife and remind him of the loving extended family he’d been a part of on earth.

His parents asked me to be one of his pall bearers, which I accepted as an honor. Escorting a fallen comrade to his grave is overwhelming – especially when we’re both so young – but I felt giving him a solemn, respectful final journey was the best gift I could give him. He was family, after all.

September

2011-09-26T17:45:00.001-05:00

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb.

His September (2009) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Healthcare encapsulated

2011-09-12T15:42:00.001-05:00

She was petite, in blue dress pants and a conservative blouse with a small gym bag over her shoulder. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed her when I arrived at the pharmacy counter and stood the customary respectful distance behind her, except her conversation with the pharmacist was taking a long time. A really long time.

I tried not to listen, but her voice was taking on a panicked tone, and the more she talked, the more high-pitched and quavery – and loud – she got.

“I’ll have the money in my account on Friday when I get paid,” she told the pharmacist. “But I ran out of my medication yesterday.” She choked back whatever was welling up in her throat.

The pharmacist apologized in a tone so low I couldn’t hear what she was saying, even though she was facing me. I could tell she was deeply troubled by having to withhold medication from a patient. But I assume there are strict laws against dispensing prescriptions on store credit.

The pharmacist had already rung up a few extra items for the woman, and they were in a bag on the counter. The woman opened the bag and looked at the other things she’d intended to buy with her medication.

“How much would the total be if I didn’t buy this?” she asked as she handed back a bottle of Sprite Zero and a package of cookies. The tiny sparkle of hope in her voice belied what she, the pharmacist and probably everyone else in earshot already knew: a few dollars wouldn’t make a difference.

“That brings it down to $735,” the pharmacist said.

The woman’s shoulders slumped. She handed the pharmacist two more products from the bag as I busied myself examining the display of sharps containers and daily pill organizers on the wall next to me.

“$723.”

The bag was empty. And even though her back was to me, I could see the woman was trying to survive this conversation with every ounce of dignity she could muster.

There was a long, heavy pause. Then something occurred to her.

“Can I just pay for a few day’s worth? Even one day’s worth?” The hope in her voice made me silently root for a good answer from the pharmacist as I discovered you can even buy pill organizers that lock so they won’t open in your purse.

The pharmacist took a breath so deep I could hear it from my position six feet away with my head turned away from her.

“I’m sorry. That’s not how the prescription was written.”

I hadn’t realized the woman had been holding her bagged prescriptions in her hands during the entire conversation. She could have grabbed them and run, which is obviously a terrible decision. But it seemed like a viable option even to me as we all stood there.

She clutched the bag to her chest for a moment – holding whatever drugs she obviously needed as close to her body as they were going to get today – and then slowly set them on the counter and pushed them back to the pharmacist.

“I’ll be back on Friday,” she said in a resigned voice. “My paycheck usually gets deposited in my account first thing in the morning, so I’ll be here before work. You open at 7, right?”

I stepped way back and started examining the boxes of alcohol wipes that the doctor uses on your skin before giving you an injection. My attempt to give her some space worked, at least for me; I didn’t see her walk away.

But when I walked up to the pharmacist, who looked slightly ashen, I saw the woman’s empty drugstore bag on the counter. And her Sprite Zero, her cookies and her two boxes of vitamins still sitting next to the register.

Lists of things

2011-07-15T16:23:00.001-05:00

Things I found while packing for an office move
1. A box of teabags that expired before I started working here five years ago.
2. Enough dust to knit a cowl-knit sweater.
3. My diploma from corporate-non-sexual-harassment training class. Which obviously didn’t take because I totally think you have a great rack.

Things I have done so far this summer
1. Spent a long weekend with six buddies on a private estate in upstate New York.
2. Started taking tap classes with a woman I picked up on an airplane.
3. Danced mostly naked on a Big Boy float (complete with insanely hot muscleboys in matching trunks, a corporate sponsorship, a decorating theme and an on-board deejay) in the Chicago pride parade.

Things that are apparently unavoidable
1. My trainer will tell me “watch your head” when I lean back on the decline bench press.
2. I will get more tattoos. And I’ll stop telling myself I can only get one for each marathon I finish.
3. The sink on the right in our office bathroom will always be out of hand soap.

Things that are hard to process
1. My little sister is now 40.
2. Michele Bachmann has a following.
3. People are finding value in Google+.

Things I have recently given up
1. Running marathons. All running, actually.
2. Writing blog posts, apparently. Except about once every few months.
3. All soda. But I fell off the wagon (or got back on, however the expression goes) within a month.

Things I put in my mouth every morning
1. Three medications for my growing litany of old-man maladies.
2. Three eggs scrambled with cheese and wheat toast with no-cholesterol butter and jelly.
3. My Jack3d pre-workout energy shake.

Things about me that are just not true
1. I was the first black Miss America.
2. I killed a man with my bare hands because he kept pronouncing it “fustrated.”
3. I am responsible for the destruction of marriage in the United States.

What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

2011-06-23T08:46:00.001-05:00

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes, when entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what the Christian hate industry works so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on our blogs … and even on national television.

We’re proud because we’re slowly achieving marriage equality state by state. And even though the change is happening at a glacial pace, we’re still making it happen.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our increasingly venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world is starting to notice and respect us and emulate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because this weekend we’ll celebrate with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, attitude queens and you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, and together we can see through the “pride” in our parade and enjoy the underlying Pride in our parade.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so much to be proud of.

Key words

2011-04-26T14:24:00.002-05:00

Fourty-Three
I crossed back into the prime numbers last week. And since 43 is kind of a wishy-washy number that has neither the young sexiness of 42 nor the august milestoniness of 45, I went home to Iowa to age quietly with my family. We celebrated by doing fun uncle things, hanging out accomplishing nothing, and eating our weight in cake and ice cream and homemade pie and pizza. For a non-remarkable-age birthday, it was remarkably fabulous.

Cancerous Moles
My birthday always means it’s time to go on my annual mole patrol at my friendly neighborhood dermatologist. Because I’m a moley person. And it just seems prudent to make sure my moles aren’t trying to kill me. Because then where would they go to grow and raise families and contribute to society? You can’t thrive on a dead body. Unless you’re a maggot. Or Maggie Gallagher. Anyway! I had a couple suspicious moles removed and biopsied in 2005, but I’ve managed to escape the dreaded mole knife since then. Until now. Because in two weeks I get to have two more moles hacked out of my dermis. But at least this time they’re not in the middle of my back (which makes replacing bandages all but impossible ); they’re almost twin moles on the lower, way-more-reachable parts of each thigh. A quick read of my blog post from 2005 reminds me that I wasn’t allowed to work out for two weeks after the last biopsies as the stitches healed. A quick check of my vanity calls bullshit on that for 2011.

Vacation Days
I have officially used up my entire allotment for the year. Well, technically not yet; since I’m not training for a marathon this summer and therefore not beholden to a draconian weekend running schedule, I’ve booked fabulous getaways from now until Labor Day, all through the weekends when I’d normally be getting up at 4:00 to pound out anywhere from 6 to 22 miles. So watch out, Rehoboth, D.C., Saugutuck, New York, Provincetown and Cedar Rapids! I’m coming to visit you this summer!

Twenty-Five
One of my vacation trips will be to my hometown for my 25th high school reunion. There’s even a Facebook page where people post nostalgia-related comments about favorite bands and local hangouts and fashion faux pas from the mid-1980s. I’m still weirdly fascinated by the fact that this group of people I knew before the Internet existed now all have email addresses and Facebook accounts. Not to mention grown children and third marriages.

Forgetfulness
I had about four more vocabulary-word-related topics I wanted to cover here as I was formulating this blog post in my head, but once I sat down to actually write it, I can’t remember what they were.

Pill Organizer
I’m now on so many old-man medications and supplements I had to break down and buy an old-man pill organizer. Here’s a picture of it open to the pills I took on my birthday last week:
Fun game for pharmacology aficionados: Guess what’s wrong with me based on the pills you see! Decoy alert: One of pills I take every morning is plain old vitamin D.

Things that Grow

2011-04-14T05:37:00.000-05:00

$100: What is this hematoma on my arm?
Thanks to some inexpert poking by a clumsy phlebotomist (which should totally be the prequel to The Drowsy Chaperone), I have a big ugly bruise in the crook of my arm. And the damn thing keeps growing and darkening, albeit at the speed of a Palin in a spelling bee. So I’m not worried that I’m slowly dying of an internal hemorrhage.

$200: What is my belt?
Never buy a $9.99 belt from H&M. Unless you’re a contestant on The Biggest Loser and you want belt-related proof of dramatic weight loss. Because my ultra-cool belt that fit perfectly three months ago now reaches past my left hip bone as it wraps around my waist. And it makes me look like I’m playing dress-up from my daddy’s closet. My daddy’s ultra-cool-belt-containing closet, but my daddy’s closet nonetheless.

$300: What is my faith in humanity?
There is a lot to make people think humanity has hit an all-time low. To wit: Newt Gingrich. But then every morning I encounter a little glimmer of hope that could make him go away. If we were lucky. There’s an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair who parks on the same corner in the Loop every morning, right under the El tracks. Nearly everyone who walks by says hi or brings him something or drops a coin in his cup, all of which could completely counteract the Gingrich Effect. Except it doesn’t. But there’s another group of people who wave at this gentleman too. And their collective gesture alone elevates my opinion of all of humanity (except, of course, Newt). They’re the El conductors who actually slow down their trains, lean out their windows from two stories up, toot their horns and wave at the old guy. I’ve never seen it not happen as a train goes by. And I’ve always seen the gentleman sit up straighter in his wheelchair when it does, as if he’s saying Do you see that? I have the power to make the trains slow down. I’m somebody!

$400: What are my quads?
After the marathon in November, my trainer ratcheted up the brutality of our workouts about a thousandfold. And since I’m not doing any cardio, the damn workouts are working! I crossed the finish line somewhere around 190 lbs, which is an artificially low post-run weight from my normal 195ish lbs. But now, five months and no miles later, I’m tipping the scales at 218 lbs, which is 13 lbs heavier than I’ve ever been! Woot! A lot of the growth seems to be in my upper thighs and my brand-new, never-before-existed butt, which (un)fortunately means most of my jeans don’t fit anymore. And it’s not like they don’t fit just a little; they totally won’t go over my upper-leg area. It’s becoming an expensive problem to have, but it’s the welcome price of gay male vanity. Plus it totally proves my cheap $9.99 H&M belt is stretching farther than the truth as spoken by Michele Bachmann.

$500: What are my feet?
Back when I was just running 5K races, I bought running shoes in cool colors … and in my always-been-this-way-since-college 10.5 street-shoe size. Which always felt pinchy, but what did I know about how running shoes should fit? Before my first marathon, though, I got fitted for running shoes by the friendly experts at Fleet Feet (true motto: Never buy running shoes based on color) and got bumped up to a 11.5 wide shoe, since your feet tend to spread out as you pound out the miles and they need someplace to go. Now, a full eight years after that first fitting, I can barely squeeze my dogs into my regular size-10.5 street shoes. In fact, the 11.5s don’t fit so well either. My feet have actually grown to a size 12 in the last few years. Which means one thing (or maybe two, but this is a family blog): I get to buy all new shoes!

It's our time. Permanently ink it in.

2011-04-03T08:52:00.001-05:00

I ran my seventh (and most likely last, but never say never) marathon in November, which by my rules gave me permission to get a seventh tattoo. I'd narrowed down what I wanted to about ten different tattoo designs on five different body parts. But a great lack of focus can lead to great abundance of regret in the tattoo department. So I waited until one idea emerged in my mind as the coolest and most mandatory of all possible ideas. Because tattoos are like ice cream flavors; eventually you just know what you want. Or something like that.

Anyway!

Many of the ideas involved quotes from the vast Stephen Sondheim canon. I toyed with "Toward the verticals of trees" climbing up the side of my torso and "It's our time. Breathe it in." wrapping around my forearm. I'd even played with fonts and made a few templates of those ideas to tape to my body and see what I thought of them.

But I love tattoos that peek out from shirts or waistbands. And I've always thought tats on the insides of a biceps (fun fact! biceps is both singular and plural!) are hot. And it occurred to me late this week that there's a better, shorter, more impactful quote from "Our Time." And it would look awesome in a swirly, brambly, vaguely triangular shape on the inside of my biceps, where it would also have the bonus feature of peeking out from a short sleeve.

And 48 hours after the idea occurred to me, it was etched in ink on my person. And I love it:

Of course, just like with ice cream flavors, you can't stop at just one. I still needed to get my seventh dot on my bonus eighth tattoo (the master tattoo that acts as a table of contents for all my other tattoos, cataloguing them via an ingenious system of dots). Weirdly, there was already a mole kind of where the last dot was supposed to go. So this dot looks a little big. It also looks like it sits a little high, but since I can't really have it lowered I choose to think that it represents all the damn hills I had to climb in the New York City Marathon last fall. In any case, with this tattoo, my collection is complete:

And by "my collection is complete" I of course mean "I've just whetted my appetite for more tattoos." But don't tell my mom.

ChicagoRound: Iroquois Theatre

2011-03-31T15:58:00.002-05:00

Chicago emerged from its devastating Great Fire on October 10, 1871, after a two-day conflagration that destroyed 17,500 buildings over four square miles, left 90,000 of the city’s 300,000 inhabitants homeless and killed an impossible-to-quantify-accurately 200–300 people.

And the city immediately began rebuilding.

Thirty-two years and two months later, after rising both literally and proverbially from its ashes to reclaim its place as one of America’s most populous and vital cities, Chicago was devastated by another fire … this time in the month-old, state-of-the-art, “fireproof” Iroquois Theatre.

When it opened on November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre was hailed as an architectural masterpiece and a jewel in the crown of Chicago’s theater scene. Designed in the highly ornate French baroque style, it featured grand staircases, gilded ornamentation, lush velvet curtains and a 6,300-square-foot domed auditorium with a dropped stage to improve the sightlines from every seat in the house. And though it was billed confidently as “absolutely fireproof,” the Iroquois contained almost no fire-safety features. No fire alarm. No backstage telephone. No labeled fire exits (most exits were hidden behind velvet curtains anyway). Even its supposedly fireproof asbestos curtain was made of a highly flammable wood pulp. (Less than ten years later, the “unsinkable” Titanic would succumb to a similarly overconfident hubris.)

The theater’s opening production was a touring musical pastiche called Mr. Bluebeard, which featured a 400-person cast and starred popular Vaudeville comedian Eddie Foy. It had enjoyed critical and popular success for over a month when its December 30 audience filed in on a freezing Wednesday afternoon during the break between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Since the theater’s opening had been delayed repeatedly, its owners were desperate to make up for lost revenue, so they habitually oversold the house, seating extra patrons up and down the aisles in the orchestra and balconies.

The fire started at the top of Act II when an overhead light shorted and sent sparks leaping to a nearby curtain. As the fire spread through the flylines and burning bits of scenery rained down on the stage, the actors continued soldiering through their performance, confident in their understanding that the theater was fireproof. A handful of people in the audience got nervous enough to leave, but many chose to stay in their seats (or aisles) until it became obvious the fire was not going to be contained.

And then panic set in.

The ensuing stampede up overcrowded aisles through an unfamiliar theater with hidden exits left trampled bodies everywhere. And since most of the Iroquois exit doors opened inward, the bodies piled up in front of the doors, leaving no hope of escape.

The actors, too, created their own stampede to find exits. And when they finally pried open the giant freight door on the north end of the stage, the arctic winter blast that blew into the building combined with the fiery gases above the stage to create a superheated fireball that exploded into the auditorium and incinerated everything in its path, including hundreds of people still in their seats.

Many of the people who did manage to get out of the building found themselves trapped high in the air on unfinished fire escapes. As these fire escapes got more and more crowded, people begin to fall (or jump) to their deaths in the alley below. By the time the fire was over, bodies were piled 10 deep in what is still called to this day Death Alley.

Though it was contained to one building and it burned less than an hour, the fire killed over 600 people (twice the number killed in the two-day Great Fire of 1871), shut down theaters around the world out of fire-safety concerns (leaving thousands of actors and theater employees unemployed), generated worldwide outpourings of sympathy, exposed yet another Chicago corruption scandal in the years of ensuing lawsuits, and ultimately brought about great changes in the way we respond to massive disasters and catalogue and identify disaster victims. It even inspired an Indianapolis hardware salesman named Carl Prinzler, who randomly had to miss the deadly performance, to invent what he called the Self Releasing Fire Exit Bolt once he learned that a disproportionate number of victims had died in desperate piles in front of the inward-opening exit doors with confusing European-style bascule locks. Known today as the “panic bar,” his invention—along with outward-opening exit doors—are perhaps the biggest public-safety legacy of the Iroquois disaster.

Today, the stunning Asian-baroque Oriental Theatre sits pretty much on the exact footprint of the Iroquois Theatre. A thriving part of the Broadway in Chicago theater collective, it features touring productions that play year-round to thousands upon thousands of theater patrons who largely have no idea that they’re sitting on a historic graveyard of sorts. To my knowledge there isn’t even a memorial on the property commemorating the fire.

There is a memorial about three blocks away, in Chicago’s classical-revival City Hall building. Designed by Chicago sculptor Laredo Taft, the bas-relief plaque currently sits above a glass column that houses a revolving door, so it’s both hard to see up close and hard to photograph, especially with an iPhone.

Thankfully, it’s accompanied by an eye-level plaque that explains it context and memorializes the 600 lives lost on December 30, 1903, in one of the worst theater disasters in history.

Litany of complaints

2011-03-15T20:55:00.001-05:00

Jake never updates his blog
Jake is a lazy bitch. But writing endlessly clever, upbeat blog posts is exhausting. Fortunately, Jake has a couple complaints he’d like to air. And those things are always more fun to write about. So now he has a blog post to post!

For instance!

Bees are liars
My spring allergies have escalated in the last few years to be spring Sinus Headache Smackdowns™! I can usually manage (but never eliminate) the excruciating sinus pain and pressure through the magic of pharmaceuticals, but I’ve always been on the lookout for something more permanent … or at least more effective. A buddy of mine who’s all holistic and shit recommended last year that I buy a jar of locally grown organic honey and eat a tablespoon of it every day for a month. His theory was that I’d ingest minuscule particles of the local allergens that inflate my head like a helium-filled otter every spring and slowly build up my own natural immunity to them. So I’ve been eating a tablespoon of the stuff every day since February 1. First impression: Organic honey is hyper-sweet. Second impression: Organic honey is gross. Third impression: Organic honey doesn’t work. I just survived an epic Sinus Headache Smackdown™! that lasted more than a week, and all I have to show for it is elevated blood sugar from eating hyper-sweet honey with a damn spoon every day for over a month. On the plus side, I got my annual Sinus Headache Smackdown™! in March instead of May, so spring is probably on its way early. Woot!

Stress fractures never really leave you
I have one in each foot. They usually re-snap (or whatever the medical term is) late in every marathon season. And they let me know they’ve re-snapped via their distinctive pattern of pain across the tops of my feet. I can’t recall whether it was when I was kicking Donald “Gays don’t deserve equal rights” Trump in the face or just wearing some stiff new shoes, but I somehow managed to make that distinctive pattern of pain appear across the top of my right foot again last week. But if it was from kicking The Donald, it was totally worth it. Fucker.

Newt Gingrich is a whore
Nobody needs a lecture on the "sanctity" of marriage from a mulitply divorced adulterer, Newt.

The New Yorkers won
Like most subscribers, I let myself get a little behind on reading my New Yorker magazines. So I had a little pile here and a little pile there, all just waiting for me to re-snap a stress fracture and use my down time to sit and read and read and read until I was all caught up. But then I noticed my little piles filled two drawers in my bureau and completely hid everything on the side table by the bedroom TV. And when I finally decided they’d reached critical never-gonna-get-read mass over the weekend and I assembled them in one single pile, I discovered I had more than a yard of unread New Yorkers mocking me from every nook and cranny in our house. But no more! Two trips to the recycling bin later, I now have stronger magazine-schlepping arms and way more room in the house for other trinkets. Like my unread Newsweeks.

10 days with glasses

2011-02-22T17:39:00.002-06:00

Zero days with headaches! Woo-hoo!

So I survived my first week back on the four-eyes stolen-lunch-money bus, and while getting my eyes used to seeing the world through what seemed like dirty water for a few days took some getting used to, I didn’t go home from work once with a headache last week. Which is five fewer headaches than I’ve brought home in weeks past.

And since my new goggles are only for reading and computer stuff—which happens primarily at work, where I don’t think I have ever had blog-worthy party pictures taken—I tried to take a self-portrait to show you-all what I look like in rimless glasses.

Unfortunately, ambient bathroom lighting + low-quality iPhone photo technology = barely-there rimless glasses in this otherwise award-worthy self-portrait:
See that shower curtain in the background? I hung it in early December when we finished the bathroom renovation. I’ve washed and dried it three times since then. So why does it still stubbornly hold onto the fold marks from its days in its store packaging?

Speaking of cheap shit, remember the little face-clinging disposable sunglasses I got when my eyes were dilated? (You should, because the pic of me sporting them has been the only thing on my blog for the last 15 days.)

They were too cute to throw away and too weird to actually wear in public. Fortunately, we have a prisoner in our home we’re not above embarrassing with cheap costume pieces. The poor guy has been forced to wear Santa hats all through Christmas season every year … and now he’s stuck wearing cheesy cheap (like Velveeta!) sunglasses until we get bored and release him from his misery. Or until the cheap glasses pop off and roll across the floor under the couch:

Odds and ends. But mostly odds.

2011-02-07T18:25:00.004-06:00

It’s really hard being absolutist about stuff. Well, it’s hard most of the time. For example, I think Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck serve one purpose: giving low-information citizens the emotional permission they’re looking for to stay uneducated, hostile and solipsistic. I loathe Sarah and Glenn and I can barely be civil to their followers who keep giving them a platform to spread their pseudo-intellectual cancer. And I see no gray areas in this matter. Unfortunately, as an absolutist, I see no gray areas in lots of places. For instance! My abandonment of Coke Zero. I enjoyed my last Coke Zero on January 2 (I prefer to start my self-deprivations on Mondays) and while I want to drink another Coke Zero more than I want to choke Sarah Palin with the empty cup, cheating on my resolution is tantamount to quitting it altogether. So I can’t allow myself even a tiny little sip in my withdrawal process.

I am full of gray areas regarding this blog. I clearly don’t write in it much anymore, even though deep down I really want to. But I’ve just grown lazy and complacent about it. And as an absolutist I should just abandon it altogether. But then I’ll be minding my own business at a street fair or a diner or—as was the case this weekend—a lesbian birthday and suddenly a stranger will pop up and start saying nice things to me about my writing and my weird sense of humor and how he or she really, really, really looks forward to my posts and then I think SHIT. Now I have to go write in it again. And I’ll write a few more posts and then I’ll get lazy and then I’ll think I should just shut it down and then another pesky fan will pop up and peskily say nice things about my blog and the cycle peskily starts over. Darn you, pesky fans! Darn you like a sock!

My socks are in a permanent state of wetness. Because it’s snowier here than a girl who lives with seven tiny men in the woods. And I seem to have a highly advanced sense of puddle-dar. Because I keep stepping in calf-deep piles of snow and slush and wetness and then spending the day in wet socks. And the snow here is so deep and so copious that there’s no chance it will be gone any time soon. So I’m now carrying extra socks in my gym bag everywhere I go. And while we’re on the topic of the blizzard, I quickly grew tired last week of predictable little neologisms like snowpocalypse and snowmageddon and snOMG. So I wielded my considerable blogging and Facebooking influence to get everyone to start calling the blizzard Snownadu—which is both an homage to my favorite song ever plus a nod to the fabulous disco-ball effect you get when you cover a city in almost two feet of snow. But Snownadu never took off. Which is a total snowdgedy.

The snow is extra sun-glinty when your eyes are dilated. I went to the eye doctor on Saturday for the first time in probably five years. And I stumbled out an hour later with enormous pupils and an $855 bill for a checkup and ultra-expensive new glasses (because they looked better than the cheap ones and if I’m gonna start wearing glasses post-LASIK I want to look totally badass, or at least slightly handsome). But! Enormous pupils are not the ideal accessory for a sunny day in a city blanketed by a Snownadu (see how easy that is?). So I was forced to wear temporary roll-up sunglasses (because I forgot to pack real sunglasses even though I knew I’d be dilated) in my cab ride (because I didn’t think I should drive—especially in two feet of snow—with dilated pupils) home. Unfortunately, I wasn’t too proud to take a self-portrait. Or too smart to post it on my blog:

Shoes before cruise!

2011-01-26T17:23:00.006-06:00

The domestic partner and I decided to take this year off from gay cruises … so of course 2011 ends up being Atlantis’ 20th anniversary of cruising and of course it books the mega-hella-massive Allure of the Seas for its epic 20th anniversary cruise and of course all our friends in the known universe will be frolicking beSpeedoed on that ship next month without us.

But! Gay cruises are expensive once you factor in airfare and hotels and port adventures and glitter. We figure we’ve spent up to $3,000 each for every cruise we’ve been on – and we don’t even drink alcohol or have to carry bail money for drug busts.

So while our friends booked the best balcony rooms and stopped eating carbs and invested in new Speedo wardrobes, we stuck to our financial guns. And we’ll be landbound next weekend when they all set sail into the warm Caribbean.

Plus we’ll also be $3,000 richer than everyone else.

And there’s only one way to celebrate saving $3,000 on a cruise: spending $400 on clothes!

To assuage my disappointment in not cruising this year, I gave myself a ~~$200~~ ~~$300~~ $400 allowance to go hunting for some new shirts, pants and shoes that were 1) appropriate for the casual-funky-slightly-dressy sartorial look I’ve imposed on myself for work, 2) comfortable to wear and easy to wash, and 3) big enough to accommodate my slowly (very slowly) growing physique.

And thanks to the awesome deals at Filene’s Basement and Nordstrom Rack—not to mention the attitude and/or incompetence of the Puma Store employees that alienated me, the almighty consumer, into not spending $260 on their full-priced stuff—I eventually stumbled home with two pair of shoes, two pair of pants and ten (twelve? fifteen? I honestly lost count) shirts.

As usual, I wanted dressy gym shoes I could wear to the gym without looking too dressy and to work without looking too gymmy. And I found these fabulous Pumas (but not in the attitude-and/or-incompetence-riddled Puma Store) marked down to $49 from $80:

My years of brutal personal-trainer workouts and mountains of chicken breasts and gallons of protein shakes are slowly (very slowly) paying off, because I’m slowly (very slowly) growing in all the places I’d hoped I’d grow. And a lot of my short-sleeve shirts that looked merely questionable for work two years ago now look downright desperate the way the shoulder seams ride up and the sleeves barely cover my arms. So I made a point to buy (still fitted) shirts in sizes bigger than you typically find in the American Girl Store.

But! This week when I was searching online for synonyms for the word “plus” (for a client’s product-naming brainstorm! honest!), thesaurus.com made some rude assumptions about my motives when it placed its paid advertisements on the results page:
Dear thesaurus.com: Suddenly wearing bigger shirts does not make me a big girl. I’ll thank you for keeping your interpretations of my shopping and/or word-searching habits to yourself.

While I was updating my look (and abandoning Atlantis) I also decided that the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange Atlantis gym bag I’ve carried around with me every day for the last four-plus years was looking kind of … um … tacky.

I leave the house at 6:00 every morning and carry my whole day in that bag—including clothes, dopp kit, protein shakes, water, pain relievers, healthful lunch, healthful snacks and reading material for the bus—so it’s a permanent part of my person. And formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange doesn’t really match my classy, not-frat-house-dwelling personality. I wanted to find a plain black bag with no logos on it, but that’s like finding an article of the Constitution Michele Bachmann has actually read. So I settled for the bag on the right, which is significantly classier and more not-frat-house-dwelling than the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange thing on the left, which found a new home in the garbage can moments after posing for this picture:

So now I have two (three? I honestly lost count) weeks of cool new clothes to wear and a new bag to carry and two new pair of shoes to choose from—which means I'll embark on an exciting new sartorial adventure every morning for at least two weeks—so who needs a stupid cruise with stupid hot men in stupid Speedos on a stupid mega-hella-massive ship with live performances by stupidly hot Cheyenne Jackson? Harumph.

I sang Happy Birthday to Dolly Parton! Twice!

2011-01-21T16:03:00.001-06:00

For realz! So I can finally cross that off my bucket list.

We went to the Chicago grand opening of 9 to 5: The Musical this week, and Dolly herself showed up, complete with a walk down a laughably short red carpet, given how close the Bank of America Theatre (née LaSalle Bank Theatre, née Shubert Theatre) is to the street and how elfin its vestibule and lobby are.

The fact that she was going to be at the show wasn’t widely publicized, so there wasn’t a massive, Dolly-worthy crowd waiting for her. Which meant one thing: more room for us to see her!

Unfortunately, that elfin vestibule gave her about 1.4 seconds to wave to the crowd on her right as she walked in … and by the time those 1.4 seconds were up she was so close to the lobby door that it looked like she wouldn’t even turn to face those of us on her left. So I panicked and took this picture of the back of her head:

Of course, the millisecond after I took the picture she turned and waved at us … as my iPhone struggled through its 17-minute process of thinking about the picture it just took. So the above picture is all I have to show Dolly and I were in the same room together … no doubt both thinking about how good I’d look in her red Best Little Whorehouse in Texas finale dress.

But! She was introduced to the audience before the show by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, who takes awkward speeches and ill-timed references to funerals to an all-time low. And when he mentioned it was her birthday, the whole audience spontaneously broke into a chorus of Happy Birthday. And since only gay men and women who can’t get dates go to musicals written by Dolly Parton, our Happy Birthday was in full harmony.

And after the show, the cast interrupted their bows to bring Dolly back up on stage, present her with a cake … and sing Happy Birthday with the audience again … this time with a full orchestra! And again with the harmony.

It was enough to drive you giddy. If you let it.

Things to celebrate

2011-01-15T10:50:00.006-06:00

1. Jury duty was a breeze on Monday

This was the third time I'd been called to jury duty in Maywood, Illinois, which is so far west it might as well be in Sarah Palin's ~~reading library~~ double-wide. But this time Maywood didn't look like the gang-warfare video game I recall it being. And sitting in the jury waiting room all day gave me a chance to catch up on some freelance writing. Even though I could not escape the bleatings of Let's Make a Deal and The Price is Right, which are both so stupid they make me want to kick puppies. And that "all day" two sentences ago is kind of a misnomer; all the cases that day settled out of court, so even though we potential jurors were denied the opportunity to send miscreants to the hoosegow, we all got sent home in just enough time for me to get my oil changed, run a bunch of other glamorous errands and start un-Christmasing the house. And I eventually got to use miscreants and hoosegow in my blog. Hoosegow!

2. Traffic court was everything I'd hoped for on Thursday

Aside from the fact that I had to go in the first place, I mean. I had (allegedly!) not seen a no-left-turn sign in a snowstorm way back on December 4, and the cop actually took my fucking license as though I were a third-offense drunk driver. I at least had the presence of mind to make him take my AAA card instead (fun fact: your motor club card usually works as bond when someone tries to take your license!) but I still had to go to court to get it back. I, being a lifelong hater of confrontation, was nervous as heck walking into court (so nervous, in fact, that I accidentally left my coat at the security check and had to run back to get it). But when I didn't see my license-taking cop in the courtroom (at least I didn't think I saw him; my guy was white and the three cops in court were a white guy who kind of looked like my vague memory of my cop and two black people, who I was able to eliminate as my cops through my otherwise keen observational skillz) I calmed down. Sure enough, the white cop was not my white cop, and since there were no witnesses against my (alleged!) traffic misdemeanor, all the charges were dropped and this (alleged!) miscreant didn't get sent to the hoosegow. Woot!

3. I had a good physical on Friday

The lab took eight vials of blood to monitor my hyperthyroidism and elevated prolactin and a host of other 42-year-old indignities, though. So I'm still kind of woozy in a vampire-in-the-daylight kind of way. But otherwise the doctor said I'm fabulous! (And healthy.)

4. I updated my blog template today

This new look -- which I don't like as much as the one I abandoned -- isn't really the reason I'm celebrating. But upgrading to a new Blogger template was the only way I could extricate myself from the clutches of the Echo commenting software I didn't want to use anymore ... even though it means I lost eight years' worth of comments in the process. Blogger promises me I can still access my old links, which I hope to incorporate into this layout in the near future. But in the mean time, the five of you who still read my blog can make comments again. Not that you've been doing a lot of that recently anyway. Ahem.

New Year's Resolutions

2011-01-11T19:00:00.007-06:00

Update my blog at least once every 21 days
Done.

Figure out how to convert my commenting to Blogger
Before Blogger offered a commenting feature, I used a free commenting app called HaloScan, which last year converted to a pay program called Echo. But I get about 5 comments per post, and now Blogger offers free built-in commenting capabilities … so it seems dumb to pay for the feature. Unfortunately, Echo offers NO help in shutting off its commenting app, which seems to have hijacked the DNA of my entire blog. So the five of you who want to comment on this post are just gonna have to hold tight until I can figure everything out. Since Echo has a lock on my commenting link but not on my credit card, you can comment all you want but I can't access your comments to approve them.

Write and mail my epic holiday letter
At this point I have a Word doc that lists all the months in order from 2010. So I’m almost done.

Gain at least two pounds a month in the gym
I started the year around 205, including bad holiday weight. I was 208 this morning, which seems to be good weight. Or at least I’ve-been-very-good-in-the-food-department weight. Then again, it could have been post-intense-workout water weight. But still. 208! Woot!

Outgrow some clothes
I mean in the vain-gymrat way. In December I reached the point where some of my narrow (not skinny—I’m not that delusional) jeans clung to my quads and calves and wouldn’t fall back down to cover my ankles when I stood up. So they’re currently at the bottom of the jeans pile. And my lats (which is vain-gymratspeak for the sides of my back) have gotten so wide (but never wide enough!) that I’ve had to do the douchebag cut (armholes down to the waist) on most of my workout shirts, which were already douchebaggy because I’d cut all the sleeves off.

Stop obsessing about getting bigger in the gym
Kidding!

Give up soda
I haven’t had a Coke Zero (my vice of choice) since January 2. I miss it worse than John McCain misses his integrity, but this attempt to quit comes with a built-in incentive: Drinking soda seems to have become a trigger for migraines and heartburn, and I haven’t had an episode of either since I quit filling myself with delightfully fizzy adventures in processed chemicals. Late last year they (the migraines and heartburn, not the delightfully fizzy chemicals) started kicking in at least twice a month, so I’ll jump on any bandwagon that looks like it could reverse that trend.

Buy some new ChapStick®
I've been reduced to digging out the last dregs from my current tube with my masculinely short fingernails. For the last month. It's probably time to pony up another couple bucks for a fresh tube.

Judge more people
I had jury duty yesterday, so I came this close to sitting in judgment over a whole world of miscreants. Unfortunately, every trial that day settled without going to court. So I was denied my right to pass judgment and send miscreants to the hoosegow. Though it did give me the opportunity to use miscreants and hoosegow in my blog.

Volunteer more
I was so impressed with the way the Center on Halsted GLBT community center went out of its way to help us when we filmed our It Gets Better Project video marathon there last October that I took its volunteer training class so I could give something back to the center in thanks. Unfortunately, all the volunteer opportunities available so far have been during my workday or have required degrees in law or social work ... or have specified that volunteers have legible handwriting. Seriously. And as a man with the handwriting of a drunken toddler, I assume I would be laughed out any note-writing events on behalf of any nonprofit organization with even Sarah Palin standards of capability. But! I’m on the Center on Halsted email list and I keep waiting for something to pop up that I can contribute to. In the mean time, I’ve gotten myself on the marketing committees for two big GLBT events in Chicago: Lambda Legal’s Freedom to Marry event in February and TPAN’s Chicago Takes Off in March. Watch this space for details about both events. They should appear every 21 days.

22 years ago today

2010-12-21T10:15:00.003-06:00

I'd finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We'd lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I'd finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I'd waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice–the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was nevertheless beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she'd gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d gone to visit her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and the extraordinary revival of Stephen Sondheim's extraordinary Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I'd come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam's murder, I've befriended her parents and friends. I've gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I've written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I've actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I've grieved and matured over the last 22 years, I've discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about epic tragedies like the 9/11 bombings ... but I'll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Kodak commercials.

Twenty-two years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-two years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-two years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions. I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour newscycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better, or at least easier.

Twenty-two years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for five presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and five houses and six jobs and three cities and one engagement as he grows into a successful, confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, though it remains impossible to forget.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Famous actress? Influential journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We'd met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted only seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the theme park that summer. Though we still email, I haven’t actually talked to Miriam's family in years. Would she and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m pretty much in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and helped her decorate her baby's room and given her a prominent link on my blogroll and kept her on my speed dial from the moment I got my first cell phone.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-two years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular. It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people's memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Litany of complaints

2010-12-09T13:26:00.003-06:00

There’s never enough time
Wow. 17 days since my last post. And yet it seems like just yesterday I was waxing rhapsodic in this very space about the life-affirming benefits of my digital toaster.

In that time I’ve celebrated Thanksgiving with my family in Iowa, seen Million Dollar Quartet, planned and canceled a holiday pie party that nobody could come to, written a freelance article about gay men and social media for Zeus magazine, worked an alarming number of 12-hour days, and just this week formally launched my period of boundless holiday cheer (or at the very least less-dour-than-I-am-the-other-11-months-of-the-year holiday cheer) with my annual pilgrimage to hear Chanticleer sing in the mighty Fourth Presbyterian Church on the Magnificent Mile.

But I didn’t get any blog posts written. Which is probably why my daily readership hovers in the tens. (Hi, everyone!)

People are morons
The first thing you have to do—the first thing—when you enter our office building—or almost any office building in the Loop—is tap your ID badge against an electronic reader to prove that you’re a … well, I’m not entirely sure what tapping your ID badge proves, but apparently it keeps the entire building safe from disgruntled ex-employees. And Senate Republicans.

This ID-badge-tapping-obligation is there every day. EVERY. DAY. It’s not randomly enforced as some once-a-month safety drill. And the electronic reader never moves to a different part of the building on some days. So there is no chance any reasonably functional building employee could rationally greet his or her morning tapping obligation as some sort of never-anticipated-in-a-million-years surprise.

And yet.

Every morning—every morning—some mouth-breathing cretin who’s more than likely just spent the last 30-plus minutes sitting on a train or a bus with the express purpose of coming to work in our ID-tapping-required building walks through the door, stumbles on the presence of the electronic reader, and only then commences searching through pockets and briefcases and purses to find his or her ID badge.

And guess where this mouth-breathing cretin stands to do his or her belabored searching? Right in front of the goddamned reader, that’s where. So the rest of us who possess more foresight than the average dead mosquito and who have our ID badges ready to tap the moment we walk through the building’s doors have to stand and wait while the mouth-breathing cretin proves to us beyond any hunch of a doubt that he or she needs to be trotted out to the sidewalk and shot in the head.

Go ahead. Ask anyone—at least anyone who’s reasonably functional—in our building if sidewalk head-shooting has never been contemplated in close vicinity to the electronic ID badge reader.

There are too many ruls
My nephew hand-lettered this sign years ago and taped it to his bedroom door after an unfortunate incident (which will not be described in any level of detail here to protect the reputation of an anonymous little girl) involving his younger sister peeing on his bedroom floor.

To what I assume will be his everlasting embarrassment, his mother—once she caught her breath after laughing like a deranged hyena … and presumably also after she cleaned the pee up from the floor—framed the sign and posted it in the powder room, where it shares space to this day with a framed (but not nearly as contextual) note hand-lettered by my niece, who had triumphantly catalogued the members of her family using her name, her brother’s name, “mom” and “bob,” which is not her dad’s name but we choose to think “bob” is more a product of her then lack of ability to distinguish between her b’s and her d’s, along with the totally unacceptable little-girl way she printed her a’s.

Or else she knows something we don’t.

Things that separate us from the animals

2010-11-23T16:52:00.009-06:00

Digital toasters. With the numbers in blue. Because blue goes well with our eyes:

Nice dishes. In neutral colors so as not to frighten the food. And a coordinated Barbra-themed mug to keep everything classy:

Bathroom magazine racks. So we don't trip over our bathroom reading like they do in prison:

Clever, relevant, thoughtful advertising. Exactly like this ad is not:
A model is supposed to do one of three things in an ad: Be someone you relate to, be someone you aspire to be, or be someone you want to get to know better. Ahem.

This chick is wearing semi-opaque pantyhose with a shorty-short romper. Who wears pantyhose with a romper? Who wears pantyhose? She's dressed too much like a slutty church secretary to be someone any thinking person can relate to. She's dressed too clownlike to be someone any self-respecting person could aspire to be. And unless you like your archy-backed porn starlets encased in tight nylon so you can't get to the good china, she's dressed too cluelessly to be someone any desperate person could want to get to know better.

And how exactly is she supposed to make me want to get an Android? Or even help me make the mental connection between her archy-backed pantyhoseness and the post-industrial aesthetic of all the rest of the Android advertising in the world?

With all the checks and balances my agency has in place to prevent bad ideas from seeing the light of day even for lowly billing inserts, how on earth did an agency with an obviously massive budget and a contract with a highly visible national brand get the corporate approval to stick this shitty stock photo into an enormous outdoor campaign? And why do I have to look at this stupid ad in every fucking bus stop in Chicago?

Advertising FAIL.

Many marathon musings!

2010-11-17T19:47:00.019-06:00

The New York City Marathon cost me around $2,000, which includes the entry fee, airfare, hotel, cabs, food, a commemorative shirt and three pair of shoes for training during the summer. Plus maybe one Broadway show. Which might have been La Bête. Which I actually didn’t like. But I was a little excited about finally running the New York City Marathon so I had a hard time focusing on things like theater the whole weekend. Add to that the $2,500 we just spent on the bathroom renovation. And the roughly $12,000 I spend a year on my addiction to working out with a personal trainer.

So my disposable income and I decided that the elfin photos I stole off the NYC Marathon website are just as good as the huge, high-resolution images I’d get if I forked over $99 plus the inevitable handling fees even though I’d be doing the downloading so handling fees my ass.

But!

I do have an actual photo to start my marathon photoblog. It features me and a dear family friend who flew in from Iowa to stay with her son and daughter-in-law in Brooklyn and cheer me on in the marathon. And also to take me out to dinner on Friday.

We ate at the up-to-the-minute trendy restaurant The Breslin in the hipster-cool lobby of the hipster-cool Ace Hotel. And our waitress, who was a little too perky to be plausibly human, took this lovely picture of us as we were busy digesting our warm olive-oily beer bread and lamburgers:

To welcome me to New York, The New Yorker also ran a commemorative cover that clearly shows me leading the pack of runners on my way to victory in the 2010 New York City Marathon:
(Again, since you read that I was the winner of the NYC Marathon here on my blog, there’s no need for you to waste time reading any of the official results. You’re welcome.)

So on to the marathon.

The NYC Marathon had a staggered start, and I don’t know how I got so lucky but I got the primo starting time. While other marathons send everyone over the start line at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning, I didn’t even have to be at the Staten Island Ferry to be shuttled to my starting gate until 8:00. So I got to have a leisurely shower and a big, hearty, unrushed breakfast on my way to the ferry. And with the whole country falling back that morning, I got even more sleep!

My marathon wave took off from Staten Island at 10:40 am, once the sun was up and the sky was clear and the beautiful brisk day was as warm as its 50º would ever get. We ran the first mile up the soaring Verrazano Bridge and the second mile down it. Which was exhilarating and beautiful, but two miles of hills right off the bat? Ouch.

Anyway, this is what we looked like from the sky:

And here we are in closeup:

And here we are spreading out as we leave Staten Island and enter Brooklyn. If I’m in this picture, I’m somewhere on your left in a white disposable coat and sunglasses that reflect reds and yellows in pictures:

Can you stand one more picture of runners on a bridge? Here’s what we looked like flooding our way into Brooklyn:
Notice the throng of runners on the ramp coming from under the bridge. Those poor souls had to run their first two miles on the lower deck of the bridge, which may have been less hilly but it was also certainly less glorious.

I don’t know shit about the boroughs of New York, but this picture looks like what I remember Brooklyn looking like as we ran our first 12 miles through it. So we’ll say it’s Brooklyn:
Brooklyn, aside from being open and roomy enough for lots of runners and packed with screaming fans (aside from the mile-long-stretch of funeral-like quiet where it ran through an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood), is also the only place I had to focus on finding people I knew in the crowd. My dinner companions from Friday were there to scream and cheer me on around mile 5, and it was a fabulous emotional boost to launch me into an even more fabulous emotional day.

The rest of the marathon is a blur of excitement, hills, screaming fans, hills, bridges, hills, brisk sunny weather, hills and the occasional hill. And aside from hills, the key word in that last sentence is blur. So I have no idea if these photos are in order. Except the first one, because I’m still wearing my disposable gloves, which I ditched around mile 6. Though I don’t remember walking in the first six miles, so this photo must be a hack Photoshop job designed to undermine my macho street cred:

The other hack Photoshop jobs on the marathon photo site include making me look fat with matronly legs:

And making me look fat with a rabid-dog face:

Thankfully, one photo actually makes me look kind of macho:

And after blurring my way through five boroughs (and right alongside the Citi corporate office building in Long Island City where I used to make endless business trips long before it occurred to me that I’d even ever want to run the NYC Marathon), huge always-curiously-uphill swaths of northern Manhattan, endless throngs of screaming fans, and three painful but beautiful final miles in Central Park (where Jared of Subway weight-loss fame actually passed me, surrounded by his retinue of hunky trainers), I finally crossed my last marathon finish line with my head held high and my freshly reactivated stress fractures in my feet screaming unflattering expletives at me:
See that woman in the black zip-up and white shirt in the bottom left corner? I met her on the Staten Island Ferry and chatted with her for a bit as we sailed our way (past the Statue of Liberty! which I gawked at like a tourist!) to the runners’ starting village. We parted ways when we docked but then randomly reconnected in one of the village warming tents. And as we walked to the starting line we decided at the last minute to do one final pre-emptive pee as we passed a bank of port-a-potties. Which made us quite literally the last two people to cross the starting line in the last heat of the marathon. And we ended up running pretty much the entire marathon together (and never needing to stop to pee). I, a veteran of six marathons, helped calm her apprehensions about running her first marathon, and she, a New York City native, told me all kinds of great stories about the boroughs and neighborhoods we ran through. She was an awesome running partner and a delightful addition to an already super-mega-fabulous-glorious day.

But.

The NYC Marathon was my best friend from the moment I received my “I’M IN!” welcome kit in the mail last summer all the way through the NYC packet pickup, the shuttle to the start line, every thoughtfully organized point along the marathon route, the finish line, and the delivery of our goodie bags and finisher medals:

But then suddenly the hospitality was over. I was forced to shuffle along with thousands of freezing, exhausted finishers on a death march past at least a mile of trucks lined up with our checked bags and then dumped out into a barricaded street with no place to sit down, no shuttles to transportation, no cabs and enough of a traffic clusterfuck that I ended up walking what I estimate to be at least three miles to my hotel. It was a disappointing way to end a fabulous experience, but it is really my only quibble about the entire day.

Except for the next day at the airport, where I saw a good hundred people in their marathon shirts—which is cool—and a good 10 people sporting their marathon medals—which is not. Maybe it’s the stoic Norwegian in me talking here, but wearing your medal the day after a marathon is as garish and desperate-looking as wearing your homecoming queen tiara to your 10-year reunion.

My medal was tucked quietly in my carry-on where nobody needed to see it. And as soon as I got home I hung it on my sturdy Gargoyle o’ Medals Plus a Few Disco Ball Necklaces … which holds court discreetly on the inside of my closet:

I may be done with marathons, but I’m already signed up for the Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon in Chicago next summer. And I kinda want to do the Disneyland Half Marathon in Anaheim next fall. But traveling for another race involves money, and I’m currently on a spending hiatus … just in time to navigate my personal budget through the upcoming holidays.

In any case, I finally got to run the New York City Marathon and it was every bit as awesome as I’d hoped it would be. And looking back at it through grainy, elfin pictures actually matches the blurry memories I have of running past cheering fans through neighborhoods I'll probably never traverse again. My marathon phase was a fabulous part of my life, but it's done and I'm more than happy now to enjoy it through my memories and my blog archives and my grainy elfin pictures. And my Gargoyle o' Medals.

The marathon photos are in!

2010-11-12T15:12:00.003-06:00

And as soon as I have a moment to download and comb through the high-res images from the official NYC Marathon photography site, I'll post some (flattering) pictures that are bigger than the Barbie® shoe above. Stay tuned!

I totally won the marathon!

2010-11-08T09:11:00.007-06:00

They gave me a medal and everything to prove it:

So there's no need for you to read the finish times in the papers. Because you got your information here.

Actually, the marathon was brutal and cold and hilly (seriously, New York: What's with the hills?) but the spectators were an almost endless sea of screaming encouragement and the views across the bridges were breathtaking and I totally choked up when we finally entered the home stretch in Central Park ... but I finally tipped over into the world of this is hard work and I actually kind of hate it as I was running the last half. So at this time I see no more marathons in my future.

Don't get me wrong: The New York City Marathon was everything I'd hoped and dreamed and planned it to be. I choked up quite a few times from the sheer awesomeness of being a part of it. It was a great experience, but it was also a great last experience running a marathon.

Since I was in NYC on my own and the marathon photographers haven't posted their photos yet, I have no actual pictures of me to post. But don't think I won't be posting the (good) ones once the marathon folks get them online.

Oh. And I finished almost an hour slower than my best time. 05:14:35. And if that isn't a sign to hang up the marathon shoes and find a new hobby, I don't know what is.

If you can read this ...

2010-11-07T10:40:00.003-06:00

I'm running the New York City Marathon! Woot!

I set this blog post to go live the moment my wave starts. It's like magic!

Unless Blogger doesn't automatically adjust for Daylight Savings Time the way my iPhone is rumored to not do. Which makes me nervous as I write this at 10 pm Saturday night because my iPhone is my alarm. And my hotel room doesn't have an alarm clock so I'll have to call the front desk for a wake-up call. And I hate to be a bother.

But! By the time you read this it will all be figured out. And I'll be running through the streets of New York in my festive Genuine New Yorker™ colors: black and gray:

That garishly colorful white coat you see on the left is a $10 disposable one designed to keep me warm until I reach my running body temperature and then be thrown away, so it won't last past mile 3 or 4. So don't think I'm getting all sunny and Midwestern in my running-gear color palette. That would just be touristy of me. Kinda like the cheap-hotel bedspread in the background.

Jake's Wild World of Macho

2010-11-03T18:27:00.002-05:00

Marathon!
By Sunday night I’ll have my seventh and last marathon behind me, a long road of limping ahead of me … and my own emotional permission to get another commemorative tattoo.

But for now I’m just so damn excited about finally running the New York City Marathon that I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl in a pair of kitten panties. I peaked in my training on a 22.5-mile run two weeks ago, I’ve had two (actually kind of rough) tapering runs the last two weekends, I treated myself to a pre-emptive sports massage on Saturday and a fresh pair of cushy new running socks, which has become my little pre-marathon gift-to-myself ritual every year … and I’m entering my final stretch with no injuries, no headcolds, no lurking tummy issues and no threats of freakish New York heat spikes on Sunday.

And no family.

My folks, who were so excited about cheering me on in New York that they booked their hotel last February before I even had a chance to book my own, will be staying in Iowa this weekend. My poor mother fell on a chunk of broken sidewalk in the dark last weekend and cracked three ribs and her patella, so she’s now locked helplessly in a knee immobilizer and a crushing pain around her lungs. She was hoping she could go anyway, but her doctors kind of laughed at her … and once she started thinking about the logistics of trains and bridges and staircases and distracted crowds and port-a-potties, she realized she had no hope of surviving the New York City Marathon spectator gauntlet.

But.

I’m actually kind of glad. I told my whole family not to come back in February when I got official word that I was in. Marathons, for as much as I enjoy running them, are stressful. Aside from the obvious physical challenges, you have to worry about hydration and nutrition and peeing and pooping and friction and sunscreen and layering and weather and waking up in time and nail trimming and gear check and bibs and pins and shoe tags and not getting trampled in the first few miles before the runners can finally spread out … so wondering whether my family said they’d meet me at mile 16 or 18 when I’m already foggy at 15 and then further wondering what side of the street they said they’d be on is more than I sometimes feel equipped to handle. Plus I don’t know jack about the NYC subway system or the marathon course so I’d worry even more about my folks trying to navigate them without my help.

And on a selfish note, marathons for me are a very internal, personal thing. I’ve found over the years I kinda don’t like sharing them. I like going to the packet pickup and browsing among all the vendor booths and taking too long to decide which commemorative T-shirt I’m going to buy without feeling like I’m being rushed. I like knowing I can set my marathon-morning schedule and nobody’s gonna slow me down by oversleeping or needing to pee or dawdling at breakfast. I like sleeping alone the night before without the worry of being awakened by another body, no matter how much I love the man in that body. I like having my pre-marathon poop without worrying that the domestic partner is gonna hear me in the next room. I like entering the runners’ area on my own, just me against the 26.2 miles stretching ahead of me. And I like running in my own little zone, without an obligation to anyone but myself … and my plummeting electrolyte levels.

So the domestic partner isn’t coming either. Which makes me both sad and selfishly happy. It will be weird to do New York and Broadway without him next to me before the run, but I’m already in my happy Zen place thinking about how I’ll be running my last marathon the way I did my first: completely, utterly on my own.

Seven years ago I didn’t know any other runners and I didn’t really know what I was doing but I found a training program online and taped it to the fridge and ran every step from my first spring training run to my exhausted stumble across the finish line completely on my own. Since then I’ve run one more on my own, three with my AIDS Marathon pace groups, one with an ad hoc training group that quickly dissolved into no group at all and then this year, where I ran all but six runs alone. And while I love running with a buddy, I kind of love even more having I-did-it-myself bragging rights.

So I take off Friday morning for my last adventure in pushing through personal limitations. With a few yet-to-be-determined Broadway shows as an appetizer. And a slow, careful stumble from the finish line to my thoughtfully selected hotel room only half a mile away. All blissfully alone.

Volleyball!
Now that my marathon phase is (almost) behind me, I need another physical outlet. Aside from my six-days-a-week gym habit that, quite frankly, is all about vanity and not even a little bit about health or physical well-being. Fortunately, some buddies just formed a volleyball team and invited me to join them. We’re playing in the lowest-skill-level league, which I think is officially classified as Z, which stands for Zygotes on Zantac. And we had our first Z-league skills camp on Saturday, where the facts were reinforced that 1) I suck at volleyball and 2) I’m in the exactly right league for my skill sets.

The other guys on our team seem nice, but I think we were all emphasizing our pleasant personalities on Saturday to distract each other from our marginal abilities to hit a ball without squealing. Our team captain promised me that he picked players based on their coolness in the face of failure, though, so I think I can safely look forward to five months of nice-guy bonding periodically interrupted by shocked squeals and bleacher searches for runaway balls.

The team captain also sent out a request for team name ideas. I, of course, suggested quite a few awesome ones … including The Bumpits, which would be simultaneously kick-ass, kitchy, memorable, punningly relevant, undeniably gay and the inspiration for a freaking cool T-shirt design. I also suggested—unfortunately—Princess Sparklepony and the Pretty Little Glitter Kittens. Which—also unfortunately—kind of won. I say “kind of” because it—fortunately—got truncated. So our T-shirts will, no doubt in some kind of sparkly fabric, eventually feature this logo, no doubt in some kind of sparkly iron-on:
I am so sorry, guys.

Getting up to speed

2010-10-28T18:48:00.013-05:00

The state of the bathroom
The shower is finally grouted and double-caulked, the fancy waffle-knit spa-like shower curtain (with matching liner! just like in an adult bathroom!) is hung, a few pieces of decorative crap have been attached to the walls, and from the looks of things the bathroom renovation is done:
But! There’s still no water in the sink. Because I still can’t bring myself to admit defeat over some leaky water supply hoses that can’t be replaced without epic levels of runaround from random Home Depot employees and the faucet manufacturer. So I continue to sit and stew. And then I go wash my hands in the other bathroom.

But I’ve posted reviews of the products I bought on homedepot.com. And somewhere along the line I must have responded to a satisfaction survey from the site because this week I got an email from a homedepot.com representative offering me financial compensation for my frustration. Without me even asking! It’s only $75—and of course it’s in Home Depot gift cards, which are pretty worthless after I’m done spending $2,500 on the bathroom—but the fact remains that they asked and they listened and they responded. And, of course, there will always be another reason to go to Home Depot.

Speaking of gift cards …
The dramatic black-and-red-and-slightly-Southwest-inspired ceramic dishes that I’d brought into the marriage but the domestic partner had never truly loved the way he should as a stepfather had grown chipped and broken and it was about time to buy replacement pieces or scrap everything and start over.

And while I loved my dishes when I bought them for my old condo, they had a rustic heaviness that never really worked in our ultra-sleek, space-needle-like kitchen or our French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room. Plus so many plates and bowls were cracked that we could only host dinner parties for five, assuming we could find five people who thought dramatic black-and-red-and-slightly-Southwest-inspired ceramic dishes actually looked good—chipped or not—in a French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room.

Plus the plates were so big that they interfered with the little spinning water jet thingie mounted on the underside of our top dishwasher rack.

So we decided to pull the trigger and buy all new dishes that were small enough to fit in the dishwasher, durable enough not to get cracked by our clumsy kitchen help, and classically beautiful enough to look at home in our ultra-sleek, space-needle-like kitchen, the charming French bistro we’re opening in our living room and all the formal state dinners we host in our French-blue-exact-replica-of-Versailles-if-you-squint-and-you’ve-never-actually-been-to-Versailles dining room.

Plus! As I was digging around in our junk drawer last month for my trusty see-through ruler so I could more easily tape off the stripes I stenciled in our Art Nouveau/Art Deco old-timey apothecary-themed bathroom, I found four long-forgotten Crate&Barrel gift cards … and they were worth $160!

So I trolled through the dinnerware section of crateandbarrel.com and found these reasonably sized, reasonably priced classic beauties:
And after stopping by the store to discover that I loved them in person as much as I loved them online, I placed my order Sunday night. And by last night, I had my first ceremonial peanut butter and jelly sandwich on my first reasonably sized, reasonably priced classic beauty of a salad plate:

While we had our credit cards out …
Like many vintage Chicago courtyard-building condos, ours has an impossible-to-decorate length of hallway that just cries out for some kind of drama. But I have no interest in installing vaulted ceilings or a soothing water feature. So we planned to do the next best thing: install four-way dimmers on the lights. Of course, we talked about it for four years but never did anything about it. But a couple months ago our friend Rob heard us mention it and he recommended installing spotlight bulbs as well so we could cast dramatic pools of light down our runway. And last weekend, I finally did:
Of course, no project in our condo is without its dramatic setbacks, and last Saturday night found me on the 24-hour helpline with the dimmer manufacturer trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the lights to work. Turns out—and are you ready for this?—the developer of our condo labeled the wiring wrong. I know! Crazy! And they’ve been so spot-on with all their other efforts to burn down our building. But the dude on the phone—after repeated expressions of amazement at the clusterfuck of mislabeled wires I found spurting out of my junction boxes—managed to help me figure out what went where … and how to label it all correctly for the next person who goes digging around in our walls. And now we have a dramatic hallway runway fit for a couple dramatic queens. Ahem.

It Gets Better Project
While four of the 26 tapes we made in our epic taping marathon on October 3 got edited and posted online within a week, the company that volunteered to edit everything else overestimated the availability of its resources and nothing else has been edited or posted since then. But! They’ve found me someone else who says she can finish everything for me. (Those lesbians can fix anything.) And! The Chicago Tribune ran a pretty spectacular piece on us in its prominent Page 2 location on Monday. You can read it HERE.

Brian Cory
My first job out of college—aside from waiting tables at an Italian restaurant with fabulous breadsticks and even fabulouser gilded crown moldings—was crunching marketing numbers at Telecom*USA, a now-defunct Iowa phone book publisher that was a direct descendant of the epic 1984 Ma Bell divestiture. I worked there from 1991 until I found my first advertising job in 1992, and the only people I remember from the company are two fun young newlyweds who soon moved to Nebraska and disappeared off the grid and continue to elude my periodic Google and Facebook attempts to search for any sign of them.

And apparently there was also some dude there named Brian Cory. I have no recollection of ever working with someone named Brian Cory. And since it was my first job out of college and my first step up the ladder to international fame and fortune, I certainly have no recollection of developing any level of feel-free-to-joke-with-each-other-inappropriately relationship with any coworker from that company.

And yet this Brian Cory dude recently found me on LinkedIn and sent me THIS little gem of a note to mark our first communication in almost 20 years (assuming I had any memory of him):
His Palinesque command of English honestly makes it impossible for me to tell whether he’s a douchebag homophobe or just an epic loser with the judgment and sense of humor of a nine-year-old. Either way, I can't think of anyone I haven't seen for 20 years I would address this way as my first attempt at re-initiating communication. LinkedIn doesn’t offer an option for me to flag his note to me as offensive, so I’m doing the next best thing: posting it on my blog with his name repeated in the HTML text enough times that it might rise to the top of any Google search a future employer or potential boyfriend might do of his name. Brian Cory!

Renovation Porn: The Saga Continues

2010-10-21T14:21:00.020-05:00

At the conclusion of our last breathtaking cliffhanger, the bathroom stripes were stenciled, the chandelier was hung and the toilet was re-installed, if for no other reason than to put an end to the constant stream of water running out of the supply valve that wouldn’t completely shut off.

But the vanity top hadn’t yet arrived. So the sink and the plumbing and the backsplash and the medicine cabinet and the new wall lighting were all waiting in limbo.

The vanity top had been promised to be delivered in 3-5 business days. But it ended up sitting 8 days in a Tennessee warehouse—where it was no doubt thoroughly indoctrinated in the cerebral political theories of Sarah Palin—before it finally showed up at our door.

And I was so excited to see its awesome white-marble-with-old-timey-veins-of-gray awesomeness that I ripped the packaging open to gaze upon its … endless, relentless diaper-gruel beigeness.

Which means that once again, homedepot.com had shipped me a huge box of frustration and disappointment.

But I’d put the bathroom on hold—and held the entire house hostage to its renovation clutter—for way too long. So goodbye, gray-marble-and-polished-chrome-old-timey-apothecary-themed bathroom dream! And hello, diaper-gruel-colored-1986-suburban-Holiday-Inn-employee-breakroom bathroom depression!

But just like a parent who discovers his child prefers Webber over Sondheim, I stoically shifted gears, embraced my new diaper-gruel color story and set about making my new not-white-and-gray-marble-themed bathroom the best little bathroom it could be.

But not until I’d fake-assembled my new multi-drawered-storage-addict's-dream vanity and diaper-gruel vanity top and shiny polished chrome faucet in the living room just to get an idea what it would all eventually look like:

We’d planned to use cool frosted-green glass tile for our backsplash, but I couldn’t even find a clear glass option at the tile store that went with diaper gruel. But I did find a cool onyx mosaic tile that included the greens of the walls, the grays and whites of the vanity top we thought we were buying, and the diaper gruels of the vanity top we’re stuck with. And once I got it up, I was actually pretty happy with it:

And a creamy filling of snow-white grout made its colors kinda shimmer and dance with each other, but never in a vulgar way. Though the setting sun sure gives it a theatrical sense of drama here, no?

Once the grout was cleaned up, I was a little more at peace with my diaper-gruel color story. Dramatic little tiles can improve any grueling (ahem) setback:
See that notch in the top row of tiles? That’s for the brace that holds up the medicine cabinet. It’s off center so the screw holes in the brace can line up with the wall studs. Normally I can find these studs just by knocking along the wall with my knuckle and listening for what I think is a pretty obvious change in sound when I’m knocking on drywall with a stud behind it. The change in sound in this wall was almost imperceptible, though. And when I cut a hole in the drywall to fish the electrical wires up to their new escape hole over the new medicine cabinet, I discovered why: THERE ARE NO STUDS. The drywall is just attached to thin strips of lathe.

And that’s just one of many appalling surprises I’ve found as I’ve renovated our condo. The original grout was installed by squirrels. The drywall joints are as straight—and attractive—as a televangelist. There are rarely junction boxes for the lights. The electrical wires are only sometimes encased in conduit. I opened one junction box for an electrical outlet to discover that all its wires were sheathed in yellow. (Usually one wire is white and one wire is black or yellow or red or some other non-white color so you know which wire is hot and which wire is neutral—and what the gauge is if that’s important to know for a specific fixture—so your wire connections don’t burn your fucking house down.)

Where was I? Oh, yes: diaper gruel. And there’s no better way to wash it away than with a fabulous polished chrome Victorian/Art Nouveau faucet, which would look extra-fabulous on a white and gray marble vanity top, but what can you do:

And what makes a faucet even better? When you hook up the plumbing and you make water come out of it!

And what would make you suddenly hate your faucet more than you hate the thought that Christine O’Donnell has even one follower who isn’t a toddler with a drinking problem? Water supply lines that drip and drip and drip and never fucking stop dripping:

Unlike most faucets that come in one solid hunk of metal, the one I bought (unbeknownst to me) comes as two separate handles and one separate spout that are all connected by flexible hoses. Unfortunately, those hoses don’t have that “watertight” quality that the kids are all into these days … even when you take them apart and re-assemble them seven fucking times with seven fucking ways of incorporating or not incorporating plumbers’ tape to see if that makes a difference, which it doesn’t. Even more unfortunately, you can’t buy replacement hoses at your friendly neighborhood Home Depot. No! You have to special order them from the faucet manufacturer. Which is the exact opposite of what you want to do when you’d rather rip the faucet out of the sink and throw its drippy worthlessness at the nearest Home Depot employee. Even more unfortunately, buying a whole new style of non-dripping faucet would be even more work than you care to think about because you’ve already bought and installed the matching toilet paper holder:

So as of this writing, the sink and faucet are completely installed, but the water supply lines are shut off until I can calm down and decide what the fuck to do about them.

But! The fabulous mirrored (even on the inside!) medicine cabinet is installed with super-gay under-cabinet lighting to give my dancing backsplash tiles even more drama … even though I made the backsplash probably a bit too high in an attempt to make sure my freakishly tall husband can see all of his handsome mug when he looks in the mirror. Plus in this picture (where I’m sitting on a stool so don’t think I made the backsplash like six miles too high or anything) you can totally see how abso-freaking awesome our chandelier looks … along with the tape marks reminding me to touch up the paint on the door frame:

For some reason, my trusty iPhone was blinded by our ultra-mega-awesome Art Nouveau/Art Deco dramatic-upsweep wall light that doesn’t make you have to look at bare lightbulbs (and everyone knows how much I hate to see bare lightbulbs) so I had to turn it off to take a picture of it for you, which also includes a reflection of parts of my tall handsome husband in the doorway:

Which brings us to the reason we started the bathroom renovation in the first place: The grout in our bathtub/shower had started to crack this summer and I was worried that since it’s on an outside wall the cracks would lead to water damage as the wall contracted this winter. So even though I started the renovation project merely by scraping cracked old grout, I waited until I’d done seven million other things in the bathroom before I filled my scrapings with fresh new grout:

Those of you who’ve worked with grout know that it cures in stages. You mix it. You wait 10 minutes. You mix it again. You wait again. You apply it to the walls. You wait. You squeegee it flat. You … probably see the pattern by now. But all that waiting is the perfect opportunity to take everything out of your nearby closet, get rid of the embarrassing stuff and reassemble everything in orderly stacks:
(middle shelf, left to right: solid T-shirts, casual T-shirts, more casual T-shirts, sleeveless shirts for the gym, tank tops, nicer T-shirts, patterned polo shirts, solid polo shirts (not shown))

And what porn-labeled blog post would be complete without a discussion of how I purged my unwanted shoes (which is like getting rid of your unwanted children … but harder)? But one giant bag of 18 forlorn, destined-for-a-lifetime-of-abandonment-issues-and-therapy shoes later, I can finally say that each pair of my wanted and loved and worthy shoes now has its own home:

And that’s all any proud parent could ever want … aside from children who prefer Sondheim over Webber … and alcohol poisoning over Christine O’Donnell.

I'm wearing purple today

2010-10-20T08:43:00.004-05:00

Look around you today. There are (or should be) purple shirts everywhere in tribute to bullied gay kids who have committed suicide ... and in a show of of solidarity and support for bullied gay kids who need to see they have allies all around them.

I don't own a lot of purple, but I'm sporting all I have today: my purple T-shirt and my purple-ish shoes and even my purple protein shaker. There's a low probability I'll encounter any bullied kids in the course of my day, but it was heartening to see so much purple on the sidewalks in the Loop this morning. And even as we purple-clad adults sit safely in our adult offices across the country, we are at the very least thinking about you kids and hoping you're finding the strength to rise above whatever abuse you're suffering.

And remember: "Bullying" is just a perversely nicer-sounding word for "assault." If you're being physically harmed at school or even at home, call the police and press charges. You do NOT have to put up with physical abuse from anyone.

And think twice before you do anything to hurt yourself. Because the moment you do, the people assaulting you have gotten even more of what they want. Don't give them that satisfaction.

For more proof that you have allies across the world, visit the It Gets Better Project.

And if you need to talk to someone, you'll find all kinds of help at The Trevor Project.

Don’t give up! You can finish!

2010-10-15T17:58:00.006-05:00

So Sunday was the first Chicago Marathon I didn’t run in seven years.

Except I actually kinda ran it. Well, half of it. Sort of.

Matthew, who intercepted me last year at mile 21 when I was as close to death as Bristol Palin is to a dancer (or a star) and propelled me somehow to the finish through my fog of pain and delirium and stab-me-in-the-neck-and-kill-me-nowium, asked me to return the favor this year for him and our friend Taz. Except he asked me to meet them at the halfway point.

So on Saturday night I carb-loaded at a touristy Italian place with Matthew’s family and then made what was supposed to be a brief appearance at a joint birthday party where I only semi-socially know the birthday boys and their slowly-becoming-friendly-to-me circle of friends. I figured the party would be nothing but a sea of panic-attack triggers and I’d be cowering in my own bed an hour after I arrived. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t have a nice time. The guests were nice, the snacks were carby, the hours flew by … and I was a groggy mess when my alarm went off at 5:30 the next morning.

Stupid panic attacks. They never work when you schedule them to.

But!

I got up, donned my running togs, loaded up on what ended up being not nearly enough food to get me through half a marathon, and joined Matthew’s family to cheer for the runners at the start and in Boystown and then I raced ahead to meet up with Matthew and Taz at the base of the Willis (née Sears) Tower, which is the last close-to-the-Red-Line location before the halfway point, where the marathon shoots straight west for a couple long, shade-free miles.

I was kinda pissed that the weather had been so gorgeous that morning; I’ve run the last six marathons in either extreme heat or extreme cold so of course the weather was perfect the year I didn’t officially run it.

And then of course the temperature spiked the moment I jumped in.

I was actually looking forward to running (and enjoying and even simply noticing) the second half of the marathon route this year. Normally by mile 17 I’m in my just-stay-focused-straight-ahead-and-run mode, so I miss out on all the festivities in the Mexican, Italian and Chinese neighborhoods the second half of the marathon snakes through. And since I was starting fresh at mile 13, I’d planned on enjoying a fabulous running tour of Chicago’s southside neighborhoods as I propelled my fabulous friends to the finish line.

But!

Matthew and Taz were already hurting by the time I met up with them. And the spiking heat just undermined their motivation. So we ended up doing a lot of walking. Which was fine; it was their marathon and I was just there for moral support when they needed me. Unfortunately, there’s tons of photographic evidence that we not only walked parts of the marathon but we were walked parts of the marathon proudly:

We’re not completely shameless, though; we mustered up the strength to run—and even smile—when the photo ops were especially photo-oppy, like when they included Chicago Marathon-branded flooring:

But the fact remained that I’m still training for the New York City Marathon in November, and I was scheduled to run 12 miles the weekend of the Chicago Marathon. So at mile 23 when Matthew and Taz announced they were going to walk the rest of the way to the finish line, I asked if they’d mind if I abandoned them and ran ahead just to get some miles in, since they didn’t need me to help them walk.

They didn’t mind, and I took off running … and it suddenly dawned on me that I was kind of sprinting through the hardest miles of the marathon, possibly making the other struggling (and legitimate) runners around me feel bad about themselves. But there was only one way back, so I kept going, planning to jump off at mile 26, right before the course veers over a half a block to the finishers’ chute.

To my horror, though, I discovered that the last half mile was barricaded to keep the spectators away from the runners. And unless I ran backward down the course, I was kind of stuck on my road to runner prevarication. And when I got to the 26-mile marker where the runners turned toward the finish chute, I stopped and tried to find a way to sneak through the barricades.

And that's when it happened.

Someone yelled at me. Someone yelled something encouraging:

Don’t give up! You can finish!

And the goodwill of that stranger, a byproduct of my original goodwill to help my friends, suddenly made me feel as fraudulent as Christine O’Donnell writing a résumé. Except I’d actually accomplished something. Plus I know “I’m you” is code for “I’m too stupid and lazy to understand the issues too” and not the endearing term of solidarity she hopes her stupid and lazy voter base interprets it to be. Plus I had my shirt off.

Plus I’m obviously capable of feeling shame.

Fortunately, I found a break in the barricade (the barricade-erecting people obviously didn’t plan for people running friends in and needing a quick escape at mile 26) and there were thousands of legitimate runners on hand to distract the well-meaning crowd from taunting me with their encouragement.

And now that all the Chicago Marathon mania has died down—and all the volunteers who man the free Gatorade tables along the lakefront trail every Saturday in summer have packed up for the fall—I still have to train. All alone. For another month.

And I can’t wait!

I run 22 miles this Saturday then taper down to 15 and 8 the next two weekends.

And then—after four years of waiting—I’m finally going to be running the celebrated New York City Marathon. With no injuries (so far) and no worries about November temperature spikes (I hope) and a glorious 26.2 mile course to keep me entertained.

And I won't give up.

The Chicago Gay Men's Chorus meets the It Gets Better Project!

2010-10-14T17:19:00.006-05:00

I was expecting this little song to be a slightly cheesy but completely heartfelt alternative to all the personal-history stories on ItGetsBetterProject.com. But once the chorus started singing it ... wow. When 150 voices rise together—even to sing simple lyrics to a public-domain melody (to sidestep any copyright issues)—there is a confluence of magic. The robust sound, the earnest faces, the emotional momentum the singers create once they catapult themselves into the canon ... let's just say the domestic partner and I were blubbering messes before they finished the first runthrough.

The Chicago Gay Men's Chorus is all about making music and having fun (and occasionally coaxing me into a wig and heels), but it's ultimately about showing the world—and any abused gay kids who need to see that there's something to look forward to—that gay adults can and DO live incredibly wonderful lives. It really can get better!

The videos from our October 3 taping marathon are still being edited, but you can see more and more of them every day on my brand spankin' new YouTube channel.

The new Gap logo: a theory

2010-10-06T17:17:00.005-05:00

The new Gap logo will look positively awesome embroidered above the saggy breast pockets of 3,500 two-sizes-too-big khaki button-downs at a corporate team-building event in a Kansas Sheraton ballroom this winter. But what's the story behind the new look? How did Gap land on a corporate identity that takes us back to the heady design days of Quark 4.0 and the endless debate over Helvetica vs. Stone Serif (vs. Tekton if we're thinking outside the box)?

Here's one theory from deep within the agency trenches:

1) Gap focus-grouped its brand to come up with an "emotional map" of key words like "timeless," "reliable," "unpretentious" and "true blue."

2) Then it RFP'd six design agencies to submit 37 logos each based on these meaningless words.

3) After 1,942 internal meetings gathering invaluable branding input from textile buyers, franchise attorneys and vice presidents of finance, Gap narrowed the choices down to their favorite elements of 16 different logos and asked two of the agencies to create some hybrid logos incorporating these elements for a second round of feedback-gathering, this time in a series of mood boards and adlobs to provide "end-user context."

4) Four days before the scheduled launch of their new brand, Gap decided the new hybrid logos weren't completely following their emotional map, so they panicked and called in a favor from their old agency ... the one they were planning to fire after the new logo was chosen.

5) The call came in at 3:47 pm on a Friday, and all the art directors at the old agency were forced to cancel their weekend plans to come up with a shit-ton more logo ideas by 9:00 am Monday.

6) Gap sat on these new ideas for 17 days while they had an internal reorg.

7) The new vice president of camisoles, inspired by a burst of creativity he felt in a senior staff off-site, came up with the current logo at his dining room table on a Thursday night using the stencils his probably gay son bought to decorate his bedroom walls in Mies van der Rohe quotes and presented it to the board of directors the very next morning ... shrewdly keeping the new vice president of denim and the chief underwear officer—who would just try to sabotage his idea—out of the loop.

8) The board of directors—wisely making branding decisions by committee—voted eleven times and approved the new logo after it was modified to give it a weird footprint that will look clumsy in almost any layout.

9) This dining-room-table story will be enshrined in the annual report and repeated at shareholder meetings for the next 12 years as proof that Gap knows its best ideas come from its most important asset: its people.

(Gap corporate brand guys: Am I close?)

We taped 25 gay people and families today!

2010-10-03T21:30:00.007-05:00

Our video-making marathon for the It Gets Better Project could not have gone better today. Everything fell magically into place—from the donated shooting space to the fabulous friends who volunteered to shoot the videos, coach the people in front of the camera and even bring us food (bless you!) to Dan Savage himself flying in to add moral support and super-awesome celebrity cred to the event—which made the entire day a breeze. Plus everyone showed up on time!

And when we were done taping all our volunteers in the donated room at the Center on Halsted, the GLBT community center in the heart of Boystown, we carried our equipment a few blocks down the street to a Chicago Gay Men's Chorus rehearsal, where 100+ voices sang some slightly cheesy but heartfelt alternate lyrics (if you think they're really cheesy, then I totally did not write them) to Frere Jacques for a delightfully unique take on an It Gets Better video. And cheesy or not, I teared up like a leaky garden hose the first time I heard the chorus sing it for the camera. Somehow the confluence of my simple lyrics, the earnestness of the singers, the contrapuntal harmonies and the relentless forward motion of the canon transformed my cute little idea into something profoundly moving.

Plus, I randomly ran into WGN-TV entertainment critic/reporter Dean Richards this week, and I randomly floated the idea of maybe getting some media coverage for the event. Tons of adult gay people know about the It Gets Better Project, but we're not its intended audience. I hoped that if a mainstream news station like WGN could cover us, then little bullied suburban and rural gay kids who may feel terrified, alone and despondent would know there's a place to turn for hope. Which isn't going to end the bullying, but hope is a step in the right direction ... and often all we as gay adults can offer these poor kids. Dean asked for a press release, which I promptly wrote and passed off to him … and when we got to the taping location today, a whole WGN news team showed up. And even though they didn't use my interview in the segment (ahem) we got a big fat piece on the 9:00 news tonight! Woot!

Didja see me? I'm in a purple shirt for a tenth of a second in the background of one scene early in the segment. Which means I'm the star!

We got a ton of work done today, but we still have a ton of work ahead of us editing six-plus hours of video … which yet another fabulous (and Emmy-winning!) friend has volunteered to do. And you can bet I'll be promoting the hell out of our videos right here on my blog when they're all edited and ready to be seen. Stay tuned!

Altruism and Vanity

2010-09-29T16:42:00.007-05:00

Altruism
This weekend’s It Gets Better Project video-making marathon is full … less than 24 hours after I sent the first invitation looking for volunteers to share their stories on camera. All 24 taping slots were grabbed up in rapid succession on Tuesday … thanks in part to the free plugs we got on Joe.My.God and AfterElton and The Best of Gay Chicago and Chicagoist. And at this writing I have a growing waiting list of 17 people who still want to be a part of it.

I’m sorry I can’t accommodate everyone, but we’re staffing the entire day with volunteers and filming people in a donated room and I think a six-hour marathon of taping is more than we can fairly ask of anyone. But what an awesome problem to have.

And we’re already toying with the idea of setting up a second video-making marathon … after the real Chicago Marathon is over in two weeks. And after the damn bathroom renovation is behind me.

And!

I emailed our video marathon idea to Dan Savage, and he’s actually coming up to help out! So all our fabulous volunteers will get to meet him when they tell their stories … and together we’ll take another step forward helping bullied gay kids across the world understand that if they can just survive the homophobic abuse they’re currently trapped in, their lives can indeed get better.

Vanity
My trainer is still beating the crap out of me three days a week in my increasingly transparent efforts to stay physically relevant in today’s youth-obsessed culture.

He’s also been faithfully updating his training blog, which often features brutal workouts he’s guinea-pigged on me the day before.

And now he’s made some videos demonstrating the no-excuses form he demands from me even when I’m exhausted to the point of sobbing into my lace workout ascot and peeing (accidentally!) into my cool new hybrid workout/work shoes. Even though I’m the one paying him. Man, what a sweet gig this guy has going.

Anyway, here he is demonstrating the rotator cuff exercises he makes me do more often than Sarah Palin spells a word correctly since I’m getting old and my rotator cuffs are so weak that they’re starting to undermine my form on my arm and chest workouts and they make my shoulders burn even when they shouldn’t be burning because I have weak rotator cuffs and oh my gosh I am trying really really hard not to call them masturbator cuffs here even though that would be funny, at least to an 11-year-old boy. But where was I? Oh yeah: My trainer has arms that look like Volkswagons:

You can see more of the muscle cars he stores in his garage in his growing library of training videos.

And to create a handy link between the two halves of this blog post—something the 1980s business world called synergy—his training videos were filmed by my super-awesome friend Michael, who is also going to be the videographer for this weekend’s six-hour It Gets Better Project video-making marathon. And what is a gay blog post without a super-awesome motif?

Be a part of the It Gets Better Project!

2010-09-28T08:25:00.003-05:00

15 minutes of your time could make a lifetime of difference.

Dan Savage and his husband Terry, frustrated and horrified over the growing epidemic of gay teens who have attempted or committed suicide to escape brutal bullying at school and home, have created a brilliant way to reach out and give hope to gay kids.

The It Gets Better Project is a library of YouTube videos featuring happy, proud gay adults talking about how the bullying will eventually end and life eventually gets better. You can see the clips he's collected so far HERE and you can read a time.com article about the project HERE.

The library is growing every day. But Dan has asked for more clips—particularly clips of couples and families ready to share the joy of their lives as gay adults—so we are working with the Center on Halsted to host a free six-hour videotaping marathon. And we want you to participate!

Date: Sunday, October 3, 2010
Time: 15-minute sessions between 1:00 and 7:00 pm
Location: Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted
Room: Polk Brothers Foundation Youth Space, Second Floor

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Forward this information to all your Chicago-area adult gay friends.

2. Email nofo jake at gmail dot com to schedule your 15-minute shoot. Please include your name, phone number and a range of times you’re available, and we’ll do our best to fit everyone in.

3. Bring a photo of you as a kid if you want. We’ll scan it while you have your shoot and give it back to you.

That’s it! We’ll edit your video, add your photo and submit it to Dan to post on the It Gets Better Project page.

Thanks in advance for your participation. See you Sunday!

Renovation porn

2010-09-27T13:11:00.012-05:00

So I took Friday off and spent a full three days (minus a 12-mile run, a trip to Home Depot, an hour drooling over Pat Tillman’s foul-mouthed brother on Bill Maher and an hour finally catching up on Glee, which also involved drooling over the new blond dude) working on our bathroom.

But the old-timey marble vanity top I ordered seven days ago has been sitting in a fucking warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days:

And without a vanity top, there’s a ripple effect on all the things I still can’t accomplish:
• I don’t want to buy the backsplash tile until I can match it to the marble in the vanity top.
• I can’t install the backsplash tile anyway until I have the vanity top installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet until the backsplash tile is installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet lighting until the medicine cabinet is installed.
• BONUS FRUSTRATION! The vanity top purportedly has an 8" spread for a faucet, which is a relatively uncommon faucet size for a bathroom … especially on a vanity top that’s only 31" wide. Since I bought the towel bar and toilet paper holder that match the 8" faucet I found (which is mega-cool in an old-timey French apothecary kind of way so I’m actually excited about it) I don’t want to install them until I see the actual holes in the vanity top to confirm that the specs on the Home Depot web site aren’t a bunch of hooey.

But!

I did get a lot of other important bathroom stuff accomplished in my 72-hour bathroom-renovation marathon, though most of it was the non-sexy important bathroom stuff like patching holes and waterproofing the window in the shower and squirting endless ropes of painter’s caulk in corners and cracks and crevices to make the walls and the moldings as smooth and professional-looking as the exact opposite of Bristol Palin’s dancing.

And!

I got a shit-ton of painting done, including the mega-hella-awesome semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil that anchors our weirdly proportioned bathroom with an Art Deco sense of color and structure and moxie (which is Art Deco-era slang for mega-hella-awesomeness). The stencil is an inch-wide stripe that runs up the edge of each wall, across the ceiling and back down the opposite wall, intersecting in the ceiling corners to create a frame of silver that adds elegance, sophistication and a shiny distraction from my not-amazingly-professional-looking repairs to the bubbly ceiling drywall.

And of course I took pictures. Lots of pictures. Too many pictures, in fact, to get the idea across. But I’m going to post them anyway.

Here are our newly painted ceiling (in Sherwin-Williams “ancient marble”) and walls (in Sherwin-Williams “svelte sage,” which in a freakishly random coincidence is the same color my sister painted her front hallway and my mom painted her guest bedroom) taped off after hours and hours of painstaking measuring and swearing so it’s ready for stenciling:
Even though it’s just a blue-taped-off negative of the eventual stencil at this point, I got totally excited about the relentless Art Deco verticalness of it all when the taping was finally done.

Here’s the corner with the door, which blocks most of one of the wall stripes, which means less stenciling for me:

Here’s one of the corners of the shower (see what I mean about too many pictures?), which blocks off most of two of the wall stripes, which means even less stenciling for me:

Here’s part of the stencil finished and un-taped because I was too excited to wait to do all the stenciling before pulling off the tape:
Little-known fact: Stenciling a ceiling is a bodybuilder-grade deltoid workout. At this writing, it’s been about 30 hours since I finished stenciling—which, for the non-crafty among you, involves distrubuting a thick, oily, uncooperative paste of color onto a wall or ceiling using a stiff, short-bristled brush using an aggressive swirling motion—and my damn shoulder is still twitching.

And here’s one corner completely done:
The stripes look pretty straight in this picture, but since they follow the shoddy edges of the shoddily installed drywall by the shoddy contractors who did the shoddy rehab of the condo before we bought it, the stripes are as straight as a mega-church pastor who campaigns against marriage equality. But since they’re a muted silver, they’re not even half as faggy.

As you may recall, the water supply for the toilet wouldn’t shut completely off when I removed the toilet so I could repair all the cracked grout from the shoddy floor tile installation, so I was forced to rig an improvised bridge-and-funnel connection between the drippy wall plumbing and the poop hole in the floor.

And since that forced me to leave the poop hole unplugged, sewer gasses were escaping into the house. And the lonely candle I left burning next to the hole wasn’t enough to burn off the smell, so I was in an understandable hurry to get the stripes stenciled in the toilet corner so I could re-install the toilet—taking a moment to savor the almost-never-in-a-lifetime thrill of squishing a toilet down on a fresh wax ring—and get the house back to its usual eau de sweaty gym clothes and wet running socks. I have never been so happy to see a toilet installed on its poop hole in my life:
Note the white square on the wall next to the toilet. Since the new white vanity doesn’t have a back on it, I taped off and whitewashed the wall that will be the back of the vanity cupboard when you open the doors. It’s details like that that separate the humans from the McCains.

And!

I also installed my new favorite part of our soon-to be-awesomist-bathroom-on-the-planet bathroom: a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier:

And the only thing gayer than a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier is a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier on a dimmer. Seriously. How much do you love this chandelier? It has crystals and beads. It has olde-worlde charm. It has swirly S shapes and faux-melty candle bases for the bulbs. Its leaden patina nicely complements the semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil in the background. Its leaden patina probably also leaches lead into the atmosphere. And I put it on a dimmer, giving our bathroom infinite levels of dramatic lighting opportunities for all the dramatic teeth-brushing and showering and pooping we do.

And we gays can’t do anything without drama. Just ask the fucking vanity top that’s been sitting in a warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days and fucking up my entire renovation schedule.

Guy Stuff

2010-09-23T16:40:00.007-05:00

Cubs game!
So the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus sang the National Anthem at the Cubs game on Tuesday … after more than an hour of delays and false starts as a monsoon worked its way across Chicago. Naturally, the game was against San Francisco. GET IT? And naturally, they had us wait by a Wrigley Field side entrance labeled Gate Q. GET IT?

But once we got the all-clear, we walked onto the field (taking great care not to step on the chalk lines, which are apparently more delicate than the lingering gossamer vestiges of John McCain’s integrity) and then smiled into the crashing waves of cheers when we were introduced. The chorus is now positioning itself as Chicago’s Most Colorful Chorus (don’t get me started) so we all wore black pants and randomly distributed jewel-tone polo shirts as we proudly thundered our way through the National Anthem of a country that still won’t allow us to serve and defend it honestly and openly. But judging by the cheers and whoops and high-fives we got both before and after we sang, the stubborn, irrational bigotry that still dominates the opinions and actions of our public servants will wither, dry up and die when they finally summon the decency to do the same.

Home renovation!
Because of the Cubs game on Tuesday and our tickets to a bloated-but-potentially-charming-if-they-do-some-serious-editing production of Candide at the Goodman Theatre on Wednesday, I’ve made little progress on the bathroom this week. But! I did manage to scrape out all the cracked, discolored floor grout and replace it with fresh, monochromatic grout on Monday (which the domestic partner got flattered into cleaning up when he was home all day on Tuesday):

And if you think living with only one functioning bathroom isn’t enough to make me devote this entire weekend to assembling our fabulous new Art-Nouveau-glam-meets-Craftsman-practical-meets-New-Orleans-shabby-fabulous-meets-French-fin-de-siècle-apothecary master bath, having a living room ripped straight from an episode of Hoarders puts me way over the top:

Gym shoes!
For those of you dying to see more of my new hella-awesome-for-the-gym-and-mega-cool-for-the-office shoe wardrobe, here you go … and you’re welcome:

If there is one benefit to taking a 6:00 bus to the gym every morning, it’s that I can take pictures of my shoes without 1) looking eccentric, 2) causing suspicion, 3) irritating strangers or 4) ruining my composition with errant bus riders in the background. Plus, it allows me to make my blog posts even longer … giving you more value for your blog dollar. It’s the free market at work, and it all starts with a trip to the shoe store.

Oh say, can you see?

2010-09-21T16:18:00.005-05:00

I am on your tee vee!

Well, I might be. I'll be singing the National Anthem at tonight's Cubs game (7:05 pm CT) with the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus. We've sung every year, but we've been televised only once. So far. So if you're the type to tune into sports on television—or even go to an actual Cubs game—be sure to tune in/get there early enough to watch us tonight. Can I get a HELL YEAH?

In equally butch news, I've ripped apart the last room in our Two Bedroomed Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo®. The last of the builder's special monstrosities that came with the condo are about to disappear forever, this time from the master bathroom. For now, though, the stuff we're replacing is currently heaped in our living room in its cheap particleboard and lucite-handled plumbing shame.

So as of now, this is what our bathroom looks like:

Note the disposable paint tray where the toilet usually sits. It's not there because I'm about to paint. It's there because the damn water supply won't completely shut off. And it's leaking at the rate of one oversized plastic souvenir college-logoed drinking cup per hour. (Never mind that it's from the college where I went to ... um ... show choir camp when I was in junior high school. Because that detail would totally undermine the unmistakable machismo of this post.)

Since we're not in the habit of getting up every hour to empty a damn cup, I had to think of a better plan to keep the water from getting all over the floor between now and this weekend when the painting should be done and the classy-fixture installation will commence. Thankfully, I'm a clever man. And thankfully, when I was searching the kitchen for something huge and flat to catch water, I noticed the used paint tray waiting patiently in our recycling bin. And with a crude hole cut out of one corner, it made the perfect bridge-and-funnel between the drippy water supply and the poop chute in the floor that the toilet sits over:

It's held in place by hope and the residual goo from the wax ring around the poop chute. So it should stay in place. It will be hard to work around as we replace the cracked grout between the floor tiles and paint the baseboards, but I guess it's better than waterlogged floor joists and no renovation glitches to bitch about in a blog post.

And stay tuned for the pictures of what I intend to be our Victorian/Art Nouveau/French bistro/Big Easy-inspired bathroom getaway.

Steppin’ up my game

2010-09-17T16:14:00.003-05:00

I know. Me using a sports metaphor is like Newt Gingrich promoting so-called “traditional marriage.” But I’m down with the kids, yo. So I’m sticking with my bad-ass sports-talkin’ instincts here.

But I’m really just talking about dressing for work. I’ve been lucky in this department for a long time; in my industry I can wear jeans and T-shirts and tennis shoes, and as long as I don’t look like I’m about to clean the garage or hide the bodies I can pass as “professional.” But in my advancing years, I’m starting to feel that my faded Levi’s and my retired Brooks Adrenalines make me look more like an aging frat boy than an appropriately dressed copywriter.

But I hate dressing up.

I hate dress pants more than I hate Sarah Palin. They’re stupid and uncomfortable. They bunch up your ass. They provide no warmth in the winter and they wrinkle and trap sweat in the summer. And they give low-information citizens the emotional permission they’re looking for to stay uneducated, hostile and solipsistic. (Wait. That last sentence was just about Sarah Palin.)

And dress shoes? Don’t get me started. No support. No useful cushioning. No breathing. No flexibility. And they make your feet smell like old pantyhose and processed leather. They’re like Rush Limbaugh on his wedding nights. Except with tongue. And a sole.

Ahem.

I will never be more than a jeans-and-gym-shoes kinda guy. I love the way jeans breathe and feel soft and provide a sturdy platform for my saggy old-man butt. I love the way gym shoes have cushioning and arch support and the occasional splashes of color. I also love the way the right gym shoes can work in the actual gym and still be appropriate for the office. And when you rely on public transportation and you have to carry your whole day with you when you leave the house in the morning, an all-purpose shoe is a great way to keep your gym bag from exploding like a Teabagger’s head at a not-everyone-is-white-and-stupid rally.

So I’ve been on a shopping mission to find fitted jeans in non-jeans fabrics like poplin and age-appropriate non-jeans colors like dark khaki and dark gray and dark blue. And to find gym shoes that are not too foo-foo trendy to look ridiculous in the gym and not too gym-rat gymmy to look slackerous in the office.

I’ve been on this mission since early spring. And I’ve been in every store on the planet (except Lane Bryant … and Chico’s … and maybe Caché), with no success in the jeans department and only minor success in the shoe department.

Until now.

Last weekend, I stumbled into a fantastic(ally loud) and wondrous(ly crowded) clothing emporium called H&M—which I think stands for Homosexuals and Metrosexuals—and I stumbled out with seven pair of exactly the kind of jeans I was looking for: fitted, respectably dark, comfortable, office-appropriate and butt-lifting. Except when I got them home and tried them on again, I decided two pair were a little shiny and a little skin-huggy and a little low-waisted and more than a little age-inappropriate, so I took them back last night.

And after I took them back, I decided to poke my head in the Nordstrom Rack next door, which I knew had racks and racks of shoes in every shape and color and style. And I stumbled out with three new pair of shoes that are both gymmy and worky … and totally go-y with my new fitted, respectably dark, comfortable, office-appropriate and butt-lifting new jeans.

Gay as I am, I almost couldn’t sleep last night knowing I got to wear my new shoes in the morning. Plus I was still loving the little Cabaret outfit Mondo wore to the runway show on Project Runway. So I was already a little giddy.

Naturally, the moment I got on the bus this morning at 6:00 to head to the gym, I took a picture of my kickin’ new kicks, though I swear what look like cankles in this picture are just morning water weight. Or something:

See? Hella-awesome for the gym and mega-cool for the office. Everybody wins! Especially once I hid those cankles in my new fitted, respectably dark, comfortable, office-appropriate and butt-lifting jeans:

$500 breakage

2010-09-01T16:23:00.002-05:00

Fulfillment is a retail industry term for delivering rewards and rebates to customers. When your paid magazine subscription comes with a free tote bag, when your rewards card offers bonus points at specific types of stores, when your certain-dollar-level purchase enters you to win round-trip airline tickets … someone somewhere has to make sure that you meet the qualifications to receive the thing that was promised to you and then fulfill on that promise.

Breakage is the industry term for the actual unspoken goal of fulfillment: that consumers will make an initial purchase and then be too lazy or confused or disorganized or frustrated with the artificial hoops they have to jump through to get their free thing that they’ll miss a deadline or overlook a step or lose a receipt or just get angry and give up. It’s why you have to request your $25 check when you reach 25,000 points on your cash-back card. It’s why you have to supply original receipts and cut out bar codes and fill out an official form to get your $10 rebate on light bulbs. It’s why merchandise returns after 30 days get you store credit that’s issued on a plastic card or slip of paper you can put in a drawer and forget about. It’s why your points expire and the fine print is on a separate website and there’s no number you can call if you have questions.

And I—the 20-plus-year advertising copywriter who writes promotional stuff every day for retail clients and who actually knows how to survive the system—recently racked up $500 in breakage losses.

$100 gone
I bought matching flight suits for the domestic partner and me a couple Halloweens ago at Belmont Army Surplus, whose website sucks so much I’m linking you to a google search instead so you can hate them from lots of links. But the domestic partner is freakishly tall and even the biggest flight suit they carried wasn’t long enough for him. So I took our flight suits back. But Belmont Army Surplus has a Draconian returns-for-store-credit-only policy. They told me they keep all the store credits in a database organized by email address so I didn’t even need to worry about a receipt. Of course, when I went to cash in my store credit for something else, there was no record of my return or even my email address in their database. Since I was dumb enough to believe their database story, my receipt was long gone. And when I asked the guy behind the counter what my options were, he treated me like I was trying to rob him. Moral of the story: NEVER shop at Belmont Army Surplus.

$400 gone
I changed a return American Airlines flight from a business trip last year so I could stick around and have a weekend vacation. Since the ticket was non-refundable, I was given a $400 credit that I had to use for a new flight within a year. Fine. Whatever. But six months later when I went to redeem my credit over the phone, American Airlines informed me that I had to schedule my replacement fight in fucking person at a fucking O’Hare ticket desk. And since I never fly out of O’Hare, it took me (what I thought was less than) a year to finally book a regular O’Hare flight so I’d have a reason to make the trek out there and book my replacement flight. Of course, by the time I got there I’d missed the deadline by three fucking days. When I complained to the desk agent about their stupid schlep-out-to-O’Hare policy, she said I might be able to bypass the rule and book my replacement flight with a supervisor … over the fucking phone. Fucking seriously. And when I called … wait for it … the supervisor told me I’d missed the deadline and I should basically go $400 myself. I fucking hate you, American Airlines.

Pop quiz

2010-08-19T12:59:00.003-05:00

What does your brain instinctively tell you to do when, say, a runaway bus is careening toward you? Or a mugger with a knife is lunging for your guts? Or Rush Limbaugh is stumbling toward you with his pants around his ankles and yet another engagement ring in his hands?

Right. You run like hell. No thinking, no putting on a brave face, no fighting back.

Now pretend you’re retarded* (and I use that word on purpose here). Pretend that your run-like-hell instincts kick in every time a friendly person smiles and walks toward you. Every time you enter a crowded room. Every time you get a freakin’ party invitation in the mail.

Congratulations! You have a social anxiety disorder.

Based on my interpretation of my personal experience with this extremely stupid disorder—and, as you’ll see if you keep reading this freakishly long blog post, I have nothing but contempt for it and what it does to people—a social anxiety disorder is an extremely impractical case of bad wiring that makes you interpret friendly, fun, happy things as hostile and terrifying. And you have almost no control over it.

For most of my life, I’ve lived under the crushing immobility of this goddamned thing. Since before it had a name. Since before those drug commercials with the sad little purple ovals that never went to parties with the other ovals. Since before I even realized my instinctive, everyday terror of friendly, nice people was not remotely normal.

Here’s the part where I pre-emptively apologize if this post is nothing but self-indulgent navel-gazing and then explain that I’m not writing it for pity or to make you see me as brave for telling my story and exposing my soul. In fact, I’ve started and stopped writing various versions of this post about 50 times over the last five years. And I’m still not entirely sure I know what I’m doing here.

But I’ve kept coming back to it. Perhaps I feel the need to explain myself to anyone who thought I was standing against a wall being all arrogant and unapproachable that one time at that one bar/party/rehearsal/meeting/parade/street festival/movie/social setting. I was not being arrogant. I was not ignoring you. I was actually afraid of you. Terrified, even.

Or perhaps it’s because I’ve come so far since I finally unlocked myself from this prison thanks to some intense (and very expensive) therapy. I can now walk up to strangers and say hi. I can carry on a conversation without looking around frantically for a way to escape all its horrifying pleasantness. I even went to my 20-year high-school reunion—which even to normal people can be a whirling sea of panic triggers—four years ago and had the audacity to have a great time.

I think I’m mostly writing this just to focus my own thoughts and mark my place in time as I go on this adventure from part-time terror to full-time (I hope!) normalcy.

All my life I’ve assumed people hated me from the moment I met them. I’d look for proof of my suspicions and easily find it (that guy just looked away as he was talking to me! those people I know are having coffee and they didn’t invite me!) in the most innocent of circumstances. Then I’d retreat to the relative safety of my house and struggle to breathe in my dizzying sea of rejection and then wait for the next person to hate me. And it all seemed so logical and rational and everyday-normal that I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Or that it was fucking stupid.

My folks, without realizing how much I was struggling with this or even that I was in therapy, recently commented about how I was afraid as a little kid to run around the corner and ask our neighbors—who were our good friends—for something. Which tells me this stupid problem has been my “norm” since I was old enough to leave the house on my own.

In fact, while I’m friendly with people from grade school through college if I run into them somewhere, I made no lasting friendships there. Aside from the handful of people I exchange Facebook greetings and holiday letters with, I have no actual close friends from school. And at my high-school reunion when people were planning parties at their houses and hotels to keep the fun going, nobody invited me to any of them. And why would they? We have very little shared history, so we have no old times to relive and no catching up to do.

One of the cruel ironies of this stupid problem is that people can interpret your terror as standoffishness. You don’t talk to them because you’re terrified of them, so they avoid you because you don’t seem nice or approachable. And then they keep avoiding you. And then you have real reasons to think they hate you. And the cycle never, ever ends.

And it’s really the most retarded* problem you could possibly have. (“Hi. My name’s Jake, and I’m afraid of nice people.”) I mean really. It takes pathetic and illogical to pathological new lows. (I just made that up! But it kind of makes sense!)

Here’s a brief list of the everyday ordinary things my social anxiety disorder has made me too terrified to do at one time (or sometimes a hundred times) over the course of my life:
• flag down a waiter
• hail a cab
• ask a clerk for help in a store
• ask a stranger for directions/the time
• walk up to a stranger at a bar or a party
• let someone introduce me to a stranger at a bar or a party
• ask someone to spot me at the gym
• ask someone in the aisle seat to let me out at my bus/train stop
• call/text/email someone I just met and ask him or her to do something fun
• make small talk with a co-worker
• make small talk with a doorman
• join an informal gathering of people after work without an express invitation
• join an informal gathering of people after a rehearsal without an express invitation
• call a meeting for a volunteer committee I’m supposed to be heading
• throw a party
• go to a party
• make small talk in an elevator/gym/audition/dog park/you get the picture

Sounds ridiculous, right? But when you’re trapped in a crushing, paralyzing fear, doing any of these things is as impossible as melting into the ground, which you’d prefer to do anyway.

And just try to find your fucking self-esteem when you’re walking an extra six blocks to work in the rain because you were too paralyzed to ask a stranger to let you up from your seat so you could get off the train at your stop. And then stop wondering why I’m describing this disorder with so many swear words.

Fortunately, my case hasn’t been lock-myself-in-a-dark-room-for-20-years extreme. I’ve had entire days an even weeks where I found myself somehow unshackled from this stupid problem. And I’ve never had these issues in places where I was “supposed” to be—like family gatherings or job interviews or official work projects or client presentations or rehearsals.

And there are cures. They take work, but this big ugly animal can be killed. I’ve seen three therapists (so far) to make this happen. The first therapist diagnosed the social anxiety disorder about seven years ago, which gave my enemy a name … and gave me something specific to fight, which was actually pretty helpful. But that’s as far as she seemed to be able to take me. The second therapist just didn’t click with me, but I stuck with her for a while because she was in my network. And the third therapist was the one I needed. He asked simple questions and offered logical insights and maintained a bemused, judgment-free demeanor that let me voice all the crap in my head and hear just how ridiculous—how staggeringly fucking ridiculous—my fears were when they left my brain through my mouth and came back in through my ears.

I started seeing him in January 2006, and by May I considered myself reliably functional in polite society. I can now go places that have historically been nothing but a sea of panic triggers—parties, bars, street fairs, networking events, actually anywhere large groups of people congregate socially—and I can walk around and socialize and laugh and leave and spend hours without it even occurring to me to have an attack. It’s a whole new world … and all it cost me was a lifetime of frustration and loneliness, five months of intense conversations and terrifying real-life practice, and a couple thousand dollars in out-of-network co-pays.

Looking back, it’s also driven almost every major choice I’ve made in life: I majored in English literature (four years of reading—minimal human interaction required), I built a career as a writer (but not a reporter, because that would involve talking to people out in the real world), I studied piano (no time to talk when you’re trying to master Debussy), I became a six-day-a-week gym rat (lifting requires no human contact—and it helps grow muscles that might work as an ice breaker when a simple hello is too terrifying), I started running marathons (exercise, fresh air, physical proximity to other runners at times, but no human interaction required), I built up a mildly popular blog (all typing, no talking) … see a pattern?

This journey has also made me acutely aware of other people suffering through the same bullshit. I recognize the signs. I see the terror. I often step up and say hi when I see someone cringing helplessly against a wall in a crowded setting.

But I don’t try to forge friendships. These people represent what I hate the most about myself. At least my old self. I don’t want to be dragged down by their stupid problems, which I fear are still on the verge of re-becoming my stupid problems. Call me insensitive, but I look at my calculated distance as self-preservation.

Facebook has been both an ally and an enemy for me in this adventure. It’s obviously great for building friendships out of casual encounters and staying in touch and making plans with people. And for putting my always-trying-to-be-clever self out there for people to see and maybe like. But every once in a while I’ll be scrolling through the news feed and I’ll stumble on pictures of parties or dinners or roadtrips populated by lots of people I know. People who obviously didn’t invite me to join them. And the rush of rejection and despair and frustration sometimes hits me so hard and so fast it crushes my chest and literally sucks my breath away.

Yes, it’s irrational. Stupidly, retardedly*, even arrogantly irrational. Especially because I do get invited to do stuff. But in my mind I’ve worked so hard to meet people … to build organic, genuine friendships that don’t come from me being too eager or pushy … to not go to that place in my head that says the people I meet all hate me and I should just give up … that I feel I somehow deserve the payoff of a whirlwind social life and an exhausting social calendar. And when I see tangible proof that I’m not on everyone’s radar when they plan their get-togethers … well … let’s just say this adventure out of my stupid retarded* (last time! I promise!) problem is still more of a journey than a destination.

So.

If you’ve read this far you’ve concluded that I’m at worst a mess or at best a writer in dire need of a filter. Or maybe that I’m just as screwed up as everyone else, only I have a bigger platform to broadcast my problems to the world. But if my endless blather helps one person see there’s an escape from his or her anxiety prison—or if it helps you guys on the outside understand that pathologically quiet people are not always the unapproachable snobs they seem to be—then maybe I’ve embarrassed myself here for a good reason.

In the mean time, I’m still getting a huge kick out of my new skill: walking up to strangers and saying hello. Even better: walking into social settings and looking at strangers as potential new friends instead of obvious-to-nobody-but-me Ninja assassins. And if you need proof, I’m totally free to come to your parties and show you.

* I know retarded is a horribly offensive word in most contexts. My domestic partner’s brother is clinically retarded. And since he came to live with us I’ve stopped using the word entirely … except in extremely appropriate circumstances. Like describing a brain that’s terrified of friendly people. Or dismissing the rationalizations for denying equality to gay families.

Celebrities I have been sweaty with

2010-08-13T17:30:00.003-05:00

I used to work out at the Crunch Gym in the base of the Marina City towers (the buildings that look like corncobs for you youngsters and the buildings that were implied to be Bob Newhart’s office for you older folks), and my celebrity-dar is such that I didn’t realize Will Smith was working out every day right next to me to get pumped up for filming the movie Ali until someone told me months after the fact.

At least I know who Will Smith is. I once spent an irritating few months sharing the gym and the locker room (but never the bathroom once I found out who he was) with alleged-child-pee-er-on-er R. Kelly and his thoroughly douchebaggy posse. And I once got sweat sprayed all over my arm by a very jittery pale man running next to me on a treadmill, only to find out later that he was Scott Weiland, who apparently is a pilot for something called Stone Temple Airlines, which must be a limited regional carrier because I never see them as an option when I book stuff on Orbitz. And I also totally ogled a very athletic butt that I found out later belonged to a baseball player I’d never heard of named Kyle Farnsworth.

But that was my old life at my old gym.

I have no allegiance to gyms or gym chains. I realized long ago that the most important feature for a gym to have—aside from decent equipment and a few hot guys to motivate me—is a close proximity to my house or my office. If my home or my office moves, I move gyms too. Because the less effort I have to make to get to a gym, the more time I can spend in my vain pursuit of maintaining some sort of physical relevance in today’s youth-obsessed culture.

So when my office moved two years ago to the heart of the Loop, I found a nearby gym that, though it’s so expensive it kind of makes me choke every time I open my Amex bill, I go every morning at 6:30 plus I cough up the equivalent of two house payments every four months so I can have one of its more muscular trainers beat me three times a week like a Mel Gibson girlfriend. And I love it!

But! It gets better!

On one of my first visits to this shiny new gym, I was huffing away on a Stairmaster absentmindedly watching Pretty Woman on one of the ten bazillion TVs that are suspended over the cardio area when I looked down and saw Richard Gere. As in the Richard Gere from the movie that was playing above my head, only live and in person in front of me in my gym. And, as my previous experience at Crunch proved, it wasn’t entirely implausible that a bona-fide celebrity (meaning one I'd actually heard of) would be using a high-end chain gym in the heart of Chicago’s financial district. So I started fantasizing about all the fabulous celebrities I’d be ~~showering naked with~~ sharing workout tips with now that I was an elite insider member of a fabulous, dripping-(literally)-with-(sweaty)-celebrities gym.

As I looked down at Richard, assuming all this time he’d been admiring my dedication to fitness and contemplating which blockbuster movie he’d like to use as a vehicle to launch my co-leading-man stardom with him, I realized that … um … he wasn’t actually Richard Gere. In fact, he barely even looked like Richard Gere, aside from his silver-gray hair and his cute-ish fortysomething face. And the fact that he was a man.

But! It gets worse!

Because once I started going religiously at 6:30 am (I’m the undisputed mayor on Foursquare, for those of you inclined to be impressed by such silliness) I started to notice all the morning regulars … including yet another celebrity lookalike. Fortunately for me, I knew right away this dude wasn’t the actual celebrity. Unfortunately for him, the poor fucker looks like Glenn Beck, who, even if you can get past his batshit craziness and his one-cylinder intellect, is still a goofy-looking low-budget circus clown. Bless his cold black heart.

And then this week a third celebrity lookalike appeared and started getting in the way of my morning workouts. This one looks remarkably like Rita Moreno in West Side Story, complete with plum-hued bouffant and fiery kohl-lined eyes. Unfortunately, he tends to take up two sinks in the locker room right as 30 other guys are racing to get cleaned up and get to work. But still. I bet he floats like a butterfly way better than Will Smith ever could.

This just in ...

2010-08-10T16:50:00.002-05:00

The biopsy results are back. The foot mole was benign. Can I get a woot?

Feet and ice cream

2010-08-10T15:34:00.004-05:00

So the dermatologist told me I could take my mole-excision stitches out of my foot by myself on Friday or Saturday if the wound looked healed and the stitches felt like they were “pulling.” The wound definitely looked healed and I convinced myself that the stitches were indeed pulling on Friday night, so I got out the pointy little dissection scissors I still have from my college I’m-gonna-be-a-doctor-someday biology class, sterilized them with rubbing alcohol and started trying to snip the tiny little stitches on the outside of my foot. But my eyes are 42 years old, the outside of my foot is far away, and my hips and knees have all the flexibility of a Faux News anchor in a Sarah-Palin-is-totally-smarter-than-a-box-of-farts discussion. And by the time I’d hacked away enough of the stitches that there was no turning back, I realized there was no way I was going to get them all out with any precision … or even with any degree of certainty.

The domestic partner was gone, but he tends to be squeamish about such things anyway. Fortunately, our buddy Mike was staying at our house for Market Days, the Boystown street festival that elevates crowds, noise, drunkenness and shirtlessness into an art form, and he wasn’t squeamish in the least. So he picked out the last little bits of my stitches, I gently washed the wound, and as I started to bandage it for stability, the damn thing ripped open.

Which meant I got to traverse about 4,000 miles of crowded street fair all weekend in heavy bandages, sturdy shoes, and the hopes that no drunken fool would spill beer or full bodyweight on my foot. I carried a triage kit in a pocket of my cargo shorts in case I had to rebuild my foot after such an emergency, but it survived the weekend with nothing worse than a stabbing pain every time I took a step.

Which almost martyred me because Mike wanted to experience everything Boystown had to offer this weekend. So we did a lot of walking. And standing. And shuffling through unmoving crowds. And dancing. In place. Because of the crowds. But still.

On the plus side, I relished sleeping until 9:00 on Saturday morning instead of getting up at 5:00 to run 14 miles on a gaping foot wound. So there’s that. And even though I rarely wore a shirt this weekend, I abandoned all pretense that I like to eat radishes for breakfast and I stuffed endless piles of sugary carbs in my face at every meal. Which is why this gratuitous photo of me and (left to right) my impossibly hot friend Brad, a friend of his, and my handsome and intrepid foot-suture-snipping buddy Mike at the street fair is cropped above the waistline, Sunshine:

Speaking of sugary carbs, I have been extremely weak-willed this summer about one of my biggest vices: ice cream. I could happily eat ice cream for every meal every day of my life and regret nothing. Except the loss of my ability to see my feet. Which means I’d never get those damn stitches out. Those of you who keep track of such things may remember that my reward for finishing my last marathon was four flavors of Ben & Jerry’s, consumed alphabetically in bed in front of a DVR full of Bones reruns. (It’s a known fact that ice cream is healthier for you if you eat it alphabetically while watching fake but fabulously graphic autopsies performed against a whimsical background of insouciantly denied romantic attraction. Look it up.)

The only two instances where I can always say no to ice cream are if it’s a flavor I don’t love or if it’s just cheap store-brand crap. And the flavors I love tend to be pretty nothin’-but-sugar simple: vanilla ice cream with cookie dough, brownie bits, chocolate pieces, candy, cake, fudge and/or frosting.

Unfortunately, in my old age I’ve developed a disturbing new ice-cream-related shopping disorder: I’ll look through the window at the grocery store freezer, find a Ben & Jerry’s flavor I like, reach in to grab it, and not notice until I’m all the way home that I’ve actually picked up the flavor that was next to it … which is invariably a flavor I hate, like Nuts ’n’ Squirrel or Crunch Limbaugh or Jake’s Excised Moles or Sarah Praline. (I really hate nuts in my ice cream.)

Thankfully, my Frozen Treat Dementia (FrTD) probably keeps me from actually consuming ice cream for every meal every day of my life instead of just blogging about it in the abstract. Which is how I’m able to keep my weight at a reasonable level year after year. And as added insurance, every year or so I get another mole or two hacked out of my body. And now, to prevent myself from ever eating anything again, I cut out my own stitches too early and watch myself burst open all over the bathroom floor. It works like magic.

May the best Jake win

2010-08-05T14:55:00.003-05:00

I ran the Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon on Sunday in what turned out to be a sea of celebrities. And I mean “celebrities” in the “barely relevant people who’ve been out in public at some point in the last seven years” sense. Also in the “I’ve heard of only three of these eight people and I could identify only two of them by sight” sense.

But! The numbers are in, and though my watch said I finished in 2:14:07 while my official time was 2:15:49, I still beat all seven of the “celebrity” finishers. Especially Jake Pavelka, who I hope won’t feel too resentful to propose to me, romance me with his shirt off and then dump me before my husband finds out. Jake may be a douchenozzle, but have you seen him? I know he’s not really much of a publicity hound so he’s never on television and there are almost no pictures of him on the Internets. But wow. Just … wow.

If you want numbers, here’s the “celebrity” breakdown:

If you’re a Proposition 8 supporter—especially if you’re still a supporter after yesterday’s impeccably reasoned trial decision—you obviously have no reading comprehension skills (or use for facts, for that matter) so just look at the dramatic play of white and dark in the above screen grab. Then stick a chainsaw in your ass.

Speaking of bloody wounds, my foot cancer surgery went so well on Tuesday that it was practically over before it began. It took longer for the anesthetic (the injections of which really, really, really hurt) to set in than for the doctor to excise the mole, cauterize the wound, stitch the edges together, and slap on layers of nourishing antibacterial goo and bandages. All of which meant I get to wear flip-flops to work all week:

The doctor said the pain would be pretty intense once the anesthetic wore off so she prescribed some hefty Rush Limbaugh drugs for me. But instead of hurting, the wound just burned like a peeing hooker. So no hypocritical drug-and-divorce-addiction scandal for me!

She also said I’d need to keep the stitches in until the wound stopped swelling and bleeding, which could take 7–10 days. On the off chance everything healed just fine in the first 48 hours, though, she gave me permission to remove my own stitches on Friday and just keep everything tightly bandaged for a week.

And guess what? 48 hours after the surgery, everything has healed quite nicely. So by this weekend I’ll be able to add “suture removal” to my resume. Also: “bar mitzvah clown.”

The stench of evil

2010-07-19T20:13:00.004-05:00

It’s always the most efficient to replace major appliances in groups so you deplete as much of your financial reserves as possible in the shortest amount of time. Which is why we scheduled our washer/dryer and our refrigerator/freezer appliance meltdowns within a couple months of each other last winter.

And everything was going fine with our shiny new appliances until about a month ago when we realized there was something dead or dying in our shiny new refrigerator. And it wasn't old-milk dead or Mel-Gibson's-career dead. It was stabbed-hooker dead. It was my-ass-after-a-marathon dead. It was Rush-Limbaugh's-fourth-wife's-wedding-night-yeast-infection-because-she-is-his-fourth-fucking-wife dead. And the stench was enough to curl the eyelashes off a buzzard on a shitwagon.

What's weird is we're not the kind of people who keep food in our refrigerator long enough to go bad. We shovel food down faster than Newt Gingrich processes divorce paperwork. And we replace it with trips to the grocery store every three or four days. Granted, we eat mostly preservative-free stuff like real fruit and organic cottage cheese, so our food isn't likely to stay fresh and lifelike as long as a box of Twinkies or a belief that gays are some kind of threat to heterosexual marriage.

In any case, we had no idea what was festering in our frost-free Freon fixture and assaulting our olfactory orifices every time we reached in to grab a Greek yogurt or a ... um ... Gripe peach.

So two weeks ago, the domestic partner took everything out of the fridge, sniffed it carefully for eau de morgue, found no evidence of rotten food or rotting corpses, wiped the refrigerator walls and shelves and all the packaging around all the food with bleach water, and put everything back in the hopes that whatever ghosts were haunting our fancy new refrigerator had been exorcised.

But not so much.

My parents visited us a week ago and the smell was just as bad as ever. My mom thought that maybe something (mouse? cat? Michele Bachmann's crazy eye?) had gotten into the space between the inside and outside refrigerator walls and had started to rot. We weren't sure what to do about that possibility, but their visit was all about being tourists (Grant Park Music Festival! Chicago History Museum! Navy Pier! Ravinia!) so we didn't pull the fridge apart looking for death while they were here.

Then this weekend we had a party celebrating the fact that I've lived in Chicago for 10 years. (Yay me!) And at our parties, our friends know they're welcome to poke around in our fridge for anything they may be hungry or thirsty for ... even if they don't realize they're going to get a noseful of death in the process. As with all my party planning, in the weeks leading up to the festivities I make mental notes about things I need to do (make sure we have enough paper plates, get fresh flowers for our fancy-ass vase, rid the refrigerator of Adolfo Pirelli's festering corpse before any relatives come poking around looking for him) and then four hours before the guests are due to arrive I realize there's no food or ice or liquor in the house and race to the store to get ready ... always forgetting to de-corpse the refrigerator in the process.

So this weekend as I was scrambling to dice vegetables for homemade lemon-feta pasta salad, scoop out avocados for homemade guacamole and slice peaches for homemade peach-raspberry cobbler (I'm really just writing this sentence to brag about all the yummy food I made) I barely noticed that the smell had disappeared somewhere between oh shit we have no food and add two tablespoons of olive oil. And by the time the door buzzed to herald the arrival the first guests I'd been so distracted that I'd pretty much forgotten we probably had a dead hooker trapped in the condenser. But when the first guest reached for the fridge to find mixers for his vodka drink, I leaned in to intercept him before he discovered our shameful secret ... and finally noticed that we no longer had a shameful secret.

I don't know if the street gang that stashed the body behind the condiments finally came back to claim it or if rotting field mice really do have a short half life, but the stench is miraculously gone, as though it had never been there. Like the pope's relevance. In any case, we can now entertain without suspicious guests calling in Seeley Booth (rats!) and we can enjoy fresh peaches without being forced to ponder the creepy fact that both peaches and rotting humans are covered in something called flesh.

And now when we have leftover shepherd's pie in the fridge, we never have to worry if it's peppered with actual shepherd on top.

Foot cancer!

2010-07-16T15:51:00.002-05:00

Really? I can hear you saying. We wait 37 years for a blog update from you (the voices in my head tend to be both filled with devotion and prone to hyperbole) and you drop THIS bombshell on us?

Well, “foot cancer” is technically an exaggeration. But! Among the billions (hyperbole motif!) of moles I have on my body, my dermatologist found a few spots that concerned her enough during my April mole patrol that she had me come in again yesterday for a three-month follow-up. And one already grotesque, misshapen mole on my foot has doubled in size since then. (Asymmetry? Check. Border? Check. Color? Check. Diameter? Check. Evolution? Check.) All the letters of the moles-can-kill-you alphabet point to something bad. Like Glenn Beck in a hot tub. But it’s fixable. Like Mel Gibson in an oven. So it has to come off.

She wanted to hack it out of me right away yesterday, but since it’s on the outside of my pinky toe joint—an area that gets so much stress that sutures there tend to rip open just from everyday locomotion—she said I couldn’t run on it for at least two weeks. And since I’ll be on a sandy beach vacation in five days and I’m running a half marathon in 17 days, she gave me special dispensation to hold off until the day after the half marathon to get my foot hacked apart. And since she caught the big scary toe mole early enough, she’s fairly certain that the hacking will be the end of the entire adventure.

Not so much, though.

My always-casual-Friday company just issued an email stating that women can dress in clothes that expose their arms and shoulders and feet but men can’t. But my dermatologist says I need to avoid confining my hacking wound in shoes until it heals strongly enough to not rip open. So I’ll need to wear flip-flops for at least the first few days after the hacking. And probably tank tops, but only to create a coherent ensemble. So there may be repercussions. Even if I promise to keep my toe hair in check.

You don’t need to send me any get-well cards. But if you decide to shop for one, there’s a fine selection at Walgreens. Some of the cards even play music. As in actual clips from actual recorded songs and not just cheesy computer renditions of “La Cucaracha” or “Happy Birthday.” I know this because I stopped into my friendly neighborhood Walgreens for a card on a recent weekend night (because I’m an on-my-way-to-the-party card shopper and DO NOT JUDGE) and I found two girls checking out these song cards … and dancing to them. From the systematic way they opened each card, danced to its song clip, compared thoughts and then repeated the process with the next card in the row, I got the feeling they were in the Walgreens card aisle that night more for its nightclub qualities than for its purveyor-of-prewritten-greetings qualities. They seemed young, so I can only assume they were working around legal barriers to approximate a complete nightclub experience, which of course includes dancing to a range of songs and … wait for it … getting carded.

Time Magazine didn't print my letter

2010-06-28T18:10:00.003-05:00

Fortunately, I found a blogger who'd print it for me:

Dear Editor,

Your Gay Days coverage told the story of one family with kids against a background of (by my count) seven salacious details that painted the rest of the gay experience as little more than sex, drugs and disease. To be fair and balanced, your next article about a religious gathering should weave the story of one family with kids into a tapestry of snarky details about priests raping children, popes covering up scandals, preachers using meth with hookers, bigoted religious researchers hiring rent boys, terrorists flying planes into buildings and groups of fine young Christians fag-bashing people as they leave gay bars.

Jake

I saw Stanley Cup at the Chicago pride parade!

2010-06-28T15:50:00.005-05:00

I think he’s the one holding the giant silver thing in this picture:

So another pride parade has come and gone, and I remain as ambivalent about the festivities as ever. But not for the usual reasons.

Despite a lot of people’s worries that the so-called freak-show aspect of the parade just feeds into negative gay stereotypes, I’m actually thrilled that the parade gives drag queens and leather queens and muscle queens and duct-tape-on-their-boobs queens a day to say To hell with what you think—this is who I am and I’m not going to apologize for it.

But.

I’m not a fan of the sheer relentlessness of it all. The noise. The crowds. The mess. The drunks. The drunks who manage to spill their drinks all over me. And the fact that anyone who forks over whatever the entrance fee is seems to get a place in the parade … never mind that the damn thing goes on for four-plus hours. Or that a bunch of people walking in mismatched T-shirts—no matter how noble their organization or how fabulous their cause—does not really make visually interesting parade fodder.

And yet.

I feel compelled to go every year. Even though I find it to be only about 50% fun. And I have no idea why I keep going. Maybe because I might miss seeing some hot guy on a float. Because in this day and age it’s impossible to find pictures of hot guys on the Internet. Or maybe because if some remote friend doesn’t see me there it might not occur to him to invite me to his pride party the next year and I’ll feel like a loser.

Despite my determination to not let myself have any fun, though, I did have a lovely weekend. I went to a few parties, I finished the Proud to Run 10K in a respectable time, I spent all day Saturday with a bunch of fabulous friends, I got a parade-watching sunburn, I got tons of compliments on my tattoos, I fell off the no-diet-soda wagon, I got back on, I fell off the almost-no-alcohol wagon, I got back on (after five drinks in one day, which is more than I usually drink in five months), and I spent the post-parade hours singing show tunes at Sidetrack with the domestic partner and a steady parade of friends who bounced in and out of our evening.

Plus I went to what was perhaps the only pre-pride brunch in the city that had three straight pregnant women on the guest list. Unfortunately, only one picture has been uploaded to Facebook so far and nobody in it is pregnant. At least not to my knowledge:

But I did take two artistic portraits at the brunch with my iPhone that will undoubtedly sell for thousands of dollars at my photography retrospective auction in the years following my untimely artists’ death. I have titled them for your convenience so you can place your bids more easily from the catalogue:

Pride Brunch with Cat 1

Pride Brunch with Cat 2

What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

2010-06-25T15:27:00.000-05:00

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes, when entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what the Christian hate industry works so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay.

We’re proud because more and more, we are able to live our lives openly and joyfully without fear of losing our jobs, losing our housing, losing our families and losing our lives.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our increasingly venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world is starting to notice and respect us and emulate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because this weekend we’ll celebrate with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, attitude queens and you’d-never-know-they-were-queens queens, and together we can see through the “pride” in our parade and enjoy the underlying Pride in our parade.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so much to be proud of.

The Internet is for Gary Coleman stories

2010-06-18T16:21:00.005-05:00

For those of you not versed in the canon of high culture, there is a Tony-award-winning musical from times of yore that weaves stories of love, betrayal, understanding and redemption across socioeconomic and ethnic lines, all told against a backdrop of poverty and despair in a New York tenement. Much like Les Misérables, the show explores these themes through the characters caught in their mighty vortices, giving them both sympathy and dignity while taking groundbreaking liberties with the conventions of the musical theater genre.

The show is, of course, Avenue Q. And in its very early scenes, as its characters are introduced and defined through tales of their abject suffering, we meet the most pathetic, fragile creature of the entire dramatis personae: Gary Coleman

Yes, that Gary Coleman, whose first couplets are so full of pathos and heartbreak it almost pains me to quote them here for you. But I will anyway:

I’m Gary Coleman
From TV’s Diff’rent Strokes.
I made a lotta money
That got stolen by my folks.
Now I’m broke and I’m the butt
Of everyone’s jokes.

In the show, Gary Coleman is played by an actor who is obviously not the actual Gary Coleman. Probably because the Avenue Q creators knew the actual Gary Coleman would eventually die and actors are easier to replace than Gary Coleman.

Anyway, when the domestic partner and I started dating and we’d spend our days listening to Broadway cast albums together—as all gay couples do, so do not judge—the domestic partner eventually turned to me and asked me if Gary Coleman received royalties for being portrayed every night so realistically in a Tony-award-winning musical of love, betrayal, understanding and redemption told against a backdrop of poverty and despair in a New York tenement.

And I, the keeper of all empirical truth, was for once unable to answer his question. For once.

But suddenly the Gary Coleman question became our shorthand for all things unanswerable. Like How do you throw away a garbage can? Or Why is Rush Limbaugh allowed to marry four times while we’re not allowed to marry even once? Or Why is Sarah Palin allowed to live?

So when we bought our Two Bedroomed Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie® Dream Condo and started painting and repairing and upgrading it before we moved in, I posted a picture of Gary Coleman in our so-palatial-it-has-its-own-ZIP-code master bedroom closet after I finished painting it just to give the domestic partner a giggle the first time he saw my finished handiwork.

And it worked!

But eventually we installed elfa shelving and stuffed the closet with the billions of dollars’ worth of designer clothing our celebrity designer friends give us when they use our TBTBOFBDC for their couture photo shoots, and Gary Coleman got moved to the mirror over the sink in our ultra-plush, members-only-spa-like master bathroom. Where we quickly stopped even noticing he was there as he started to wither and curl from years of exposure to shower steam and high-end hair product. Which is kind of like a sad metaphor for his career, but we were too busy trying on couture to really care.

But then Gary Coleman actually died.

And now that we’ve started re-noticing the picture on our mirror, it seems cavalier bordering on cruel to take it down and throw it away. Though we probably eventually will, just as soon as we finally turn the paint chips you see in the background of this picture into actual paint that we actually put on the walls:

In the mean time, I leave you with a charming pastiche number from Act 1 of Avenue Q that’s not sung by the Gary Coleman character, but most of his songs are pretty lame and unquotable so who cares? Enjoy:

I’m not wearing underwear today.
No I’m not wearing underwear today.
Not that you probably care
Much about my underwear.
Still nonetheless I gotta say
That I’m not wearing underwear today.

10,000 miles is a long way to run

2010-06-15T19:35:00.005-05:00

Especially when it’s really only 205 miles. But 36 hours of living like circus people in a crowded van with occasional breaks to run lonely 10Ks through oppressive heat or inky blackness has a way of feeling as long and arduous as a swim from Maine to Hawaii. Or a walk from Hollywood to Argentina. Or an emotional trek from Palin to reality.

In any case, the 205-mile relay from Madison to Chicago last weekend was at once exhausting, sweaty, painful, smelly as a bucket of goat butts and quite possibly the second awesomist running experience of my life … right after crossing my first marathon finish line.

Our team of 12 runners was divided into two vans, and we hopscotched all over Wisconsin and Illinois through 36 transition points, dropping off runners, picking up runners, grabbing showers in college dorms, grabbing sleep in 40-minute shifts on the van floor, changing clothes in front of each other, checking cell phones for updates on runners’ pace times, posting pictures on Facebook through the magic of iPhone technology, chugging more Gatorade than can possibly be healthy for anyone … and generally having a freaking amazing time collectively running a whopping 205 miles from 7:00 am Friday to 7:00 pm Saturday.

Since my van held runners 7 through 12, we didn't have to be at the start line in Madison so early on Friday so we took our leisurely time Friday morning getting up to just somewhere near Madison. Here we are at transition point 6 waiting for runner number 6 from van number 1 (got all that?) to reach us so we could start our half of the adventure:

I was runner number 9, which put my first leg of the race at 2:00 in the afternoon on what ended up being a swelteringly hot day. Here I am waiting for the baton—which was really a slap strap that wraps around your wrist—before my little Gatorade-distended belly and I began our 8.5 miles through what you can see is a pretty shade-free section of oh-my-holy-crap-on-a-fart-colored-cracker-is-that-hot rural Wisconsin:

My team found me around my sixth mile to reload my no-I'm-not-in-my-third-trimester-of-gestating-triplets tummy with water and Gatorade before sending me back into the oppressive heat:
As I continued slogging through my little sun-drenched nightmare, I found myself wishing that a local hunter might mistake me for a deer trying desperately to masquerade as a human by wearing hunter-orange running shorts and shoot me in the head for my hubris. But I had no such luck.

By the time I passed my grotesquely sweaty slap strap to runner number 10, I was sunburned and delirious, but already enamored of the epic adventure I had embarked on:

Once we got through our 12th runner, we passed the baton (as it were) back to van number 1 and used our six hours of down time to scrub the stink off us in a college dormitory and grab some dinner at a local carb emporium. The rules for the relay clearly stated that all runners had to wear reflective vests when the sun was down with no exceptions so we dutifully wore them to wolf down our bowls of pasta and plates of pizza:

I have no photos of my 2:00 am 6.5-mile run in my reflective getup and my headlamp (which felt ridiculous but ended up being an awesome accessory for running down rural highways in pitch blackness) but the weather had turned blessedly cool and I was positively euphoric through my entire hour with my slap-strap baton wrapped securely around my midnight-blackened wrist.

My van finished our night shift at dawn and we used our down time to nap in whatever configurations we could manage in the van, near the van and perhaps even under the van. And by morning we found ourselves waiting to start up our third shift in a school parking lot with hundreds of other team vans (this one time ... at van camp ...) while storms rolled in and threatened to shut us down completely.

Which they did. And they did. Except we never really saw the storms. But we got tons of tweets from the race organizers telling us to stay in our vans until we got the go-ahead to resume the relay. So of course we used the down time to organize all the crap we had stashed in the back of our van:

The race came back to life after two hours, and my last 5.5-mile leg along a manicured suburban nature trail at 2:00 was another study in glorious weather and runner's euphoria. And by the time I passed off my final baton, I had thankfully burned off the Gatorade bloat in my poor little tummy:

And now all that's left is the memories. And the few pictures we took. And of course the blog post. But now I have a new hobby! And since the team I ran on this year was a corporate team of some friends who are moving to freaking Australia in a few months, I've already emailed all my fun runner friends to build our own team for next year. And we're going to have a cool team name ("Princess Sparklepony and the Li'l Glitterpickles" is currently my working title) and cool shirts and cool vans and even more Gatorade bloat and goatbutt stink and it's gonna be awesome and I'm so excited I can't wait for June so I can do it all over again!

When to think of me as insane

2010-06-10T11:52:00.001-05:00

7:00 am Friday
I pile into a rental van with a driver, two friends and three people I’ve never met to trek to our starting point in the 200-mile, 36-hour Milwaukee-to-Chicago relay. Our team has 12 runners, but our van holds runners 7 through 12 so we don’t have to be all the way to Milwaukee for the 7:30 am start. Which means I get to sleep in my own bed instead of a van with six strangers the night before I run.

2:00 pm Friday
I’m runner number 9, and this is roughly when I start my first leg of the race … give or take a couple hours depending on how fast runners 1 through 8 get through their first legs. I have to pound out 8.40 miles on this leg. And thanks to my mega-double-hella-wicked sinus infection—which after 15 days is finally 99% gone—I’ve done exactly two training runs—maxing out at 6.34 miles last night!—to build up to what promises to be a freaking painful hour-and-a-half-plus of running in what promises to be freaking endless rain. And since I have what we will politely call the sense of direction of Sarah Palin trying to find her own ass with a flashlight, there is a very good chance I could miss whatever directional signs are placed along the route and find myself frolicking among Adam and Eve and the dinosaurs in cerebral Kentucky’s venerated Creation Museum without much effort. For this, I am actually nervous about a run. Which hasn’t happened since I ran my first half marathon almost 10 years ago.

1:30 am Saturday
Eleven runners later—assuming Adam and Eve don’t run over me riding their dinosaur to church—this is roughly when I start my second leg of the race. After sleeping and stinking and politely trying not to fart in a van full of sweaty, rain-soaked runners I barely even know, I get to leave the safe confines of my pleather bucket seat and run 6.46 miles somewhere in the wee early hours of Saturday. In anywhere from a 30-50% chance of rain. But it’s 1.94 fewer miles I have to get lost and wander off to dance to Quisling John’s music at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth temporary wedding.

12:30 pm Saturday
And then I’m back to running in the hot afternoon sun, assuming all the predicted rain clears up. So I’ll either have heat stroke or wet-shoe blisters to complement my unrelenting swamp ass. The start time on my last leg actually has a massive give-or-take window on our runner spreadsheet to accommodate the giant time variables involved in propelling 12 people over 175 miles through 33 legs to get me to the start of my last 5.86 miles … which is the one number that’s fixed on our spreadsheet.

4:30 pm Saturday
This is our predicted finish time, in a Chicago lakefront park that’s literally stumbling distance from my house. Or a short plane ride from the BP Gulf Coast Aquatic Preserve. Depending on my state of mind—and level of hydration—I may actually drink some alcohol to celebrate what will be either my coolest or my most horrifying runner experience to date. But either way, I get two T-shirts out of the deal. (I need more T-shirts!) And maybe some new lifelong friends. Unless they accidentally breathe in the van after I run.

One week later
I start my hardcore training for the New York City Marathon. Can I get a WOOT?

There is so much going through my head right now

2010-06-07T08:20:00.003-05:00

Most of which are the ingredients in crystal meth, apparently. I’ve been fighting the mother and father and pit bull and vindictive, murderous neighbor of all sinus infections for more than a week now. I finally broke down and admitted it was more than allergies late last week, and my doctor put me on four medications for it:

• Z-Pak to kill the sinus infection
• Flonase to shrink the polyp (which is such a pretty word) in my sinuses that is preventing things from draining properly
• Claritin D to start my own meth lab
• Ibuprofen to mask the pain that the other three meds are obviously incapable of overcoming

Have you tried to buy Claritin D lately? You have to go through a freaking background check—at least in Illinois—complete with a scan of your driver’s license, a series of questions and a signed statement that yes indeed you are suffering from horrifying head pain and not instead planning to blow up your toothless family in your cousin's dented trailer as you try to make enough meth to fund an afternoon at McDonald’s because all you are legally allowed to buy is 10 pills.

I’m happy to report that five days after firing up my own personal meth lab—ahem, combination drug therapy—I can finally function in polite society without hoping I stumble on an armed robbery so I can provoke the gunman into shooting me in the head.

I even ran 4.5 miles on Saturday, though the angry monkeys having a pickaxe fight in my skull were not happy with all the jostling and they banged their rusty implements of war on the side of my head right above my right ear every time my feet hit the ground. But I have to run this 200-mile relay on Friday so I had no choice but to soldier on and get some miles under my belt. Monkeys be damned!

I also haven’t missed a workout through any of this—vanity before comfort!—though there were a few days where the exertion of bench pressing 225 lbs (a number he worked modestly into his blog post) was enough to fill my throbbing head with images of brains and mucous and freakishly inflamed sinus tissue (and polyps! because you can never say that word too often!) splattered all over the gym walls. Polyps!

But! I’m happy to report that today I feel about 85% better, enough so that I’ve promised myself I won’t complain about the pain to my long-suffering colleagues today at work. You people, though? Different story. Please re-read this blog post 173 more times until your brain can approximate the pain mine has endured for the last 10 days.

Bad Idea Bears

2010-05-25T08:11:00.000-05:00

I haven’t even run for a bus since I took off my specially fitted, custom-orthotics-enhanced running shoes at the end of the Chicago Marathon in October.

So when a friend asked me to be on his 12-person team to run a 36-hour, 200-mile relay from Madison to Chicago three weeks from now, I wisely said no … though I told him if he got desperate he should ask me again and we could talk.

I never heard back from him, but then a different friend asked me to be on his team … and then he asked again … and again.

And I thought about it long and hard. I weighed the pros (bragging rights, cool race shirt, forced cardio just in time for spring, make new friends) and the cons (no foundation of training, 15 new pounds of bodyweight [good bodyweight, just for the record] to propel through space and time, sleeping in a van with strangers, pooping who knows where) and I decided against it.

But then I did the math. I’d be expected to run three eight-ish-mile legs with breaks as long as it takes 11 other team members to run eight-ish miles each. And I can usually ramp up to eight miles within my first month of marathon training each spring. Plus it’s a hellofa way to kick off marathon training for the summer.

So I said yes. Hesitantly.

And my initial burst of regret tinged with slight panic was ameliorated when I received the runner breakdown and discovered that as runner number 9, I was responsible for three legs of only 6.5 miles each. Which is totally doable. I think.

So last night I started training. I dug out my specially fitted, custom-orthotics-enhanced running shoes, unlocked my hamstrings, stripped down to a pair of shorty running shorts (hey, I didn’t eat right and get plenty of sleep and lift weights to put on 15 new pounds for my health) … and realized as I headed out the door that I hadn’t charged my grotesquely expensive GPS running watch. But I churned out three-plus miles with relative ease … though my quads and abs made sure I knew that my last mile was very unfamiliar territory after six months of enduring nothing but squats and crunches.

And when I got home and scrubbed the stink off so as not to repel my poor domestic partner into the more redolent arms of a homeless junkie, I sat down to read through the event rules and other runner information. And I was shocked to discover the complete anarchy under which the race will be run:

Obscenity Rule: any team vehicle that is decorated with obscene images or representations, use of obscene language Warning for 1st offense; 2nd offense; disqualification.
Urinating/defecating or the appearance of urinating on public or private property that is part of the course including, but not limited to Transition Areas, will result in Immediate Disqualification

Seriously. If the relay organizing people can’t be bothered to follow basic rules of grammar and capitalization, I can’t guarantee I won’t loudly announce what I’m doing when I shit on the side of the road.

How to survive the dentist

2010-05-19T14:31:00.001-05:00

1. Pee. Being trapped for more than an hour with an entire Teamsters union plus all their industrial-grade tooth-pulverizing tools crammed in your mouth is not the time to discover your bladder is painfully full. So take a moment to make a pre-emptive pee before you climb in the chair.

2. Sit still. Apparently I spent the early moments of my filling-replacement procedure on Monday wiggling my feet to distract myself from the fact that four adult human hands plus two suction tubes plus an assortment of super-glue-strength bonding compounds plus a rock-boring drill borrowed from the Manhattan subway expansion project were wedged in my delicate little mouth. I wiggled so much that my dentist’s assistant eventually had to ask me nicely but firmly to sit still. Like a big boy.

3. Breathe through your nose. Despite recent advancements in suction technology, water and pulverized tooth bits and probably clumps of leftover pudding from a nearby grade-school lunch program will puddle in the back of your mouth as your cracked old fillings are being drilled out of your head. Resist the urge to think about how easily this gunk could become a fatal choking hazard. Or to valiantly compare yourself to a waterboarding victim.

4. Don’t bite your tongue. It will be numb to the point you won’t even be sure you even have a tongue. Especially when you’re pumped full of enough Novocain to mask the horror of two filling removals. Keep in mind that your teeth are designed to chew meat. And your tongue is meat. So keep whatever bit of it you’re aware that you still have away from your molars.

5. Reward yourself with something nice when you’re done. My dentist is across the street from the Mac store. I went home Monday night with two new fillings, partial control over my lower face and one of these pretty kitties:

Three ways I'm celebrating Syttende Mai

2010-05-17T10:54:00.002-05:00

1. Forgetting to wear red. Though there is a red star on my fancy reversible belt buckle and my trendy shoes have red detailing. For those of you inclined to oppress us Norwegians with your selfish ignorance of our rich, lutefisk-and-sweater-based culture, Syttende Mai—literally “The Seventeenth of May”—is Norwegian Independence Day, which celebrates the day Norway declared itself to be an independent nation from those oppressive Swedes in 1814. I have no idea if wearing red is any official way to celebrate this day, but I’ve always worn a red shirt on May 17 so I could be my own one-man Borgertoget. Except today, obviously. But I am wearing a pale gray shirt that pays tribute to the pale white palette of Norwegian foods and food-covering sauces. So there’s that. Ett språk er aldri nok!

2. Getting two fillings replaced. I haven’t had a cavity since junior high school, so these dull silver bad boys in my molars have to be almost 30 years old. My dentist says they’re cracked, and since the gums around these teeth always bleed when I floss, I’m inclined to think it’s time to go under the drill again. Traditionally Norwegian Independence Day is not celebrated by attacking Norwegian-Americans with drills, but replacing fillings carries with it a high probability of wearing a paper bib with blood on it. Which equals red. Which equals Norwegian pride. Vær vennlig og snakk saktere!

3. Writing my monthly blog post. Seriously, I have no idea why I’ve been so not-bloggy lately. I’ve had a ton of adventures to write about. And tons of snarky thoughts I wanted to share. (Sarah Palin was in Chicago last week! Which means puppies died and blood ran out of our faucets and thinking people got scabby rashes on our asses.) And I’ve even enjoyed two stay-all-day-in-front-of-the-TV days in the last month. Which means I’ve had time to write. Or time to be a complete vegetable. But since vegetables are good for you, the TV won. Luftputefartøyet mitt er fullt av ål!

I'm back from ... um ... Europe!

2010-05-07T17:51:00.003-05:00

I made all kinds of awesome blog posts and posted all kinds of awesome pictures while I was there. But they were in … um … Euros so they didn’t translate to most American computers. Sorry if you had gotten the impression that I’d just abandoned my blog in favor of sitting around watching TV for weeks and weeks. Because I’d never get that lazy about blogging. Ahem.

Anyway!

I have three huge announcements to make:

1. I turned 42 while you weren’t looking. My bosoms have officially drooped and gone dry. I’m currently tucking them in my foundation garments so they don’t bounce around and hurt people when I walk.

2. I stopped drinking soda. Because my trainer told me to. About ten thousand times. I had my last bubbly, delicious glass of chemical refreshment the night before my birthday. And I think I actually had withdrawal symptoms for the first week. I’m a reformed junkie! Tomorrow will mark three weeks of sobriety, and I think I deserve some kind of medal or coin or dead hooker or whatever it is they give out to mark such milestones in other reformed-junkie support groups.

3. I switched from plastic gym water to metal gym water. My trusty plastic water bottle had seen me through two marathons and almost two years of lifting. It was really just a Powerade bottle I hadn’t thrown away because it had a built-in grip that was easy to hold through the sweatiest runs and a wide mouth that was easy to refill from any drinking fountain or hose or municipal toilet. Despite my best attempts to ignore the obvious, though, the inside of it had started to smell as sour as George Rekers’ boy-hooker-stained underpants. And I kept stumbling on more and more scary reports that my well-used bottle was already leaching polyethelene phthalates into my uterus and giving my unborn children mushy little Palin brains. So I finally broke down and bought a non-fetus-deforming stainless steel bottle in a hypermasculine gunmetal gray color to complement my hypermasculine demeanor and gunmetal gray pallor. Here is a candid shot of the two bottles meeting right before the old one went to the “retirement home” next to our garbage can. It just puts a lump of heartbreaking sorrow in my polyethelene phthalate-drenched uterus:

P.S. How awesome is our toaster? It has a digital toast setting … in a hypermasculine blue!
P.P.S. If I ever formed a drag band, I would totally call it Polyethelene Phthalates and the Estrogenic Compounds.
P.P.P.S. I wasn’t really in Europe. But I totally have a girlfriend who lives in Canada.

Underpants Gnomes

2010-04-21T18:19:00.004-05:00

I'll be stripping down to my fancy underwear again this year to raise money for the Chicago Gay Men's Chorus' Big Package Auction fundraiser at Sidetrack on May 8. I don't know if that will inspire you to show up and bid on our fabulous travel/spa/entertainment/merchandise packages or stay home and hide behind the couch with a Bible and a can of mace.

Either way, here's this year's promo video featuring underwear-clad footage of last year's event. I might also appear in it as as one of the implied-to-be-naked package-holding dudes who flash in and out of the background. Clearly, I can be flattered into stripping down for anything that involves standing around in my underwear in a bar.

We’re back from our Broadway overdose!

2010-04-14T17:42:00.001-05:00

And I owe you reviews of all the shows we saw and catty comments about all the celebrities we ran into.

And I’m fully aware that by “I owe you” I actually mean “I intend to write but you have no obligation to read or even care about” but “I owe you” sounds more like my ramblings provide actual value, which helps offset my crippling self-image issues about the mole on my foot. Plus it makes that first sentence easier to embroider on a sampler.

In the mean time, I leave you with a picture of the dog we stayed with in New York. This is Q:

Q lives with a handsome college friend of mine and his equally handsome husband in their fabulous Art Deco sunken-living-room-and-arched-doorway Chelsea apartment. And Q has a bone. And he wants to make sure that you know he has a bone, so he shows it to you from many different angles and with many different grunts and whimpers so that there is no chance that you will miss the fact that he has a bone. He doesn’t want you to tug on it or take it from him or throw it for him to fetch. He just wants to make absolutely sure that you know he. has. a. bone. Plus if you take him for a walk in Chelsea, he will attract legions of muscular, well-moisturized men who will want to say hi to you. Bone!

Adventures in unplanned retail

2010-04-08T19:41:00.002-05:00

Behold our new refrigerator/freezer:

It actually makes cold! Unlike our old refrigerator/freezer, which stopped accomplishing cold-related tasks a week ago … just in time to ruin the Easter aspic. Which we didn’t make because we don’t celebrate Easter and I’m not even entirely sure what’s in aspic. But if we were Easter aspic eaters our non-cold-making refrigerator/freezer would have left us in a fine how-do-you-do.

Now avert your gaze from its fine shiny surface long enough to notice how it sits nestled next to a wall. (A wall covered in artifacts of my Norwegian heritage, which makes it a cool wall. But that’s not the point of this paragraph.) Now try to picture our old side-by-side refrigerator/freezer sitting next to that wall. Now try to picture us opening the left side-by-side door about a quarter of the way for three freaking years because that’s as far as it would open because that’s what happens when you’re a moron developer who designs a kitchen in such a way that you put a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer right next to a goddamn wall.

Thankfully, the moron developer installed a cheap-ass side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that lasted a whopping six years before it had to be replaced by a sturdy, EnergyStar-rated, non-side-by-side refrigerator. So though we hadn’t really wanted to drop more than a thousand dollars on appliances in the week before we drop a couple thousand dollars on a whirlwind Sondheim festival on Broadway—we leave in the morning!—we can at least open our goddamned freezer when we get back.

You may remember that we also had to buy a fancy new washer/dryer in February when the cheap-ass one from the cheap-ass developer stopped making motion and heat. And nobody wants to buy just one unplanned, unbudgeted-for major appliance in a three-month period. Nobody. Thankfully, we bought them from the same place. And thankfully and the domestic partner has the kind of balls I lack—the kind of balls that get you a sizeable discount on your second major appliance purchase in three months when you remind the lady on the phone that you bought the first one at full price.

So we leave for our Anyone Can Whistle/A Little Night Music/Sondheim on Sondheim tour secure in the knowledge that the milk will probably still be cold and the meat will probably still be pink when we get back. Even though the credit cards will still be very, very warm.

Top 10 reasons I haven't updated my blog in decades

2010-04-05T15:02:00.004-05:00

1. I’ve been kickin’ it old skool
I have no idea what that actually means, but it sounds younger and hipper than I’ve been lollygagging around.

2. I’ve discovered Words with Friends
It’s the iPhone version of Scrabulous, which was Facebook’s legally-squashed-by-Hasbro version of Scrabble. And it is now my #1 favorite way to be unproductive. I usually have 10 to 15 games going at a time, most of which I play on the bus to and from work (which is where I used to read Time, Newsweek and The New Yorker so I’m now so far behind on my current events that I ask you to let me know the moment Lincoln gets home from the theater). It’s also been a really good way to tune out Judge Judy, the #1 home-TV-watching guilty pleasure of a certain domestic partner who shall not be named here. If you want to play with me, open a game against NofoJake … and send me a message to let me know who you are!

3. We’ve been cleaning house
And by “cleaning house” I mean vacuuming up colonies of dust bunnies that literally looked like mountains of pillow stuffing under our bed, schlepping entire carloads of clothes, furniture and electronics to the Brown Elephant, and sorting through mountains of paperwork from banks, investments, insurance companies and our many ceramic figurine collector clubs.

4. I have spring allergies
Speaking of dust bunnies, my spring allergies have kicked my ass this year like a bully on a gayground. They knocked me out so hard this weekend I took a four-hour nap on Saturday and a six-hour nap on Sunday in addition to the eight hours of sleep I got every night. And I’m still stuffy and sleepy and cranky and about eleven other potential dwarf names. But I just took a Claritin so I’m on my way to being Claritin Clear™! At least I should be at some unspecified time that is presumably in the near future, according to the vague promise on the packaging.

5. I’m shaving my legs
As my trainer inches me closer and closer to my giant-bodybuilder vanity fantasies, I have actually started piling on some measurable muscle mass. (Alliteration runs rampant!) I’m currently up to 205 pounds (from the 195 base weight I’ve maintained for the last 10ish years, give or take the months on either side of a marathon). Most of my new weight seems to be in my legs, which are actually so big I can’t wear two of my favorite jeans anymore. Woot! And now that I feel like I’m actually getting big, I’m further feeding into my giant-bodybuilder vanity fantasies by shaving my legs like all the big kids do at the gym. And shaving meaty legs takes a freakishly huge amount of time. Plus when you’re naturally hairy you have to maintain your shave virtually every day. Plus when you’re naturally pasty you have to slather on self-tanner all the time so you don’t scare children and interfere with the light refraction on the Hubble Telescope.

6. We’ve been tackling long-overdue home projects
There were so many not-quite-dones on our unofficial to-do list that I finally typed everything in a two-page document, organized it by the rooms in our house and taped it on the kitchen cabinet were we can be reminded of our self-imposed obligations every time we feel the urge to collapse unproductively on the couch with a jar of marshmallow fluff and a spoon. By my unofficial count, we’re a good 5% through the list, but that’s farther than we’d be if we didn’t have a list. Our biggest accomplishment this weekend: We finally hung the curtains in our guest bedroom, which will be occupied by my family when they come to stay with us for my birthday.

7. I’m turning twice the legal drinking age
Speaking of my birthday, I’ll be a whopping 42 in less than two weeks. Which means I’m too old and tired to deal with newfangled things like “blogs” and “technology” and “jazz” and “Sarah Palin.”

8. I keep getting blood tests
One of the fun parts of getting older is watching your body slowly fall apart. My body’s newest trick: low thyroid output and high prolactin output. Which means new medications. And endless blood tests to monitor how the medications are (or aren’t) working. I’m so full of needle punctures I’m holier than the pope! Especially because I don’t help priests fuck little kids!

9. I’m planning a birthday party
If you live in Chicago, come to show tunes at Sidetrack on April 18 and look for us near the Liza cake in the south bar. We’re starting around 4:00 and going until we’re all jittery from carbs, sugar, fat and Dreamgirls clips. But be warned: This is a show-tune birthday, which requires show-tune flair. So to show respect for my age, you need to show up in your Cats T-shirt or your Les Miz button or your Damn Yankees cap or your A Chorus Line legwarmers or you can simply re-create Barbra's orange-and-fur “Don't Rain on My Parade” ensemble. Or if you want to go low-key, just show up with your best friend Stephen Sondheim.

10. I’m a tranny hot mess
Again, I have no idea what that means. But it sounds younger and hipper than I’m too gender-confused, sweaty and rumpled to write in my blog.

Corrupting the youth

2010-03-26T12:39:00.007-05:00

My sweet, adorable nephew just turned 11 and he finally got a cell phone from his tyrannic, cruel, cell-phone-withholding parents. And the domestic partner and I paid for a year’s worth of text messaging so he could keep up with his little buddies … and so he could pester us with hourly updates about his life. At dinner! Waking up! Going 2 school!

I pretty much live by text messaging. It’s fast, it’s convenient, it’s not disruptive when ~~I should be paying attention in meetings~~ I’m on the bus and it requires a bare minimum of human interaction. Text messaging may very well be the perfect husband! But until now I texted only with adults whose adult voices and adult senses of humor came through every time I read their texts.

Which is why it’s so weird to be texting with a kid. Even though I know my nephew better than I know my adult friends, I just don’t hear his squeaky little voice in the texts he sends me. For some reason, our text interactions feel abstract and clinical instead of warm and conversational to me. And it’s not just because he’s the only person I text with who actually uses doofy texting contractions without irony. U r the bst uncle evr!

But that’s changing.

The nephew and his sister and his parents are currently at the end of a whirlwind spring break trip to DC. And he’s been texting me minute-by-minute updates of the sites they’ve visited. At the natl hstry museum. Just came out of the house of Rep. In line at Arlington!

Like a conscientious uncle—and a person who freaking loves DC—I’ve tried to respond to all his texts with educational information or leading questions or suggestions for fun things to do. Like my insistence that they all sit on the top steps of the Lincoln Memorial and take in the gorgeous view of the Mall below. It’s seriously my favorite spot in all of DC.

And the nephew has done a great job of holding up his end of the conversation … especially when he told me they'd stopped to have dinner on their drive east to DC:

What 11-year-old says I know, right? HOW CUTE IS THAT? But I still don’t hear his squeaky little voice in that conversation.

And I totally don’t hear his squeaky little kid voice in today’s exchange, which simultaneously makes me laugh and wonder when he got clever enough to keep up with his corrupting uncle who is surely going to whatever circle of hell is reserved people who have no respect for the dead or the theater:

It becomes more official by the minute

2010-03-23T15:35:00.003-05:00

I'm running New York this fall. Woot! And now it's officially too late to change my mind about Chicago. Not that I would have anyway. But still.

We managed to avoid the paparazzi on our cruise!

2010-03-22T08:53:00.001-05:00

When you live the glamorous life of a world-famous blogger, ubiquitous celebrity spokesperson and A-list gadfly, you get really good at avoiding the paparazzi that hound you everywhere you go. Or so I hear. I mean it's a constant struggle.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard. And we somehow managed to avoid pretty much every camera on our cruise. And since I carried my camera with me everywhere but used it to take exactly 15 pictures all week—three of which turned out dark and blurry—there isn't a lot of photographic evidence we were even on the good ship Solstice.

But! Thanks to the miracle of the Internets and the stalker photo-stealing capabilities of Facebook, I've been able to assemble a bunch of other people's photos—some of which actually include us—into a picture directory I can call my own!

So let's cruise (ahem) through our borrowed trip memories, shall we?

First of all, here is the beautiful Celebrity Solstice, our home away from land for a whole week. See the row of orange lifeboats? Our private balcony—and now that we've sampled the charmed private-balcony life of people who scrimp and pinch so they can afford to sail in rooms with private balconies, we are never going back to the prison-like confines of an interior stateroom—was one floor above the space between the leftmost two lifeboats:

Before we set sail, we were docked in a space crammed with other cruise ships, including this one that sounds like it might be expensive:

Gay boys on gay cruises are compelled to decorate their doors in gay ways. I think we succeeded gaily:

We set sail the night of the Academy Awards, which were broadcast on a giant screen in the giant theater on the ship with a couch full of sassy drag queens and raunchy comedians sitting below the screen making catty comments. Here's my husband and our fabulous friends Curtis and Chris hanging out in the theater in the moments before the broadcast ... and before we discovered just how excruciatingly painful unrehearsed commentary can be, even when it comes from sassy drag queens and raunchy comedians:

The cafe on the ship is open 24 hours a day, and—in contrast to the formal dining room—it's very casual. Here's what a gay cruise looks like on the first morning. And for those of you who aren't gay, here's our secret for always looking so young and fresh:

Our first port of call was Coco Cay in the Bahamas. We couldn't pull our massive ship up to the island, so we had to drop anchor a couple hundred feet (or knots or ripples or whatever unit seafolk use to measure distance across water) away from shore and ride smallish boats called tenders to get to land. Here's the view of our mighty ship from one of our tenders:

Coco Cay, though lovely, has a distinctively Disney flair to it. I'm a huge Disney fan, so I'm not saying this as an insult. But I have a hard time thinking we experienced Coco Cay the way the pirates did:

Here's the view from our tender as it pulled up to the boat slip on the island. Notice how easily I throw nautical terms like tender, slip and aaaarrrrrgh! into this blog post.

Coco Cay beach is stunningly lovely:

And here's the view from our beach chairs:

Back on the ship, we had our first themed party: the Dog Tag T-Dance. A t-dance, which is often spelled tea dance, is just an afternoon dance where you're as likely to find tea as you are to find teabaggers and their misspelled anti-~~black people~~ Obama signs. Here's a crowd shot I stole from someone's Facebook page. It illustrates nicely how useful my tattoo is when I'm trying to find myself in photos of giant crowds of men:

Here's another crowd shot I stole from the t-dance. It contains two of the five guys I drooled over all week but never got the stones to walk up and say hi to:

Our second port of call was St. Barth, which, like practically every island in the Caribbean, features charming architecture echoing a history of Dutch, English, French and/or Spanish occupation; stores dedicated to selling overpriced jewelry and dustables to tourists; pre-Revolutionary buildings with pre-Revolutionary cannons in front of them; and giant nautical objets d'tourist that you can use to lend drama to your vacation photos:

St. Barth has dramatic mountains and huge bays filled with giant private yachts. We asked a local to take a picture of us in front of both as though we were mega-wealthy yacht-and-mountain-owning moguls. But he cropped us too tight so for all you know this picture was taken in front of a flooded Walmart parking lot in South Carolina:

We tendered back to the ship in choppy water after sunset. Here's the best my intrepid little camera could do to capture the majesty and grandeur of the good ship Solstice without aid of natural light or terra firma:

Our next t-dance was disco themed. And the gays NEVER pass up a chance to dress in ridiculous polyester:

We met a lot of fun new friends on the ship, and we went out of our way to coordinate dinners with everyone in the ship's grand dining room. There was only one night where we couldn't scare up dinner dates so we asked to be seated at a table for four and play dinner-companion roulette with another couple. Unfortunately, we didn't specify that we wanted to be seated with an English-speaking couple, so we and our German dinner companions spent a whole hour gesturing at our food and making nummy sounds at each other. I broke out in a cold sweat from the awkwardness of it all. But! Most of our dinners were more fun, like this one with all our new best coastal friends who hail from New York and San Francisco:

Only on a gay cruise can you get away with wearing cheesy matchy-matchy shirts. Justin got to be Partner A because he's bigger and he can beat me up:

My favorite part of the gay cruises is hanging out by the pool and meeting new people. Here we are with our new best friend Ron from New York, who has actual Broadway connections. Which is like catnip to us. Sparkly, marabou-trimmed catnip. We might as well be posing with Sondheim himself here:

There is goofy poolside entertainment on the ship every afternoon, like spoofs of Project Runway or Dancing with the Stars. Those of us in the know stake out good deck chairs so we can watch all the goofiness without standing on our tippy-toes. And once in a while we get captured in strangers' photos that get posted on Facebook:

Here's a closeup of that last shot, which shows me sitting tantalizingly close to some distractingly attractive men:

Gay boys in speedos socializing in a giant pool. It truly is heaven on earth. Except for the love handles that glow so loudly from my lower back:

More socializing in the pool. More proof that I don't suck in my stomach hard enough when cameras are around:

The last t-dance of the week is called Splash, and it has a nautical/poolside theme. Unfortunately our cruise wasn't the epitome of warm Caribbean weather, and people actually bundled up instead of parading around in skimpy costumes for this dance. But not us! Because we had adorable outfits!

There are huge themed parties almost every night on the ship. We packed fabulous costumes to wear to the FantaSea party and the Lost Island party, but they started too late and we were too tired to go to them. But we did stay up past our bedtime for the week-ending White Party, where people dress any way they want as long as they're in white. And our $25 white nerd costumes were pretty fabulous, despite the fact that my pocket protector kept sliding down like it was some kind of kitten-sized messenger bag:

Atlantis, the company that charters these cruises and makes them fabulously gay, knows how to throw a party ... with lasers and fog machines and massive speakers and top-name deejays. Here's a shot of the White Party crowd dancing away to thunderous music on a gorgeous ship in the middle of the Caribbean:

And here's a shot taken without a flash, which shows all the cool laser effects:

The guy on the right went to my high school. I used to deliver his family's newspaper. He's five years older than I am but he looks 10 times younger and hotter. Life is so not fair:

I leave you with one more look at us in our fabulous White Party costumes as we flank our distractingly tattooed and distractingly hot stateroom neighbor:

And let me point out that micro-spray SPF is about as useful as a Sarah Palin opinion. I applied my micro-spray SPF 45 every 45 minutes or so on our cruise and I still turned bright red on the first day I was in the sun. Unfortunately, that's all the sunscreen we'd packed. But rest assured I'm going back to the thick goopy SPF 45 that's kept me reliably pasty white for all my smooth, relatively wrinkle-free years. Sunburns are for nerds.

We're back!

2010-03-14T16:49:00.003-05:00

But our luggage isn't. While we wait for it to be delivered so we can fire up the washing machine and start scrubbing all that sun-drenched happiness out of our cruisewear, I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that I was a big dork for carrying my camera around the whole damn trip but taking pictures with it exactly 15 times.

But!

We did get someone to take a picture of us in our fabulous costumes for the fabulous week-ending white party. And while everyone else on the ship dressed as angels or sparkleponies or tiny little underpants wearers or people in basic white garments, we very cleverly went as nerds, complete with white high socks, white support underpants, white bow ties, contrasting white-or-black taped glasses (because I couldn't find two pair of white ones), and clear pocket protectors (because I couldn't find white ones). But they were packed with brightly colored pencils! Arranged in the order of the rainbow! Because we're gay!

But! Nobody told me my pocket protector had slipped well below my shirt-pocket area for this picture, lending a saggy-bosom effect to my otherwise awesome nerd costume. Which made me look totally nerdy:

I'm in the process of stealing other people's cruise photos off the Internets so I can present you with a more complete Atlantis cruise photo portfolio ... and to give you the impression that I am actually capable of remembering to use my camera. Stay tuned!

Gratuitous Nipple Shot

2010-03-06T07:34:00.003-06:00

Here we are looking all macho and stuff in our adorable matching camo shorts (camo = très butch!) on last year's Atlantis cruise:
And we're about to go back for more! And compared to last year, this year really is all about the more: More adorable matching outfits! More tattoos! More body mass! More speedos! More gay!

We board the good ship Solstice in Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday and I'll go an entire week without access to blogger, facebook, gmail or joe.my.god. I just hope there's something to see or do on the ship to keep me entertained.

And I'll be sure to tell you all about it when I get back. Be good while we're gone.

I had planned to stand in place today

2010-03-04T08:31:00.000-06:00

But my calendar said March 4th

Dear dude who asked me for directions last night,

2010-03-03T14:01:00.001-06:00

By now you’ve figured out what a moron I am.

You wanted to go to the Palace Theater. You clearly could tell I’m a big ol’ homo because you singled me out of the entire crowd of people on the sidewalk you could have asked for directions to a big ol’ Versailles-inspired theater.

In my defense, I physically pointed you in the right direction: north and west. But I told you to walk up State and turn left on Roosevelt. It was only when we’d walked a good block away from each other that I realized Roosevelt was so not the street you wanted … because it was actually more than 10 blocks behind you.

So I sprinted back to find you and tell you breathlessly that you wanted to turn left on Lake. North on State and left on Lake.

You thanked me profusely and I headed back to my bus stop to play Words with Friends, my newest obsession on my iPhone.

And when the bus came and I got on it and we started driving north on State, it suddenly hit me. The Palace Theater is actually on Randolph.

The many ways I'm a douchebag

2010-03-01T18:26:00.000-06:00

I stole photos
My third and final Hustle up the Hancock is behind me! And I did OK for not doing any stair training. I routinely do 100 squats twice a week, so I was counting on my newly beefy quads to propel me up 94 flights of the John Hancock Center. But my quads started quivering around floor 15. And I made it the rest of the way on little more than get-this-over-with-ness and the highly appropriate Dreamgirls snippet that got stuck in my head and fit perfectly with the seven-step chunks of stairs I was climbing: STEP! MOVE it MOVE it MOVE it RIGHT to THE top STEP (walk walk walk) STEP! MOVE it MOVE it MOVE it, etc. I did the climb in 19:09 the last two years, but my utter lack of training this year added a minute and a half to my time. So I staggered to the top-floor observation deck yesterday in 20:36 and gladly accepted the fact that my Hustle days were over. And as a card-carrying douchebag, I have no intention of forking over any money for commemorative photos. So all I have to show you that I did the Hustle is this proof (you can tell it’s a proof because of the giant word PROOF angling up the middle) that I stole from the photo people’s web site:

I destroyed a rehearsal
Hustle up the Hancock is a fundraiser for the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, so there is cruel irony in the fact that all those people climbing all those seldom-used stairs kick up tons of metallic-tasting dust that we all suck deep into our lungs. And by the time I went to rehearsal two hours later, I had a hacking cough and a throat full of rust-flavored pudding that prevented me from doing important rehearsal things like controlling pitch and matching tones and blending with other singers. All of which become glaringly obvious when everyone is singing a cappella. So I was the sucky douchebag who brought the whole rehearsal down for two hours.

I hoarded food for invalids
A friend of ours is currently recovering at home from a pretty horrific encounter with a car. He’s immobilized in casts and for the next few weeks pretty dependent on his devoted husband and the parade of friends who drop in and demand to supply vast mountains of food and flowers and assistance. And in the spirit of making their lives easier I thought I’d make him good and farty. So I made a massive crock of my favorite turkey chili for them, of course skimming off a few bowls for myself before I delivered it to their door. Because I’m not that altruistic.

I made a child cry
The domestic partner and I spent Saturday afternoon teaching our nieces and their mother how to make pies. We let the girls use the kick-ass apple peeler my folks bought us and we got flour and sugar and other surprisingly sticky ingredients all over the kitchen, but we managed to make a latticed apple pie and a crumbly Dutch apple pie without searing any flesh off any body parts except for my left pinky. While we waited for the pies to bake, the girls bounced around the family room to Just Dance, a Wii game that shows you an abstract-y girl doing arm-wavy choreography to trendy pop songs. You’re supposed to dance along as though the girl were your mirror, and every time the Wii remote thingy detects that your arms are moving in the right ways, a little shoe or hot dog or other cartoon symbol that you chose to represent your badass self rains sparkle dust into a giant clear tube to measure how well you’re doing. Just like any Tuesday night in our bedroom! Everything was going fine until the girls decided to challenge us uncles to a dance-off. And, being a federally licensed choreographer, I naturally smoked my little 8-year-old challenger on my first try. And being a total heartless douchebag, I turned to her and said, “I smoked you!” Not “Good job!” or “High five!” or “You rock!” or “You obviously do a lot of practicing!” or “Can I try on your shoes?” No. I went right to the trash talk I always do with people who have mortgages. And the look on her face made me want to stab myself in the heart. Once I pulled the knife out of hers, of course. In my defense, we were dancing to one of the most heinous-anus abortions of pop music known to man: that “zig-a-zig-HA!” dreck by the Spice Girls. So I get a thousand points just for playing along. Plus I totally did smoke her. And it’s not like I broke her nose with a hearty head-butt like I normally do when I win dance-offs at nursing-home sing-alongs and abortion rallies. But I was still a total douchebag. And even though she seemed to get over it once the next song came on … and especially once we served her pie and ice cream … I will always and forever be the uncle who made the little dancing girl cry. And I now have two reasons to hate that stupid song.

Finishing the tat

2010-02-26T17:49:00.003-06:00

So I’ve been tossing around my commemorative roman-numerals-and-dots-for-each-race marathon tattoo idea since I was inspired by one in Runner’s World a month ago. I drew up some design options, I printed them and cut them out and held them up on various parts of my body to decide where I wanted the ink, and I finally told myself I’d wait until I’d actually finished the New York Marathon in November before I pulled the trigger … and then a buddy of mine got a similar (but WAY bigger) tattoo down the side of his torso last weekend. And it looks HOT:

And then all I could think about was fast-tracking my own commemorative roman-numerals-and-dots-for-each-race marathon tattoo. Especially because I’ll be on a cruise in a week so if I was going to get the tattoo before the cruise I had to do it now so it would have time to heal.

So I did it. Last night. And love it!

Why do I love it? It’s hidden in a peek-a-boo-ey spot that’s both out of the way and attention grabbing. It’s small enough that it didn’t take long to gouge into my flesh and it pretty much healed 24 hours after I got it. It’s meaningful in a personal way and badass in a symbolism-and-dead-language way. Plus it’s totally in my armpit! (And when I stand with my arms at my sides and flare my lats, it actually faces forward. How cool is that?)

I mapped out the dots in such a way that the six marathons I’ve run are represented, there’s room for the seventh, and I can’t run an eighth without totally screwing up the symmetry. So now I have an aesthetic reason to stop running stupid marathons after November. Which is way more compelling than an it-makes-my-knees-hurt-and-sucks-my-social-life-dry reason.

And next November when I have New York under my belt (and pounded into my arches and sucked into my lungs) I totally get to go back for another tattoo! Even though it will just be a tiny little dot. But still! I get to finish the tat! Look I made a tat! Where there never was a tat!

Funniest! Site! Ever!

2010-02-21T00:09:00.004-06:00

Click here for ten thousand delicious kinds of wrong.

Vile, revolting things that have been yanked out of my body, Vol. 2

2010-02-19T16:42:00.004-06:00

Those of you who keep up with such things through your Jake shrines and fan fiction and tribute musicales no doubt remember my epic adventures in pilar cyst excision. I had two of the little buggers hacked out of my head two years ago and then got to do it all over again last year. And I got to look at my dead little cysts before they were dried and made into necklaces by underprivileged children at state-run summer camps. And while they (the cysts, not the underprivileged children) were gross from a textbook-definition standpoint, they really looked no worse than exceptionally bloody boogers with a few stray nose hairs sticking out of them. Which was way more fascinating than disgusting to me. Then again, it takes a lot to gross me out. I mean, I’ve seen Sarah Palin on television.

Anyway!

One of the great things about entering your 40s is the way your body starts to betray you. You creak when you walk. You fart when you sneeze. You start wearing socks to bed. And your hearing starts to mess with you. In my case, ambient noise like traffic and bar din can completely drown out conversations I’m having where people’s mouths are literally inches from my ears. And I have to ask the domestic partner—whom I don’t think of as a mumbler—to repeat stuff he says almost half the time he says something to me. Whee!

So I got my doctor to refer me to an otolaryngologist, which is a fancy word for a doctor who specializes in otolaryngology. And I went yesterday to get my hearing checked. And because otolaryngology has so many syllables—or maybe because I have so many ears—I got to be checked out by two doctors. And before we were all done, I actually found myself thoroughly, genuinely grossed out by something that came out of my own body (but not without a fight … I can be macho like that).

The first doctor locked me in a tiny soundproof room with speaker-embedded plugs jammed in my ears so she could conduct two hearing tests. But that’s not the revolting part.

The first part of the test involved listening for wee tiny beeps that were not unlike what I imagine gnat farts sound like. I had to raise my hand every time I heard (or thought I heard) the doctor squeezing a gnat at the other end of the ear plugs. And I had no idea gnats could fart in so many pitches. They certainly are nature’s tragically overlooked musical prodigies. (That’s not the revolting part either.)

Then I had to repeat recorded words that were mumbled into my ear speakers at decibel levels that would make a librarian proud. If I couldn’t understand what the words were, I was told to take a guess. And, though quiet, the words were fairly easy to understand … or at least to guess: garden, mixture, table, Lautner … and then what I SWEAR was … um … date rape. I seriously couldn’t imagine what else the word I heard could be. And instead of politely keeping it in my head I actually said it out loud. To a female doctor. Who was 97 months pregnant. It wasn’t until this morning—after endless wondering all evening—that I figured out that the word was probably gateway. Or possibly Jake Pavelka. In any case, yelling date rape at a pregnant woman wasn’t the revolting part either. If you can imagine.

Once the pregnant doctor had scraped the look of horror off her face and released me from my padded room, I still wasn’t done! Because I still had to see a doctor who actually stuck things in my ears! And that’s where the revolting part comes in.

As I’ve said, I have a pretty high tolerance for gross things. Aside from the aforementioned excisions of bloody keratin lumps from my scalp and the Vice Presidential debates, I also routinely consume giant bowls of chili in front of grisly autopsy dramas like CSI and Bones. So I can handle a lot.

But when the second doctor put a gauze pad on my shoulder and tiny metal funnel in my ear and then poked around deep in my head with an alarmingly lengthy implement … when I felt him pull something out of me that might as well have been a marabou boa … when I felt the tickle of something warm and moist-y bounce off my ear and roll off my shoulder gauze and land in the cook of my bare arm … when I looked down to find what I can only charitably describe as a dried Raggedy Ann tampon staring up at me through a film of matted rat hair … I almost physically gagged. Almost.

And when he’d finished with both ears and showed me the accumulated mass of brown, waxy bulldog bile he’d pulled out of me and I realized that it could easily fill a tablespoon and that I’d been walking around with a full tablespoon of the cheese that collects on Rush Limbaugh’s taint every time they have corduroy pants day at his Sweatin' to the Hateys jazzercise classes crammed in my head … well, I probably reacted in a less-than-awesome way. Then again, I’d just yelled date rape at a pregnant woman so it’s not like I had a firm grasp on the awesomeness yesterday afternoon.

What’s worse, my ears keep pooping out little pellets of the stuff a full 24 hours later, like I have some goddamn bunnies strapped to my head as part of a low-budget production of Star Wars: Revenge of the High-Fiber Plant Eaters featuring Jake as an Earwax-Shitting Princess Leia.

And after all this, the diagnosis from the doctors wasn’t terribly promising. I have minor hearing loss, mostly in the high-frequency range. And there’s nothing they can do about it. They said the earwax removal shouldn’t improve my hearing … though it certainly makes me more aware of the sounds around me. And more aware that I’m capable of producing alarmingly large clumps of waxy brown-black hairballs deep inside my own head.

If that weren’t disturbing enough, I just took a detailed look at the audiology report they gave me as I was writing that last paragraph. And it shows that the pregnant doctor gave me a word recognition score of 100%.

Stars upon thars

2010-02-18T14:23:00.000-06:00

I finally did it. I finally joined the vanguard of hipness and ahead-of-the-curve technological superiority. Three years after the fact.

I got an iPhone!

My relatively awesome little Verizon flip phone hadn’t given me a lick of trouble in the three years I’d been schlepping it around, but it didn’t do anything more than take pictures and send texts. And, um, sometimes make calls. Though in the last few months it had lost its ability to hold a charge for more than a day.

I wanted an iPhone in the same way Sarah Palin wants to matter. But the domestic partner and his brother were on our Verizon family plan and were both under contract. And we had no beef with Verizon … and tons of concerns about AT&T.

Then! The domestic partner got out of contract. And so did his brother. We thought. But we were too lazy to try to get all three of us in one AT&T store at on time so I could cross over to the side of the mountain with all the sheep.

Then! The domestic partner’s phone went blank. Kinda like when Sarah Palin accidentally wears mittens at a speech. And we had no choice but to pack up the herd and head to the trendier meadow last night.

And in three hours (it seemed) we stumbled out the door with an iPhone for me, a plain old phone for the domestic partner (who can barely be bothered to check his emails and his Facebook on his regular computer) and a plain old phone with a temporary number for the brother-in-law, who it turns out still has another month on his contract. So we’ll cross him over next month when he’s safely a free agent.

Getting an iPhone is just as exciting as getting a tattoo. Except an iPhone doesn’t bleed. And you can figure out how to use a tattoo on the first try. And you pay for a tattoo only once. And a tattoo doesn’t punish you for having big meaty fingers when you try to send texts on it. And a tattoo makes you look badass. Or delusional. But you can take pictures of a tattoo with an iPhone and not the other way around. So there’s that.

And the first two apps I downloaded—Facebook and the CTA Bus Tracker—are so far more irritating than useful to me. Especially the CTA Bus Tracker, which incorrectly predicted FOUR bus arrivals this morning … two of them by 15 minutes. But maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand the words “2 MIN.” Or something.

In the mean time, I can’t be bothered with Middle Ages technology like blogging and laptops. I have apps to download! And texts to misspell! And—as always—Sarah Palin insults to dream up!

Things I have cleaned

2010-02-16T12:16:00.001-06:00

My pee shoes
Even after repeated scrubbings with harsh chemicals and a stiff brush, my favorite tennis shoes still smelled like, well, a cat peed on them. And since they float, their one adventure in our crappy old top-loading washing machine was as effective as a Sarah Palin. But! Our magical new front-loading washing machine rotates and re-rotates and sloshes and spins in such a way that my incredible floating shoes couldn’t get away from the water and the suds (and the dash of bleach I threw in as a precaution) … and now they’re as clean and awesome as the day before the cat even discovered I owned them.

My weightlifting gloves
They’re made of leather and some stretchy elastic material. They’re designed to wick away moisture and improve my grip and prevent calluses and make me look extra-butch when I’m throwing the ol’ weights around the gym. But lately they’d started to smell like my arm did after it had been in a cast for six weeks. And if you’ve ever smelled cast rot you’d know it’s not the way to attract the ladies. Even if you look extra-butch. So I threw them in the wash with a load of darks thinking the worst thing that could happen is they’d come out in pieces and I’d be out a $15 pair of one-year-old gloves. But! They came out just like they were before … minus the smell of rotting flesh. Everyone wins!

My winter coat
This paragraph does not come with a compelling story. My big old puffy Gap winter coat hadn’t been washed since I lived in my highrise and had access to the front-loading washing machines in its vast laundry room. And now that we have a front-loading machine in our low-to-the-ground vintage condo I decided to wash it again. And it came out nice and clean. See? Boring story. But with a clean-coat ending!

My family’s clocks
The domestic partner and I spent Valentine’s Day weekend in Iowa with my family, where my eight-year-old niece and I proceeded to kick the, well, clocks off of the domestic partner and my sister (both of whom are well over eight years old) at Sequence. And then the domestic partner and I tied for the win in a full-family Game of Things, which would be a lot more fun with just adults but we all managed to squeeze in some inappropriate answers without corrupting the children too much. For instance! The thing that would make school more fun: I won with Underpants day! The thing you’d hate to find in your sandwich: I won with Grandma! The thing you should never do when you ride a bike: I won with Hold a leaky bag of pudding! I am clearly a winner. Which is why we won’t mention the three games of Rummikub I played while I was there. And if you try to bring it up, I’ll just shout out one of my winning Game of Things answers until you give up and go away. Underpants day!

Our new baby

2010-02-09T22:48:00.001-06:00

Here's what happens when your hamper gets full

2010-02-09T17:05:00.002-06:00

and you have a guest-bathroom tub that’s not being used anyway:

The halfway decent washing machine installed by the halfway decent developer of our totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo only six years ago died two weeks ago. And the not-even-halfway-on-time repairman we called said the transmission was shot (who knew washing machines had transmissions?) and wasn’t worth fixing. Once he eventually showed up and looked at it, that is.

So we went online to research stackable washer/dryer units and discovered that 1) there really aren’t many of them on the market and 2) only one of them (front loading!) is Energy Star rated. At least of the models available at the stores where we can afford to shop. Normally I give myself a couple days to make a decision about a big expensive purchase, but it looked like we had exactly one choice so I just bought it on the spot. Online. I never even had to talk to a human! The Internets are made of the awesome.

Anyway! The delivery couldn’t happen until today. And in the mean time we kept wearing clothes. And they were spilling out of the hamper to the extent they were impeding our walking about the totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo. So the domestic partner had the genius idea to start dumping them in the tub. And I had the genius idea to take a picture. After hiding all but apparently one pair of underwear.

On the plus side through all the waiting, our closets were totally easy to pick through because they weren’t bursting with clothes. On the minus side, the stuff we had to pick through wasn’t the favorite stuff we usually wear. So we’ve been looking kind of 2007-y this last week. Please don’t laugh.

But now! We have our tub back! Oh, and we have a new Energy Star-rated stackable washer/dryer (front loading!). And the domestic partner has been home all day playing catch-up on our laundry. And as soon as I get home tonight, I’m totally gonna start dressing like it’s 2010.

The cell-phone self-portrait king

2010-02-07T13:24:00.002-06:00

I'm FINALLY getting caught up on my Disney stockholder obligations.

A self portrait from the camera phone

2010-02-06T18:17:00.002-06:00

I'm in NYC! And I just spent a shit-ton of money on a bridge. But it reportedly has a view.

I saved $19.30 with coupons and rebates this weekend!

2010-02-01T18:43:00.001-06:00

Plus I had an MRI.

I’m probably about to tell you waaaaaay too much medical information about myself. Or maybe not enough, depending on your level of fascination about such things.

Anyway! I got the lab results back from my annual physical last week. And it turns out I’m about a quart low on whatever it is that’s supposed to squirt out of my thyroid. So I’m now taking thyroid medication. Every morning. For the rest of my life. Like an old person. At least like an old person with an underperforming thyroid.

I mentioned this fact to a handful of friends and … um … all of Facebook last week. And it turns out a number of people I know are hypothyroidic (if that’s the adjective form) as well. And they universally claim that their diagnosis and subsequent better living through pills completely reignited their saggy old lives. Like me, they just thought they’d become the kind of person who’s chronically rundown and plagued by dry skin and stubborn bodyfat, among other more personal problems. And everything I’ve read about the drug therapy I’m on tells me that the small indignities I thought were just the cost of living into your 40s are probably tied to easily correctible thyroid issues. So I’m eagerly awaiting the second coming of my youth once the meds kick in.

In the mean time, I also have another problem: too much of some other chemical being squirted out of my brain. And apparently the first line of defense is a look at the damn thing. And the easiest way to get in my head and poke around without completely collapsing my facelift is an MRI.

Having an MRI is like being buried alive in a coffin that screams at you.

Here’s how it works: You’re dressed in an embarrassing little hospital gown. You’re immobilized on a sliding deli tray. You’re squirted full of dye. You’re slid into a tiny little tube where you don’t dare open your eyes in case you suddenly discover you’re claustrophobic. You’re told to lie perfectly still as unseen Thor-like monsters have anvil-and-garbage-can fights mere millimeters from your ears. And you don’t … dare … move … for a full 45 minutes.

But you wanna hear something funny? I actually fell asleep about 10 minutes into mine on Saturday.

And when I woke up, I had what turned out to be an all-day sinus headache. Plus a bleeding hole in my arm where the dye needle had been. Plus a Grammy Award. Oh, wait. That greedy Beyonce took all the Grammys. So apparently Squirty Brain and the Bleedy Armhole won’t be going platinum this year.

Awesome news!

2010-01-25T14:21:00.001-06:00

ONE
I installed new windshield wipers blades on my car yesterday! You don’t realize just how shameful and empty your life is when you drive around with wiper blades that leave wide, semi-opaque streaks right where you want to see. Probably because your blades fail slowly, so the growth of that shameful emptiness is like a gradually building storm cloud over your cold, dead soul. But the moment you install new blades that wipe your windshield bright and clean, you find yourself following semi trailer trucks on the highway so they’ll spray you with their backwash just so you can wipe it clean with one flick of your fancy new blades …all the while finding reasons to sing “I can see clearly now the rain is gone” to everyone who will listen.

TWO
I bench pressed 90-pound dumbbells this morning! Eight reps! Three sets! More loud grunts than I care to admit making! Before I started with my trainer, I struggled to get ten full reps with 60-pound dumbbells. Now I’m routinely pressing an entire grunge band (because it’s the ’90s! get it?) over my face without much worry about crushing my head or dislocating my shoulder. Though I doubt I’ll ever be able to tone down the grunting. So I hope the grunge band plays extra-loud.

THREE
I’M GOING TO NEW YORK, BABY! After three years of always-the-bridesmaid rejection, I’m finally gonna be rocking the New York City Marathon this November!
Since it’s a month later than the Chicago Marathon, I don’t have to start training until June. So I can have a leisurely spring … and I can finally enjoy the Chicago Marathon this year without actually running the damn thing. Of course, the 2010 Chicago Marathon will probably happen in perfect weather now that I won’t be there tempting the weather gods to make it stifling hot or tundra cold. But who cares! NYC! Marathon! Me! Finally!