Another show finished. Another audience delighted. Another standing ovation savored.

I had a voice lesson scheduled for right after today’s matinee, which somehow seemed like a brilliant idea a month ago when I scheduled everything. But my voice teacher and I just very wisely realized it was, in fact, a terrible idea. So I went right home, coincidentally as the 91.7 fm classical station played the “Goin’ Home” themes from Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Which was coincidentally written in Iowa. And which was also coincidentally written in 1893, which is roughly the time in which Hello, Dolly! takes place. Which is all pretty cool.

I lost almost the entire day today sleeping off what seems to be a low-grade-but-nonetheless-still-exhausting cold

but I thankfully woke up in time to make it to my niece’s birthday dinner tonight. Then I think I finally got my dad’s birthday Alexa set up, even though I accidentally called it Siri twice and ended up having conversations with two disembodied robot women at once—JUST LIKE MY LOVE LIFE—but even though I couldn’t get Alexa to find 91.7 fm classical radio, it IS somehow playing classical music from somewhere that’s probably costing $7.99 a minute right now, and I’m going to try to knock out one more chapter of this fabulously gay book that I started reading in August because why read a book quickly when you can stretch it out over multiple sessions of Congress?

"The Iowa Public Radio fall fund drive is over."

The nine most beautiful words in the English language.

There’s something cozy and reassuring about a woodwind sextet on a cool, overcast day

91.7 fm just said “we all know that Haydn was the father of the string quartet"

which made my hair stand up in surprise like in the cartoons because REALLY, 91.7 fm? Did you ask EVERYBODY? And have you done a DNA paternity test? No and no.

But we all DO know that it’s blergy early and just on the warm side of perfect weather and I’m so hopped up on Gu and 5-Hour Energy that I’m shaking—or maybe I’m shaking in anger over 91.7 fm’s blanket-statement reporting—but in any case I’m clearly working overtime to make this Haydn joke work so I’m gonna take my shaky blergy energy and run 7 miles before it gets too warm.

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• Canada apparently burned down the White House while I was asleep
• The Fake News media totally fake-newsily didn’t even cover it
• “Feisty Cherry” Diet Coke
• Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony is on the radio right now and I’m trapped because I love hearing the muted ti-ti-ti-tum-tum violin motifs in the third movement and I don’t want to leave the room and miss them
• Not even for a quick run to the bathroom
• Which will happen the moment the entire ti-ti-ti-tum-tum exposition has finished
• Trust me on this
• Because damn, we have a loud toilet
• Autocorrect automatically put the accent in Antonín just now but I had to add all the diacritics to Dvořák myself
• Plus it nonchalantly changed automatically to automagically
• Seriously, autocorrect?
• I’M the only one allowed to make up stupid words on my blog
• Forrealsly
• If autocorrect is going to keep this up, we might as well thank Canada for burning down the White House, disband the last coherent fragments of our country and convert our phone keyboards to Cyrillic right now
• Settings > General > Language & Region > iPhone Language > Russian
• до свидания

I'm almost always lucid enough for a selfie

When you apparently mention being bipolar too much on Facebook and it cosmically triggers a depressive episode that lands you in bed for 18 hours when you get home from work and it’s bad enough that you call in sick the next day even though you’re hoarding all your PTO for all your summer vacations but it turns out to be the right decision because you sleep long and rough and alarmingly sweaty and you eventually start to punch your way out of the wet wool blanket and see the light through the fog and your mom gets out your favorite mattress-ticking sheet to put on the couch so you can convalesce in the living room by the radio that’s currently playing a Fauré harp sonata which isn’t totally your thing but you still have some lingering fog so you really have bigger fish to fry which is just an expression because you don’t really like seafood where was I oh yes I had a damn depressive episode yesterday that ended up being worse than I’d expected and I always feel guilty calling in sick but these episodes have gone from one a month to about three a year and it’s better it happened today instead of tomorrow when I’d have to fight my way out of a fog on stage in my show which I’ve done many times before but it’s not ideal and it usually alarms my castmates so WHEW! to that timing and now the radio is playing a Rossini overture that’s filled with fire and music just like Eve Harrington which is way more my style and I have my mattress-ticking sheet and a feisty-cherry-flavored whatever the hell that means Diet Coke and I managed to take a decent selfie not that I have a lot of practice or anything and if I time everything just right this manically run-on non-sentence will post just ... as ... the ... Rossini ... comes ... to ... its ... triumphant ... CONCLUSION.

The Sea is Frozen!

So I came home from work feeling a little bit bipolar-depressed-y and went right to bed ... only to be awakened three hours later by the realization that tomorrow is garbage day and I had to get the damn Bitch Kitty box all scooped and cleaned and shit. Well, technically SHE did the shitting the moment I was done scooping (natch) but my cheap joke here is still funny. Once the garbage was out though, I was sitting and chatting with my folks when 91.7 started playing Debussy’s La Mer (which is French for The Sea Except Without Enough Syllables Or Even Damn Letters To Let You Say It In A Charming I’ve-Been-To-Paris-Once French Accent) just as the skies started making all kinds of diluvian bluster in anticipation of an impending downpour, but Debussy’s churning ocean (which has TWO SYLLABLES and is therefore FAR EASIER to say with a charming accent of any kind and ARE YOU LISTENING, CLAUDE?) and Iowa’s churning skies never synched up so untold volumes of referential and metaphorical poetry were lost to the ages. Anyway, my head’s a lot clearer now as I climb back into bed and leave you with this totally random, totally awesome, totally mesmerizing MIDI of “Let it Go” from Frozen: