LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• My supposed-to-be-awesome new T-shirt has an owl saying WHOM on the chest, but the printing and the shirt are almost the same color so you can’t even see the graphics and I’m too lazy to mail it back so I’m now the proud owner of a $20 new gray T-shirt with a hidden pronornithology pun on it.
• It has an owl! Whom says WHOM!
• Oops.
• WHO says WHOM.
• Stupid owl.
• Our tech-week/opening-weekend marathon is over, and I’m already missing the show and the people and the mysterious drafty feeling I have during the bows.
• But I accidentally called my wife the wrong name today on stage.
• So maybe it’s time for a little break.
• We also had a catcaller in the audience today who yelled something about our “winkies.”
• It was probably one of those stupid owls.
• We have only six more times to bring this wonderful show to life.
• That’s 12 if you count in buttcheeks though.
• When I got home just now, Dad was listening to country gospel music on Alexa.
• Where did I go wrong when I raised him?
• The music was probably sung by owls.
• I unceremoniously and no doubt rudely told Alexa to play classical music instead.
• BECAUSE I’M A HEARTLESS TYRANT.
• WITH GOOD TASTE.
• Not like those damn owls.
• And their damn pronouns.
• CAN I GET A WHOM YEAH!

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS

• Our Disney vacation is over
• I didn’t win the marathon
• Perhaps because there was only a half marathon
• Perhaps not
• But now we’ll never know
• Will we?
• No, we won’t
• Anyway ...
• Disney water
• It tastes like History and Safety First
• Turning it into ice and putting it in Diet Coke doesn’t help
• And it CERTAINLY doesn’t help the Diet Coke
• Speaking of ...
• A large cup of Disney History And Safety First ice with a splash of a Diet Coke costs less than $6
• But not much less
• Disney has stopped using lids on its fountain sodas
• Which is awesome from an environmental standpoint
• And I assume from a cost-overhead standpoint
• Plus an ordering-supplies-and-dealing with-invoices-and-delivering-stuff-to-all-the-restaurants standpoint
• But definitely not from a don’t-spill-your-tiny-splash-of-Diet-Coke-on-yourself-when-you-get-jostled-in-the-crowds standpoint
• Safety First!
• Anyway ...
• Runner dudes with muscularly lean, distractingly shapely calves
• Who didn’t ask me on dates
• Probably because they didn’t want to make things weird in front of their wives and kids
• BECAUSE ALL OF THE RUNNER DUDES WITH MUSCULARLY LEAN, DISTRACTINGLY SHAPELY CALVES HAD WIVES AND KIDS
• I am developing a healthy animosity toward wives and kids
• People who wore their race medals to the parks
• Three days after their races
• Really?
• Was a full day of wearing a rigid, itchy ribbon around your neck with a heavy, clangy medal bouncing against your chest a productive enhancement to your sweaty Disney joy?
• Asking for a friend
• Also:
• Also!
• People who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• Grrrrrr
• I bought three race shirts and zero other souvenirs but I somehow couldn’t get my suitcase closed this morning
• My cargo shorts are out to get me
• Or perhaps they wanted to stay a few more days
• And I broke their eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed hearts
• Now I’M the bad guy
• Speaking of my eminently-practical-and-yet-appropriate-as-always-multiple-pocketed cargo shorts ...
• I finally stopped having little panic attacks every time I realized I couldn’t feel my car keys in my front right pocket
• When I get home tonight, I’m going to start having an unsightly key bulge in my front right pocket again
• And it might be uncomfortable since I’m not used to it anymore
• WHEN
• WILL
• MY
• SUFFERING
• END
• ?
• We got our bills from our Magic Bands that we wore all week to buy food and charge it to our room ...
• Ouch
• Not OUCH
• But still ouch
• (I’m talking about the final tally of charges and not the bands themselves; the bands were actually quite comfortable)
• Remember our fancy, four-princess dinner in Cinderella’s castle where we got to see the fireworks show outside the quatrefoil-gothic castle windows?
• We were told our dinner was vaguely “already taken care of” at the end
• We assumed that meant it had been automatically charged to our Magic Bands, so we blithely went on our merry way
• But ...
• There was no fancy-four-princess-dinner-in-Cinderella’s-quatrefoil-gothic-window-castle charge on our bills this morning
• Was it an oversight?
• A surprise Summer Of Running Away From Being 50 birthday gift?
• A random act of Disney benevolence?
• Pre-emptive compensation for not winning the marathon?
• Do we need to contact them to see which option it was?
• THIS SITUATION IS NOT COVERED IN THE DISNEY PROTOCOL HANDBOOK
• Not a complaint: Our entire Disney stay was a beautifully immersive experience of colors and ethnicities and accents and physical abilities and sexualities and gender fluidities and ages and family sizes
• Especially on It’s a Small World
• ESPECIALLY on It’s a Small World
• That ride gives me hives
• On my runner-chafed unmentionable locations
• Anyway ...
• We never encountered an instance of racism or xenophobia or hostility or even poorly hidden frustration over our differences
• During the entire week of our stay
• In fact, we all seemed to celebrate each other and gladly accommodate people in wheelchairs and families with excited kids so we could all enjoy our collective Disney experience together
• For a whole week
• Except, of course, for the people who stopped in the middle of a crowd of moving people to do something vitally important like take a selfie or scratch an elbow or clap on 1 and 3 or whatever other pressing needs really stupid, rude people face in their center-of-the-universe days
• MAJOR. PET. PEEVE.
• Anyway ...
• We’re re-entering the ugly, not-Disney-égalité-fraternité world of our shithole president and his shithole orbit today
• I don’t know how all of you survived it over the last week
• But re-enter we must
• In a cloud of voter optimism and hope
• And three new race shirts that make my suitcase uncloseable
• My flight home is at 5:14 tonight
• Erik’s is at 2:31
• So we took the early Disney bus to the airport for him to catch his flight and for me to chill with a couple of books and a fully charged phone for a while
• I’m currently typing this as I sit in a comfy chair in front of the airport Chick-fil-A
• Speaking of non-Disney-égalité-fraternité
• Facebook keeps crashing on me, so I’m obsessively select-all-ing and copying this post after every other bullet I write on it here
• Just so I don’t lose this freaking endless list of rambling, mostly pointless litany-of-complaints line items
• Freezing and crashing apps are many-times-a-day occurrences on my iPhone X
• I am SOOOOOOO not impressed with the iPhone X
• Save your money and get an abacus and two cans with a string
• Much more reliable
• And affordable
• Anyway ...
• I had an awesome vacation with an awesome friend and an awesome surprise finish of a half marathon I’d fully expected to choke on and possibly even have to quit
• And now I’m chilling in a bustling airport seated near two hip and cool teenagers who are using hip-and-cool-teenager patois like brah to talk to each other and my boy to talk about their (presumably male) friends
• It’s both charming and amusing
• And I’m in a happy place, both in my head and in this airport
• Except the airport’s escalators look like they were installed in a columbarium
• Brah

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS

1. The pillows in our room are way too comfortable
2. My squirrel-molested hair
3. Erik is taller than I am so he keeps getting all the chicks
4. I bit the side of my tongue so hard and so shreddy four hours ago while eating super-spicy (OUCH), super-acidy-tomatoey (OUCH) pizza that I’m STILL discovering how extensive the damage is
5. There is not enough time in the day to adequately complain about how awful the pain and blood and taste and resulting speech impediment are
6. Steve King
7. I’ve been up so long today that I’m too tired to do the math to figure out how many hours it’s been plus adjust for the new time zone
8. Steve King
9. My tung hurch
10. The pillows in our room are way too comfortable

Three miles! 10:46 pace!

The 10:16 pace was actually just Rob and me; he slogged along with my slow ass so we could talk about SHOW TUNES! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Rival-gang-member-and-occasional-interloper Traci (whom I’m calling a rival gang member here solely for the purpose of layering dramatic tension into this artfully nuanced narrative) sprinted ahead with pack-leader Scott and talked about the dreary sociopolitical metaphors of prescription constipation medication commercials. Or grapes. Or something. How would I know? I was in the back discussing Bernadette Peters’ surprisingly tepid movie career with Rob.

Anyway, here is this morning’s litany of complaints:
• Rob was 10 minutes late because he went the wrong way on the highway
• Because Bernadette Peters’ surprisingly tepid movie career is distressing to the point of highway distraction
• Rob’s 10 minute delay seems to have increased the potentially us-hitting automobile cross traffic on our running trail exponentially
• BECAUSE ROB WENT THE WRONG WAY ON THE HIGHWAY THIS MORNING
• WHO DOES THAT?
• OK, I’ve done it a couple times too
• But I’ll never admit it on here
• The fog this morning was insane
• Autocorrect just insisted that I wanted to write about insane figs
• That’s crazy
• Anyway, back to the fog ...
• It was so thick
• (How thick was it?)
• The fog this morning was so thick that it made us all sopping wet after our run
• What? Not everything has to be a joke, people
• Sheesh
• Let’s see ... Rob has driving-moron issues, Traci ran with us, Scott may or may not have talked about grapes, I’m awesome because this is my narrative and I control the content, Bernadette Peters, lots of cross traffic, insane figs, wet runners, sheesh ... that about covers everything
• Except we tried to stand or squat in levels for our post-run selfie and I chose to squat and then I had a hard time standing up afterward
• Probably because I have scurvy caused by an acute grape deficiency
• Or maybe it’s figs
• Which is insane

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

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• The city of Marion was clearly and cruelly platted by M.C. Escher because the entire 5K route was uphill and yet it mysteriously finished in the same place it started.
• Every hot man at the race was accompanied by a woman and/or child.
• Many of those children totally lapped me in the last mile.
• Which, I remind you, was totally uphill.
• That one guy in the black shorts and yellow shirt would have especially looked handsome with me in our wedding photos.
• He can reach me here if you know him.
• I’d forgotten that this race had clydesdale (meaning big ol’ heavy runners) and masters (meaning just ol’ runners) divisions. Which usually means less competition for us big and ol’ folks who should get trophies just for showing up in matching shoes. But even though I qualified for both divisions and did indeed manage to show up in matching shoes and therefore mathematically should have won in those big and ol’ divisions, I came in 15th.
• I placed 248th overall, but I didn’t register a place ranking for my gender.
• Seriously. After “G Plc” on the finisher listings, I have a big fat NOTHING.
• That’s not a metaphor for anything.
• Uphill.
• The whole way.
• Hot guys lugging around the accoutrements of heterosexuality.
• I couldn’t decide between that last bullet and “Hot guys albatrossed with the accoutrements of heterosexuality.”
• So I included both.
• Cleverly.
• I really stink right now.
• Because the whole damn race was uphill.