We put our paws on the floor when we’re told to stay on our bed but we still want to be in the room with our people

#Pride101: What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

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 they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, 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 systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work 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 sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because we currently have an openly gay married man as a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination for president--something most of us never even considered would EVER happen--and not only is he enjoying enthusiastic support from Democratic voters, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our 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—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

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

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 50 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

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

I didn’t really know anybody by the time the first pride parade happened soon after I moved to Chicago

So I went by myself to watch it. And, standing among thousands and thousands of cheering, smiling, happy, proud people who were watching with groups of friends and waving at other friends who squeezed by on the crowded sidewalks, I never felt more alone.

It was actually so devastating in my mind that pride weekend literally filled me with dread for the next 15 years I lived in Chicago.

I did notice that first year that the people dancing and waving on the floats looked very happy—and they didn’t have to be surrounded by friends or even anybody as they enjoyed the parade from their glorified perches. So I made up my mind that I needed to make the connections to get myself on a float by the next pride parade.

As I slowly—finally!—made Chicago friends and watched the next few parades with them, I still harbored an irrational, unshakable dread that I’d lose them—or they’d actually leave me—and I’d be alone all over again in the crowds. So I kept trying to figure out how to get myself on a float.

Then I joined the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. And we marched in the parade! But not on a float. And I very very stupidly decided to wear my rollerblades and they hurt and I was bad at stopping so I kept running into people and I was so miserable I had to hobble home the moment it was over so I couldn’t hang out and celebrate with anyone afterward so as far as I’m concerned the whole experience didn’t count and I don’t want to talk about it.

Then! Finally! I got on a float! And let me tell you: Though standing in a Speedo sucking in your abs and holding on for dear life on a lurching, frequently stopping vehicle technically sucks all the fun out of it, having hundreds of millions (in my fantasies my math says I have hundreds of millions of adoring fans so shut up) of people screaming and cheering for you is ALMOST as awesome as dancing and waving high on a moving platform where the cooling breezes are plenty, the jostling crowds are penned up on the sidewalks below you and the scenery changes by the second to keep everything interesting.

Plus you get to dance to your favorite disco hits.

I got myself onto many more floats for the rest of my years in Chicago. The weather was always perfect, my cheering, adoring fans swelled into the billions (shut up), and the joy and pride were always plenty. And my irrational dread—though never gone—was always in check.

Today is Chicago’s pride parade. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with joyful, excited, rainbow-colored, mostly shirtless pictures of my Chicago friends and acquaintances already celebrating, and while I’m thrilled and proud to have (eventually) been a part of those traditions, our dramatically more subdued Cedar Rapids pride festival next weekend is now WAY more my speed. And not my Speedo.

So I wish all of you celebrating pride in Chicago today—whether on the sidewalks or on a float—an awesome day and an awesome experience both personally and with everyone around you. I’ll be happily painting my room—and no doubt dancing to my favorite disco hits and/or belting to my favorite show tunes—instead. And we all can’t stop the music.

I may not be doing big-city Pride things this weekend, but I can still be plenty gay watching documentaries on my couch

Happy World Pride Weekend, gurls! (snap!)

Tears

Of joy, of fury, of gratitude, of promise. This documentary is profoundly, deeply moving and profoundly, deeply inspiring. See it.

Lamp down!

Stupid clumsy homosexual painters ...

Walgreens run!

ONE: The good news is our smoke detectors are capable of blasting sound to every corner of the house.

The other good news is it’s not a house fire that alerted us to this fact.

The bad news is (at least) one of the batteries died in (at least) one of the smoke detectors scattered around the house and its little chirpy alerts so effectively broadcast that news that we can’t pinpoint which one (or ones) is (or are) doing all that GODDAMN CHIRPING.

So ... it’s Everybody Gets A New Battery Day!

TWO:I just had the neurologist appointment that I scheduled three weeks ago at the height of my headache nightmare, and he officially undiagnosed my occipital neuralgia and told me I’d just experienced a plain old boring migraine. Which is so unglamorous that it robs me of the sense of exotic purpose to which I’m entitled. Anyway, he said that for now I should just keep plain old boring OTC migraine medicine on hand to stop the next one (because apparently there will be many more next ones) when it starts and to call him if things get worse.

THREE:No trip to Walgreens even counts if you don’t leave with a package of Chips Ahoy!

#Pride101: The 50th Anniversary of Stonewall

Fifty years ago today, the New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn--a gay bar in Greenwich Village that catered to drag queens--in an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation specifically targeted at people wearing clothing that didn’t conform to the conventions of their “assigned gender.” These arrests usually led to people’s names and photographs being published in the newspaper … which carried the high risk of the them losing their jobs and even their families.

Usually the people submissively complied as they were being arrested. But this time they fought back. When an officer clubbed a black lesbian named Stormé DeLarverie over the head for complaining that her handcuffs were too tight, the crowd that had gathered outside the club had had enough. Marsha P. Johnson, a black drag queen, and Sylvia Rivera, a Latinx queen, were two of the first to actively resist the police that night, and their fellow queens joined them in throwing bricks, bottles and shot glasses at officers and effectively shutting down the raid. I mention these people’s ethnicities and orientations here to give credit to the non-white, non-cis-presenting people for showing the courage and gumption to initiate the fight back and start what ended up being six days of riots in the neighborhood surrounding the Stonewall Inn that finally ignited a national fight for the rights and equalities that everyone under the LGBTQ+ rainbow enjoys today.

Stonewall wasn’t the first riot in defiance of police raids; in 1959 angry gays fought police after a raid of Cooper’s Do-Nuts--a gay-friendly diner--in Los Angeles, and in 1966 a trans woman threw a cup of hot coffee in a police officer’s face in a raid at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco, sparking a riot that inspired the city to acknowledge the trans community and develop a network of trans-specific social, mental-health and medical services. But Stonewall was the turning point. The police raid quickly drew a large mob whose collective lifetimes of oppression and discrimination boiled over into a violent revolt that trapped police in the bar until the NYC Tactical Patrol Force was dispatched to rescue them. Riots erupted the next night and through the week in the Christopher Street and other nearby gay neighborhoods, including one mob that threatened to burn down the offices of The Village Voice for describing the riots as "forces of faggotry" and "Sunday fag follies." The next year, an orginization called Chicago Gay Liberation organized a parade on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot, and the city has staged a parade on the last Saturday in June ever since.

Now every major metropolis and many smaller cities have pride parades and events, many of which spill beyond the last week of June to pop up in celebrations all year. But June is officially Pride month in the hearts and minds of gay people--and an exploding population of straight people and businesses large and small--and we owe it all to the brave gay people who had had enough and fought back at great risk to themselves and even to our community fifty years ago today.

THIS IS WHY WE CELEBRATE PRIDE.

FINAL DEBATE TAKEAWAYS:

• Pete is the co-winner with his calming, authoritative presence and genuine affability
• Kamala is the co-winner with her commanding presence and emotional connection
• Bernie and Biden seem like yelly old men
• Eric Swalwell: I’m 100% on board with your assault-weapon-buyback proposal
• “Two words down the line” means TWO WORDS
• Shut up, Bernie
• Just shut up
• Marianne Williamson: You’re just ... odd
• I’m officially tired of old politicians. Bring on the young people and their fresh perspectives and ideas for fixing what the old folks can’t seem to stop fucking up!
• Shut up, Bernie
• 19 Democratic candidates. If there’s one good thing that stable genius has accomplished, it’s inspiring this wave of young, smart, skilled, competent people who all seem genuinely committed to repairing and reinvigorating our tattered country
• Kamala: Nice plug for your web site!
• Pete: Your closing statement is just ... everything

EARLY DEBATE TAKEAWAYS:

• Tonight is WAY more spirited than last night

• I hate to play the “likable” card, but though I love a lot of what Bernie says I’m having a hard time liking him
• Oh, Pete. Pete, Pete, Pete. Why are you so awesome?
• You KNOW SHIT. You give thoughtful, meaningful, nuanced, practical answers to every question, you explain yourself amicably like you’re having a conversation with a friend, AND you politely stay within your allotted time. If you were gay I’d totally marry you.
• Kamala Harris: Play your Personal Integration History card loud and clear! It keeps you real and authoritative and I have great admiration for you.
• John Hickenlooper: You seem kind of deer-in-the-headlights when you get asked questions
• Plus you kind of look like a poorly embalmed corpse
• Marianne Williamson: I’ve never heard of you, but I feel like you should be singing your answers with a guitar and flowery headband
• Joe Biden: I remember when you made so many awkward gaffes at the beginning of the Obama administration that after a few months they quietly kept you hidden behind the bougainvillea.
• You haven’t stopped doing goofy shit that your opponents are going to feast on. You’re your own worst liability.
• Pete and Kamala almost drove themselves to tears talking about their most impassioned issues. LET’S JUST ALL AGREE NOW THEY SHOULD RUN TOGETHER.
• Eric Swalwell: I like you. I like what you think. But I instantly forget you every time someone else talks.
• Kamala Harris is getting lots of good TV time, but she’s squandering it on in-the-weeds anecdotes at the expense of articulating broader concepts and issues
• Andrew Yang: You’re smart. You’re capable. But your droopy Q rating is unfortunately going to sink you.
• Michael Bennet: I loved A Chorus Line
• That Anti-Biden commercial. OUCH.

You’d think the reason that all those stupid birds finally stopped pecking at our windows is that they finally banged all their little brains into catastrophic cerebral failure

But you’d be wrong.

Because the REAL reason that all those stupid birds finally stopped pecking at our windows is that WE TAPED UP PAPER OWLS. THAT WE PRINTED FROM THE INTERNET.

#Pride101:

In 1983--at the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the United States--the CDC instituted a lifteime ban of blood donations from gay men (specifically “men who have sex with men,” a distinction necessitated by a sizable population of MSM who refuse for any number of reasons to be identified as gay or bisexual). The ban was actually even broader than that; it also included women who have sex with MSM and transgender people. At the time, HIV was--and was perceived by the broader population to be exclusively--a “gay disease” and was gleefully used by religious hate groups to perpetuate their vilification of--and mock and exploit the deaths of--gay people. The ban was an extreme measure, but as 1980s technologies in HIV detection weren’t very effective it was seen as prudent--with no resistance from leading gay organizations--and it no doubt prevented an even larger American HIV epidemic. As HIV spread beyond the gay population, the infection demographics leveled out and HIV-detection technologies advanced, in 2015 the guidelines regarding blood donations from MSM were reduced from a lifetime ban to a one-year-of-celibacy ban. Today, the Insti HIV test--considered to be the most accurate--has a 99.96% accuracy rate, with results provided in one minute. (For the record, the relatively small populations of people with certain medical conditions, people on certain medications and people who have had blood transfusions are subject to restrictions and bans.) With often desperately low stockpiles of donated blood in the United States, there is no reason to specifically ban blood donations from MSM based on outdated demographic medical information and stigmas regarding HIV. But progress is being made; many 2020 Democratic candidates include a repeal of the ban in their platforms. The march to erase the stigma and embrace 21st Century medicine is on, and gay people without other risks are proudly willing to step up and do our part as blood donors.

I just ran three miles in sweaty-Freddy humidity

WHY CAN’T I FIT IN MY HIGH-SCHOOL PARACHUTE PANTS ALREADY?

Could it be the 12:20 pace? It’s nice and even and divisible by many numbers. For instance, if you divide it by 2, I ran at a 6:10 pace. That should count for SOMETHING.

To make myself look—and feel!—better, I followed the Blanche Devereaux playbook and took my post-run selfie from above. Behold my eternal youth!

I had to cancel yesterday’s run because I had a pretty epic headache relapse that kept me in bed until noon

And because my hair looked too nice for my ritual selfie. Thankfully the headache dissipated as quickly as it powered up and I was able to go to work and paint woodwork and swoon over Corey Booker.

But now my head feels great and my hair is a disaster (coincidence?) and it’s life-suckingly humid and I have three miles to run!

KEY DEBATE TAKEAWAYS:

• Corey Booker answers his own damn questions

• Gay people are citizens who de facto deserve to be treated as such and not as pawns in manipulative political theater
• Mitch McConnell is universally regarded as a drug-resistant-syphilis public-health outbreak that needs to be quarantined and annihilated
• Rachel Maddow: I would happily turn lesbian if you’d please marry me
• Nobody’s afraid to play the Let Me Tell You About This Devastatingly Horrible Personal Tragedy That Happened To Me And/Or My Family card
• One unexpected side benefit of this bountiful diversity of candidates: It’s so much easier to differentiate among people when they’re not all wrinkly old white men
• John Delaney: Just fucking shut up when you’re told to
• Tulsi Gabbard: I predict you’ll be voted off the island first
• I find myself feeling WAY more confident in people who have military experience
• Seth Moulton: Well-placed ad buy right before the closing statements!
• Julián Castro: Your bilingual demonstrations are awesome and I wholeheartedly applaud them both for what they celebrate and for whom they piss off but they come off as staged and gimmicky and maybe you should practice them in front of the mirror so they feel more natural
• Amy Klobuchar: You performed better than I’d expected—I’m sorry I undersold you to myself and I promise I’ll pay more attention going forward
• Beto O’Rourke and Corey Booker: Your passion and intelligence and thoughtfulness make you my front-runners of this debate
• Shit—I feel the same about Elizabeth Warren
• THERE ARE TOO MANY AWESOME CHOICES HERE—this is such a profoundly impressive bunch of people and intellects and perspectives
• Taking turns isn’t anybody’s strong suit
• But I LOVE the overall spirit of respect and universal commitment to our country’s best interests
• And it’s so thrilling to hear people talk in informed, coherent, meaningful sentences
• THAT I can tell you

Don't walk on the grass

I can think of no better way to paint woodwork than to do it while warbling along with this richly orchestrated and gorgeously sung tongue-twister of a jewel of a song on infinite repeat:

Remember when this POS literally hid in the bushes to avoid speaking to the press--WHICH WAS HIS JOB--and then later said it was because he was fat?

Raise your hand if you've ever body-shamed yourself to the point you've hidden in bushes to avoid doing your job. I'll wait.

Maybe if he smiled more to look pretty ...

Red things I have successfully watered

#Pride101:

Virtually every pride parade and public event draws a crowd of hate-filled, mouth-frothing religious bigots carrying signs (notice the ever-popular message in this photo: GAY = Got AIDS Yet?) and screaming at us with bullhorns and often trying to goad us into physical fights so they can videotape them and whimper to the police about the cruel persecution they endure just for expressing their First Amendment rights. At bigger events like the Chicago Pride Parade, they're walled off in pens like the rabid swine they are at the end of the route where they're more of a nuisance than a violence-inciting threat. But at smaller events like the Cedar Rapids Pride Fest, they wander freely in much smaller numbers at the perimeters, hauling massive signs as if they were crosses and yelling into bullhorns and goading us from afar so they can run like the cowards they are if they feel outnumbered and/or want to stoke their wannabe persecution complexes. But we keep showing up to our events, not letting their cruel, puerile, relentless harassment undermine our celebration of who we are how far we've come. THIS IS WHY WE USE THE WORD PRIDE.

So. Many. Clothes.

When the doors are off the closet and you can see in one glance how obscenely huge your collection of clothing is, it’s very easy to start purging. Those hangers on the left mark my progress before it occurred to me to take a picture to hold myself accountable. If I get the entire left half open, perhaps I could put some shoe cubbies there.

I canceled my trip to the pain clinic last week because my headache pain was (and still is!) virtually gone

I decided to keep my ophthalmologist appointment today though because 1) I’m waaaaay overdue for an eye appointment anyway and 2) it took forever to get on the schedule and 3) ophthalmologist is fun to spell. Ophthalmologist! See?

So I’m here and artfully masking the signs for the ladies’ bathroom in my selfie and moments away from getting to tell people that I’m dilated to meet them.

Ophthalmologist!

Happy 48th birthday to my little sister!

I don't know how this happened, but she is somehow old enough to be the mother of a high-school senior and a college junior who are two of the most delightful, caring, fiercely loved young adults I know; a pillar of our community through her new job with the St. Luke’s Foundation and Unity Point and her volunteering through her church and many other civic organizations; a maker of world-class scotcharoos; an anchor to her extended family; and sister to a brother who is constantly in awe of her and everything she does. Her only real fault is she loves her terrible cat. But we’ll forgive her for that just this one day of the year to focus instead on how old she’s getting.

In celebration of Pride month, I have burst out of the closet!

And by “burst out of the closet” I mean “removed the floor guides, carefully lifted the closet doors from their roller tracks, carried them upstairs to the garage where I have drop cloths and rag-draped saw horses set up, given them two coats of bullshit-one-coat paint, let them become thoroughly dry, and brought them back downstairs to wait for the door frame to completely dry so I can re-install them.”

Things I Just Found In My Storage Unit:

My second “Who Am I Anyway?” headshot—still stalwartly mounted on its foam core—from my second A Chorus Line in 1996ish. Behold that perfect hang-ten wave of hair crashing over my forehead! Behold that rakish single earring! Behold that attempt at a world-aware smolder! Behold that long-abandoned 32-inch waist (not pictured)!

Whew. My bedroom project is ALL DONE.

I decided to paint a super-perfectly-awesomely-straight stripe along the floor blue instead of spreading blue all over those big walls.

Now that that’s all over: DAY DRINKING!

Her favorite person is gone for a few days, and she seems quite displeased that I’m all she has in the mean time

Thoughts and purrs, Bitch Kitty. Thoughts and purrs.

We have reached the moment in this evening’s activities where I post a photo of myself wielding my mighty caulk gun

I’m still pretending this is fun

Even though after three hours I’m still prepping the walls. And trying to figure out what the living hell to do with that breaker box and nest of cables in the corner—which is not as simple a challenge as it appears to be in this or any other photo. It’s a 4D puzzle and an M. C. Escher drawing cowering in the corner like an angry, vindictive spider plotting my emotional demise. BUT IT’S SO TERRIBLY FUN!

I painted my first dining room 25 years ago listening to Sunday in the Park with George on permanent repeat. I still think about that room and how cool it turned out every time I hear that score.

And this room already has Tootsie embedded deep in its sequined, fake-boobed DNA.

Shit’s gettin’ real, fam!

Real crowded in the center of the room, real dusty, and real HOLY SHIT WHAT GAPING MOUTH OF HELL HAVE I JUST JUMPED INTO?

Painting is stupid. Learn to livelaughlove with your beige.

What’s more appalling:

That I’m having ice cream for dinner or that I just said Kitty Kitty Bang Bang out loud in public?

Flashback Friday: Passing the Baton Edition

Nine years ago right now I was enjoying a nice, relaxing 200-mile Madison-to-Chicago relay with 11 other runners in two vans in some of the most sweltering weather in recorded history. We passed the baton for 36 non-stop hours with loads of sunscreen all day and reflective vests and road-finding spotlights strapped to our heads all night.

Fun fact: This all happened in a dark, purposeless, existential-void period in our history before smartphones and GPS running watches were invented (CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE?) and when people had something called "conversations" to pass the long hours of waiting in their leapfrogging runner vans. It was so bleak that WE ACTUALLY HELD SWEAT-STAINED PAPER MAPS IN OUR HANDS AND RELIED ON RANDOM ARROWS CHALKED ONTO THE GROUND TO FIND OUR WAY AS WE RAN ALONG THE RELAY ROUTE. And we hoped to hell that we didn't get lost on moonless, werewolf-filled country roads at 2:13 am because we'd basically have no way to figure out how to get back on track and/or how to let our teammates know where to find our fang-torn bodies come sunrise.

Occipital Nomorealgia!

So today--after this epic, never-ending headache that started May 17 and necessitated weeks of checkups and tests and more checkups and finally a referral and then 10 days of waiting to get on the schedule--I was FINALLY going to be visiting the St. Luke's pain clinic for a nerve block ... literally as I'm writing this. But suddenly on Monday I felt remarkably better. Which may or may not have had a correlation to my first distance run of the summer that morning. And by Tuesday morning I felt so much better that I figured it would be pointless to go to a pain clinic. So I apprehensively called to cancel my long-awaited appointment.

And here I am: not at my long-anticipated pain clinic appointment and feeling relatively great (my ears are still quietly ringing and my eyes have a twinge of pain when I think about them, like right now--so stop making me think about them!) (oh--and did I mention I'm old so there's always a pain somewhere?). I like to think that my cancellation got some other poor in-pain soul into the clinic sooner than he or she was expecting. And the nurse I talked to said the referral is still active for three months, so I can get in without jumping through all the hoops if it flares up again. And then the billing department called me to warn me that my insurance doesn't cover visits to pain clinics so I should start selling organs to cover the epic-pain-inducing costs.

And even though I truly love my job and look forward to coming into work every morning, I can honestly say I've never been more happy to be here, considering the alternative.

So YAY! for me for hopefully never going through the breathtaking pain of occipital neuralgia again. And YAY! for all of you for hopefully never having to read my whiny posts about it.

Now ... ONWARD! I have some shoes to write about!

Aaaaaand we're back!

After last year’s endless summer of endless running selfies, you thought you were finally done with us. But nooooooo. We’re back again this summer, and we’re older than ever. And slower. At least I am. Rob and Scott SAID they were out of practice and out of shape before this, our first run together of the summer, but you and I both know the endless bullshit they spew to humiliate me in my dotage. And, as expected, they finished this morning’s three-mile run a whole month ahead of me.

But! I ran an exact 12:00 pace. And I find desperate validation in round, even numbers. So there’s that. Plus I found this old shirt I used to wear when I was young and buff. It used to be sure-thing tight around my arms. Now it’s sure-gonna-suffocate-me tight around my gut. But we sure had nice running weather. And it was a good thing to run with these two again.

Throwback Wednesday: Old And Dysmorphic Edition

When you’re feeling old and invisible at your Pumped-Up Unabridged Encyclopedia of Hotness Gym, instead of working out, do something actually productive and emotionally healthy: Re-post a pic of yourself and your shirtless shoulders and your saucy instep from a long-ago gay cruise.

#Pride101

Liberty Counsel (rule of thumb: "Liberty" almost always means "hate gay people") has made a lucrative industry of selling hatred toward gay people as an easy-sell loss leader to promoting less visceral add-on products like hatred toward non-Evangelicals and boycotts of Disney. Since 1989, they've enjoyed tax-free access to politicians and influence on public policy in their quest to literally kill gay people--among other undesirables--by halting funding on AIDS research, killing sex-education programs, preventing access to HPV vaccines, and defunding Planned Parenthood's low- and no-cost medical services. And now this: Liberty Counsel Chariman Matt Staver has issued a de facto endorsement of lynching gay and transgender people by removing them from a Senate anti-lynching bill. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated Liberty Counsel as an official hate group in 2015, yet it continues to exert influence on our elected representatives. Thankfully, many members of Congress oppose Liberty Counsel's amoral depravity and actively fight for all of our citizens. But it's clearly an ongoing war between good and Liberty Counsel's evil. THIS IS WHY WE NEED TO UNITE UNDER THE BANNER OF PRIDE.

Well, shit

When we got our fabulous new marbled quartz counters last summer, the profile of the new peninsula countertop was smaller than the old one and we ended up with a little halo of unpainted wall around it that was so horrifyingly unsightly that I immediately waited an entire year to try to paint it in. Since I have all our household painting supplies out for my bedroom painting project right now, I figured I’d use the opportunity to finally touch it up. To make sure I didn’t use the wrong color from our many saved AND UNLABELED containers of leftover paint from throughout the house, I made little sample sticks of paper that I could hold up to the wall first to make sure I had the exact right paint. Which I did. AND WHICH DIDN’T WORK BECAUSE THE TOUCH-UP PAINT IS SIGNIFICANTLY LIGHTER AND I WASN’T TERRIBLY EXACTING IN MY PAINT APPLICATION AND NOW WE HAVE TO BURN DOWN THE HOUSE AND START OVER.