Don’t ... make ... eye ... contact ...

Brand new Pride couture and assorted mannequin boobies

Goodbye, delicate-effluvium-of-the-tropics-scented lotions that I purloined from my Disney hotel room in November!

I’ve meted out your blossomy, breezy, not-really-masculiney deliciousness with Herculean restraint over the last seven months, but just like the flora you’re named for, you’ve finally dropped your last petals and drifted away into nothing but fond memories.

LAST CHANCE, PEOPLE! SNIFF ME TODAY OR FOREVER WONDER WHAT THE HELL GRAPEFRUIT BERGAMOT OCEANSIDE SCENT SMELLS LIKE.

Good morning! OR IS IT?

Oops! Oops! Oops!

Her kingdom survived the tornadoes

All is well in Bitchkittyville.

The tornado sirens are screaming, the walls are weeping with condensation, and I’m currently entombed in the cinderblock bowels of Theatre Cedar Rapids with the casts of Ripcord and Newsies

I’m also wearing a costume. So our grisly deaths will at least come with coordinated outfits and a peppy musical score.

ACK! DON’T LET ME DIE WITH ALL THESE WEIRD THEATER PEOPLE!

My Screamy Headache Man T-Shirt and I are back in the gym for my first time in exactly two weeks

(I didn’t say “the” first time because he may have been here without me in that time. I have more important things to keep track of than the comings and goings of my leisure apparel. Besides, trying to talk to him is a frustrating exercise in unproductivity; as you might surmise from his rather unambiguous name, it’s hard to get anything out of him but blood-curdling screams about his damn headache. Over and over. All over the Internet. And nobody should have to put up with that.)

Anyway, I’d hoped that my energy-chemical-explosion pre-workout shake might have an effect on my headache pain—which is significantly lessened today—but all it’s done is made me have to pee more. I worked out doing things that kept me relatively vertical—mostly back and shoulder stuff—so I’m at least hoping to have crippling workout pain—which is the pain I like—in those areas when I wake up tomorrow. After getting up to pee six times in the night, of course.

Alcoholic-o

In the midst of all my heartless, unsentimental purging of once-beloved shoes and clothing

... I may or may not have just ordered some pride apparel I totally don’t need.

When you were planning on stuffing yourself with Tylenol PM and going to bed the moment you got home

but your mom and dad made you some pie so you decided to stay up for a little bit first:

Why am I in an electric chair?

A. I ran out of gas for my gas-powered chair.
B. I wore white before Memorial Day.
C. I’m not. I’m just getting my hair did.
D. NOT. GEELTEE.
E. It’s more comfortable than the nuclear chair.
F. IT’S THE ONLY WAY TO END THIS 12-DAY HEADACHE.
G. You’ll have to come to Ripcord at Theatre Cedar Rapids and find out for yourself now, won’t you?

Yup!

Don’t be fooled by her adorable little half-smile

She’s a psychopath who’s patiently calculating which veins to tear from my body to make my murder as grisly and excruciating as felinely possible.

Really, Amazon Prime Video?

The entire batshit-crazypants Left Behind trilogy is free in your catalog but Can’t Stop the Music is $3.99?

Is it because I finally blocked all the fox “news” channels tonight?

I always think of daisies as breezy, insouciant harbingers of a carefree summer

until I get close to them as I pick weeds and remember that they smell like yesterday’s feet.

Well someone had to say it.

Racing ahead

Among the many, many helpful suggestions people have offered me about conquering this STU! PID! FUC! KING! headache—I’m actually quite humbled by your mass outpouring of concern and the sheer volume of suggestions and I’m sorry that I haven’t personally thanked you all—is trying a mega-dose of caffeine. I’m currently five and a half months pop-free and I’m not about to break my sobriety streak now and I’ve never been able to choke down coffee so I just chugged a 5 Hour Energy even though I don’t feel tired so I’m totally about to live that episode of Desperate Housewives where Felicity Huffman mainlines her kids’ Adderall and stays up all night organizing the toothpicks and doing her kids’ science projects for them—WHICH IN RETROSPECT WAS A SIGN WE ALL MISSED WAKE UP, PEOPLE!—and I still have to work a half day from home to make up for the negative-PTO deficit my NYC canceled flights caused and I really want to pull the weeds and fix the flappy visqueen and displaced pea gravel in our side hosta bed and find more things to clean with my awesome new happy-Mother’s-Day-to-me vacuum and paint my room and finish the build-out behind the house and fix the deficit before the sun goes down and hoo boy I’m off and running where did I put my running shoes oh there they are I’ll see you when we all get to Narnia look out toothpicks here I come!

The bad news is I woke up with my head throbbing. Throb. Ing.

The good news is once I hobbled and squinted to the kitchen and ate something, my head felt considerably better. Better than it’s felt all week, I dare say.

The bad news is it still really hurts.

The good news is it feels manageable enough that it’s emboldened me to not mask it with any pain meds so I can gauge how bad it is all day.

The bad news is I won’t really get a full all-day reading because I’m crawling back in bed.

Wait ... that’s actually good news.

Guard my dungeon bedroom all you want, my Bitch Kitty nemesis

I’m still sleeping in the upstairs guest room because 1) my folks want to have me and my stupid nine-day headache near their bedroom so they can hear me choke on the pain and die in my sleep and 2) my bedroom bed isn’t made anyway.

Backstage at Ripcord tech

DR and FR stand for Djake Ris Ftotallt Rawsome. It’s theater lingo.

Ripcord tech rehearsal at Theatre Cedar Rapids!

I’ve been here an hour and I’ve already said Ope! seven times.

You’re not an official Cedar Rapidian until you’ve stood on the sidewalk waiting for a massive train that keeps stopping

... and going ... and stopping ... and going ... and stopping ... and going ... and stopping ... and stopping ... and stopping ...

The question is not why do we have a flimsy plastic bag of stiff plastic flowers on the floor

The question is why does Bitch Kitty think a flimsy plastic bag of stiff plastic flowers makes a comfortable bed.

Cannula

Many, many people suggested that oxygen might help alleviate the still-breathtaking pain of my now eight-day headache, so I just purloined my dad’s COPD oxygen machinery and a fresh (I hope) cannula (fun fact: this thing in my nose has a name!) and I’m sitting here playing on my blog while the machinery hums and purrs and hiccups in rhythm with my breathing in the earnest hope that I’ll soon be up and pain-free and skipping and cartwheeling and bending over to put on my socks with wild abandon.

Has it really been two years since our modern-day Kennedys and beacons of sacred morality held audience with the pope?

Sigh. It seems like this was only 100 mortal embarrassments ago ...

STRIKE ONE:

"Hi Jake -

Thanks for the crack at this one, but I’m afraid we aren’t going to use it.

Best,
Chris
McSweeney's Internet Tendency"

Good morning!

Achomlishments

I have done it:

I've just crossed a bucket-list thing off my bucket list and submitted something to be published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. I think my fear-sucking headache fog allowed me to finally give my personal approval to something I've been working on and then to actually send it off for McSweeney's judgment.

Next on the bucket list: Bask in the fame and fortune that comes with it being published.

Did you know mannequins used to be made of wax? AND THEY USED TO MELT?

And I thought *I* had a splitting headache ...

Guess who just scooped the litter box with his throbbing headache?

(Well, actually he used his hands, but his throbbing headache came along as an impediment.)

THIS GUY!

Guess who also forgot to pack a razor for his Galena weekend and then has consistently forgotten to bring a razor into the shower where he shaves all week so now he looks like a scraggly old troll who lives under a Norwegian bridge and challenges hapless but ultimately resourceful children with riddles whose answers often involve dumbass wordplay and/or personal introspection before he lets them cross?

ALSO THIS GUY!

I’m off to work pumped full of pain blockers, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines and steroidal inhalants

... and an admonition to check for signs of bleeding kidneys.

My headache pain is only slightly better—and probably masked by all the aforementioned pharmaceuticals—and bending over to put on my socks this morning was one step closer to NOT making me pass out.

Thanks for all your kind words and expressions of concern and support. And to those of you who suggested yoga: I dare you to even THINK about doing downward dog with a Richter-scale sinus headache. But you’re not wrong that I should probably get back into doing yoga. Just not in the foreseeable future where my head might explode and I might die of urethral exsanguination.

'Till my garters break

When your pain meds have worn off and for some reason FX disappeared from your channel lineup with last week’s ImOn system upgrade and you’ve thought Fosse/Verdon has been getting draggy and dull anyway and you decide to give up trying to watch it and just go to bed. But gently. Because going to bed using Fosse moves would make your head explode.

HEADACHE UPDATE:

I got a shot of Toredol industrial-strength painkiller in my shoulder this morning, and OHMYGODITHURT. It took its sweet time killing the pain in my head—and it never killed the pain from the damn shot—and now, just seven hours later, it’s quickly wearing off. I feel my eyes trying to cross as I type this.

I finally got my CT scan at 4:30, and apparently there’s nothing remarkable in my head. So I’m back to ingesting mountains of painkillers and snorting gallons of squirty sinus stuff, as they say in the ouch-my-head-hurts medical world. And in the mean time I just saw—and subsequently googled to discern the marital status of—Rob Marciano and Will Carr reporting on the ABC Nightly News. In summary: They’re both hot, they’re both married, and they’re both not offering to provide curative hugs and kisses to me and my achy head.

Fuuuuuuuuuck

What began as a throbbing headache over the weekend has escalated into breathtaking waves of pain, ringing ears, cloudy peripheral vision and constant cold sweats. The alarmist in me is obsessing over the fact that I’ve recently been struggling to find words when I talk so I probably should will my estate to the brain cancer society right now and start picking out caskets. But as I’m currently waiting for my doctor to find a place that can get me in for a CT scan this morning, I’m thankful for small favors from the universe like the fact that I didn’t end up in stirrups covered in smiley-face footies as he examined me.

You had me at chevron

Even though this rapidly changing weather and barometric pressure have given me an almost week-long headache that is so stubborn and so intractable and so deep in my skull that it’s making it excruciating to move my eyes and bend over to put on my socks, it all HAS given me an opportunity to wear my super-cute new durable-ripstop, sporty-mesh-lined, boldly chevron-patterned hooded windbreaker. It has pockets!

I’m home, after listening to this song on repeat for at least 30 minutes

It’s so brilliant—and so brilliantly layered—that we mortals don’t deserve it ... especially the cascading “hello” obbligato starting at 2:16. It’s transcendently rapturous.

Plus, Andrew Rannells: CALL ME.

Our revels now are ended,

... but not before I stopped by our friendly neighborhood Dick’s Piggly Wiggly (which is apparently now Tammy’s Piggly Wiggly but I’m a Piggly-Wiggly-giggly little middle-schooler so I’m gonna stick with Dick’s) to stock up on klarbrunn—which sounds so European! without garish American capital letters even!—sparking water. (I heartily recommend the blueberry/passionfruit flavor. That is if you can find any; I just bought the entire stock of it.)

Now I’m back on the road with my Broadway podcasts and my cigarette-lighter-radio-broadcast-thingie and my carbs coma and my birdie videos and my happy memories.

And my full tank of gas this time.

Au revoir, Chez Birdies!

Our (now four) little babies are growing up so fast. Sigh ...

Saturday Morning Chick Cam!

We had two more hatchlings in the night, and they appear to be huddling their little heads together to keep warm or share little birdie secrets as a storm makes the weather cold and their mommy or birdie nanny flits back and forth with fresh diapers and Orthomil.

OHMYGODONEOFTHEEGGSTOTALLYHATCHED!

We’ve been in Galena four hours and we’ve already been told by the toothless cashier at Walmart that her husband’s best friend got her pregnant and gave her chlamydia

And “gave her chlamydia” is not am impoetic euphemism for “gave her a baby they eventually named Chlamydia once it was born.” I asked to make sure.

But! Our rental house! Is cuuuuuute!

It comes with a Carol-Brady-including collage of wall art over an actual working turntable and a library of suspiciously gay LPs, a curvy scripted self-promoting hashtag painted in shimmery gold by a round mirror reflecting two suspiciously gay kissing husband roommates, a gilded squirrel thing, a fire pit at the end of a rocky walkway, and an actual working bird’s nest with actual working robin eggs that appear to be actually hatching.

Plus I brought pie!

Ice-cold Cherry Bubly? Check.

Two freshly homemade pies? Check. Gay-ass Longaberger pie carrier with gay-ass fruit-print ruffled liner? Check. New thingie I just bought to stick in my cigarette lighter and broadcast show tunes and podcasts from my phone to a radio station? Check. A library of more show tunes and podcasts than one person could listen to in five lifetimes? Check.

Full tank of gas to get me to my Galena weekend reunion vacation without having to stop?

Shit.

Happy Syttende Mai!

[break it down: sytten = seventeen, de = of, Mai = May]

As I'm sure the endless media coverage has made you thoroughly aware, today is Norwegian Constitution Day--celebrating the 1814 Constituent Assembly at Eidsvold where we signed our new Constitution and began our quest for independence after 400 years under the oppressive reign of the (not so great, it would seem) Danes. (We joined into an unholy union on this day with Sweden and didn't gain our full independence until 1905, but that's a whole different fjord to climb.)

So anyway, I thank all of you for wearing red and blue today to help me honor my heritage. There's leftover Christmas lutefisk in the freezer. Help yourself!

Life Goals:

1. Be best friends with Kai Ryssdal
2. Hang out all the time
3. Talk about stuff

And she literally just moments ago TODAY denied the request for a reprieve for someone who's going to be executed TONIGHT

That makes SEVEN "every life is a sacred gift from God" hypocrisies. I mean lies. I mean FUCK YOU, ALABAMA.

Pretty pansies

This tweet has been making the rounds this week

I have no idea what the original context was, but I can’t stop laughing at poor Brad here for derailing the conversation into the trainwreck admission he clearly doesn’t realize he’s making.

Lara: “Women can enjoy sex.
Brad: “NOT THE WAY I DO IT!”

What’s the ONE THING you IMMEDIATELY find

the first time you walk into your storage unit after having given up all hope of ever finding your TV remote and then buying a universal remote that you’ve already programmed?

That’s right: red whorehouse throw pillows!

One of the most emotionally freeing things I’ve ever done

is allowing myself to stop worrying that I have the lids matched with their original color-coordinated shaker bottles every morning when I pack for the gym.

Not the Superman and Batman shaker bottles, though. I’m not a monster.

Surveying her domain

The domain she DESPERATELY wants to explore but isn’t remotely trustworthy enough to experience without a big screen door in her face. Which makes her a sad, powerless little monarch.