I’m at the gym minding my own business

and desperately trying to reclaim even the tiniest shadow of my former (relatively) youthful (relative) pulchritude but there’s a glaring specimen of Unfair Physical Perfection wandering all over the gym as if to ensure that everyone notices his hyper-Adonic contours and perfectly polished cheekbones and covet his genetics and his ... um ... other things. And here I am in my Shakespeare T-shirt that says “This shit writes itself” and he inevitably has a B.A in Bard and a PhD in Pentameter and is mortally offended by my literary flippancy EVEN THOUGH THIS VERY MORNING I MADE A BURNHAM-WOOD-TO-DUNSINANE REFERENCE as we moved a bunch of fake potted trees at our 9 to 5 strike but he seems to have left the gym while I just had my caps lock on and he’s probably going to go pull some kind of manufactured-drama Ophelia stunt to express his disdain and disgust with me but in the mean time since he’s gone some sense of non-outlier self-esteem equilibrium has been restored among the mere mortals and steel plates and cable machines and relentlessly forgettable ‘90s B-side grunge-wannabe noise on the loudspeakers and I’m returning to my regularly scheduled Back And Shoulders Day programming. With 20 more lbs on my shoulder presses!

Oh—and not only did Ophelia Guy have the well-honed genetics of a You’re Never Gonna Have This Physique Model but he also had really cool shoes. He’s such a Portia.

#EnglishMajorHumor

#IambicPentameter4Evah

Tonight’s penultimate performance of Elf the Musical was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish

As we were waiting onstage for the overture, one of our little elves walked up and accused me of not knowing her name—rude!—and then I had to admit that she was right. And then in our big tappy finale, not one but two—TWO!—of my tap shoes came untied.

Existential. Horror.

I just hope I can salvage what’s left of my joy and dignity in tomorrow’s matinee, or all my Elf the Musical memories will carry with them the lingering stink of shame and potential OHSA violations.

LITTLE. SANTA. HATS.

As is the case with many people on psychotropic medications, my bipolar meds have given me a robust case of tardive dyskinesia, a permanent neurological disorder that causes a range of involuntary movements including twitches and wiggles and shakes and grimaces and blinks and OCD things like repetitive face touching.

And I've won the tardive dyskinesia lottery and gotten the full spectrum of these behaviors, with varying degrees of intensity. Some days my knees just shiver. Some days I have epic squinting, face rubbing, rocking and anything else my body can think of to make me super-paranoid I'm irritating the hell out of everyone around me. People often ask me if I'm nervous (which happened once at a job interview I was otherwise rocking, to my eternal mortification) or cold (my veins actually course with reptile blood and I am NEVER cold) when they see me shaking. People have asked me why I'm always on my tiptoes when I sit down (the obvious answer: to help my body shake the living hell out of my legs more annoyingly). People have politely asked me to sit still.

And while these awake behaviors are bad enough, it's the nighttime manifestations of tardive dyskinesia that are killing me. Many, MANY times every EVERY night, I end up on my back with my legs bent and my feet flat and my knees slamming against each other so violently that they wake me up--usually somehow mummified in a tangle of sheets. Or I wake myself by repeatedly running my hands through my hair like I'm a supermodel being all sexy for a shampoo commercial as I ride with the top down along the 101. Or I just rub my face like I'm Lady Macbeth but the damn spots got all over everything and I need to URGENT URGENT WAKE UP AND TELL MACBETH TO ORDER DUNKIN' AND NOT MURDER DUNCAN.

Last night it was the face. Hoo boy, was it the face. And it was so borderline violent that it hurt ... and then it stung like an advanced-degree sunburn when the water hit it in the shower this morning. Which--if you see me today--is why I look like Hobo Santa because my cheeks are ultra-rosy and I'm now on my third day of not shaving and I don't care THAT much about how I'm going to look in the family Thanksgiving photos.

I take Gabatentin three times a day to help control the reason I'm extremely bad at stealing tambourines, but that is a six-paragraph discussion for another day. Key words: opiod epidemic.

Anyway, this post started out as a few sentences about how my face hurt in the shower this morning and then I was going to show you all a photo of the Hershey's Kisses I bought last night THAT LOOK LIKE LITTLE SANTA HATS. Sorry for rambling on like this, but look at the Hershey's Kisses I bought last night THAT LOOK LIKE LITTLE SANTA HATS:

Swear not by the clouds, the inconstant clouds ...

So the moon was shining through this amorphous, stunningly dimensional opening in the clouds tonight while I was pouring a bottle of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparkling water in the yew by the garage (because if I poured it directly on the ground it would splash on my shoe by the garage) so I could recycle the bottle to protect the environment but by the time I put the bottle down and got my phone out and turned off the flash because everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on the amorphous opening had morphed into something less stunningly dimensional and less moon-shine-throughy but I had my phone out and my flash turned off anyway because again everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on so I tried to artfully frame the rapidly disappearing amorphous hole of stunning moonlight between some handy nearby treetops and I took the picture anyway and it’s not great or artistic or even remotely as beautiful as the shining, amorphous, stunningly dimensional celestial event I saw in the sky in the first place but despite my rush to get out my phone and turn off my flash because as I’ve said repeatedly now everyone knows you can’t photograph the night sky with your flash on I didn’t get even a drop of long-expired store-brand mango-pear-flavored sparking water splashed on my shoe by the yew so I count the entire sequence of events as both an artistic and an environmental win.

Burnham Wood

This -- THIS! -- is why I'm so in-demand with the ladies that I have to wear tear-away pants in the show. You have two more chances to behold my feral mane and disco-fantasy mustache on stage this weekend. Because I'll be waiting by the door of the haircut store first thing Sunday morning, and once the forest has moved to Dunsinane -- if I may desperately force an illogical theater metaphor -- Macbeth is dead and gone forever. Which, of course, is the logical conclusion of that desperately forced illogical theater metaphor.

Anyway, get your tickets now at Theatre Cedar Rapids.