I would have called this download Sleep APPnea

but nobody asked for MY freely offered marketing expertise. Rude.

Anyway.

In the absence of a patient but long-suffering boyfriend to keep awake with my woodchopper snoring, I’m forced to sleep—IN SIN!—with this not-creepy app running in the background to record and chart my snoring so my doctor can monitor the efficacy of my super-expensive anti-APPnea (SEE HOW CLEVER THAT IS?) custom dental appliance.

So I’ll be sleeping with a mouthful of jaw-realigning plastic while my phone secretly records every noise in my bedroom. WHICH ARE THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF ALL LEADING WHAT-ARE-YOU-LOOKING-FOR-IN-A-PARTNER CRITERIA ON EVERY DATING SITE ON THIS AND ALL OTHER LONELYHEARTS-COLONIZED PLANETS EVER.

Indignities. They never end.

I seem to be having a bit of a bipolar depressive episode today

I’m functional enough that I’m at work, but I’m dysfunctional enough that I. CAN’T. FUCKING. SIT. STILL. Being bipolar is weird.

Plus my boyfriend won’t even talk to me.

You know that expression “Nothing can come between us but a gray plastic tote filled with severed mannequin arms in a wide selection of sizes”?

My handsomely chiseled boyfriend Fulgencio and I coined that.

Mommy, why doesn't Jake have a boyfriend?

Because he eats too much sugar, Timmy. And because he thinks dappled roseate colorways make sense next to earthy brown colorways.

Because we have inclement weather and I need calories to keep my strength up in case I get snowpocalypsed in

Also because I don’t have a boyfriend to give me gentle encouragement to rediscover and nurture my latent abs.

A needle in the haygurl

I am fully aware that the "people you may know" Facebook feature is not a poor man's Match.com. Nevertheless, I persist at treating it as such and I greedily swipe through it every time it appears on my feed in the hopes of finding the one local age-appropriate reasonably athletic show-tune loving human non-sequitur needle in the cliché-loathing haygurl who I know Facebook will deliver to my screen if I look just THIS ONE LAST TIME.

But Facebook keeps showing me in random order the same people I clearly after all this time STILL DON'T KNOW: local women, long-bearded undergrads who live 45 miles away, guys in Venezuela I share one friend with, and people who use Nell Carter for their profile photos. Plus my psychiatrist from Chicago who I had to leave for a different psychiatrist because not only was she mortally opposed to the very existence of Diet Coke but she didn't inform me of this fact -- and, granted, she didn't yet have a reason to -- until I brought a large McDonald's Diet Coke to her office and after I learned she really didn't want me even having it in her office I reached over to pick it up so I could pour it in her little office sink but instead I bumped it and spilled it all over her couch, throw pillows, artfully draped pashmina and carpet and neither of us had any way to clean it up except for the box of Kleenex on her table and the sweaty gym clothes in my bag and I was dying by fiery degrees inside as I simultaneously struggled to clean it up, apologized profusely, and marveled at the sheer liquid volume of seepy, drippy horror that a larger-than-I-thought container of delicious carbonated chemicals could inflict in mere seconds across the entirety of this poor woman's office furniture, décor and feng shui. Needless to say, I could never face her again and I began the hunt for a new in-network, geographically desirable psychiatrist almost as soon as I got in her elevator. So yes, Facebook, she technically IS a person I know. Score one for you! But under the circumstances, she is currently a poor dating choice for you to repeatedly offer me in the poor-man's Match.com you so misleadingly call "people you may know."

Oh -- and aside from any oblique references to show tunes or spilled liquids, the attached picture has almost no relevance to this post. I just thought it was funny. And you should find me a boyfriend.

For Future Reference:

The expanded 75-acre Super Target enveloping the west side of Cedar Rapids at 8:00 - 8:30 pm on a chilly January Monday is the exact opposite of where you should look to find:

• White shower heads unencumbered by stupid droopy hand-holdable hoses that just leak anyway
• Blank recordable CDs
• Vintage-looking Donald Duck T-shirts on clearance in my size
• Unheathered fabrics anywhere in the whole damn men's department
• Seriously - heathered shirts are the fashion equivalent of Bitch Kitty in a marching band uniform
• Affordable knockoffs of Kellyanne Conway's inauguration marching band dress
• All the bulk bar soap in the same aisle or even within 10 aisles of each other
• Cat perms
• Packages of fun-size share-with-the-office chocolates on the front shelves by the groceries where they've been reliably located in every Target in the known universe and beyond since the second Roosevelt administration
• Age-appropriate handsome potential boyfriends who aren't suddenly draped in clingy wives or girlfriends as soon as you both reach the end of the aisle
• Sassy pants
• In-focus photos of the new all-white expanded 75-acre Super Target logo from right by your car, which is parked really not that far away because the parking lot is practically empty which is why there are no age-appropriate handsome potential boyfriends wandering the aisles looking for scabby gay guys who sit in their cars listening to Billy Joel while furtively whining on Facebook
• Any fucking left-turn access to Edgewood Road
• Cherry-vanilla yogurt

Meet my new husband!

#AlternativeFacts

Three years ago today

I woke up, ran 16 miles, had breakfast with my marathon team, headed home to nap ... and decided I should be social and go to a brunch at some friends' house instead.

A few hours later I left that brunch with a boyfriend. Who became a fiancé a year later. Who is now a domestic partner or a husband depending on which word pops out of my mouth first ... even though we haven't had a wedding yet. Mostly because we're too lazy to plan one. And too cheap to pay for one. But as far as we're concerned, we're still very much married.

Three years is the Chips Ahoy!® anniversary. I think. So we'll be packing a snacky picnic basket and spreading ourselves on a blanket tonight at Millennium Park to enjoy a free concert. And we're thrilled that some dear friends and family members will be joining us.

And I can't think of a happier way to celebrate three years of freakishly easy happiness.

5% done!

The domestic partner and I agreed long ago that we’ll give our relationship 50 years to work. After that, we’ll both be free to cut our losses, walk away and find someone better while we still have our looks.

Today marks our two-and-a-half-year mark. Which by my calculations means we’re 5% done with our obligations. In the mean time we’re celebrating our kindaversary in grand style: I’m at work and he’s at home. And I have a rehearsal tonight, during which time he’ll probably still be at home.

It’s passion like this that’s gonna make this marriage work.

Uff da

I'm back from showing off the domestic partner this weekend at the every-other-summer reunion on the family farm in northeast Iowa. The farm was first settled by my Norwegian immigrant ancestors during the Civil War, and legend has it that they arrived too late in the summer that first year to get any kind of house built, so they dug a cave and lived there–even going so far as to give birth to my great grandfather in that cave in the middle of their first Iowa winter in their effort to set the Norwegian-martyr-card bar impossibly high from the get-go. Ever since I first heard that story, whenever I feel like the world is out to get me I remind myself that I'm not giving birth in a freaking cave in the middle of nowhere in a harsh Iowa winter. And then I feel a little better about myself. But just a little.

I thought I had a lock on minority show-and-tell this year by bringing my gay used-to-be-Catholic domestic partner to our hetero-Norwegian-Lutheran family reunion, but my jealous cousin had to trump me by bringing a black foster child. My domestic partner is pretty cute, but he just can't compete with an adorable black kid. Though the kid was only a few months old, so the domestic partner totally beat him in the math competition. Babies are stupid.

But we just drove six hours home on nothing but Diet Pepsi and Taco Bell, and I need my recovery sleep. I have only two years to think of a way to trump my cousin, so I have to get to planning and scheming bright and early tomorrow.

Two years ago today ...

I met a tall, disarmingly handsome fella at a lovely brunch. He laughed at my jokes. He quoted Sondheim. He wasn't subtle about ogling me when I wasn't subtle about showing him the tattoo on my abs.

And now—two job changes, one new condo, one 40th birthday, six new plants, two marathons and a whole bunch of show tunes later—we're waking up alone, half a continent apart. He's in Louisville and I'm in Chicago. He'll be traveling all day and I have a whole day of meetings. And since he won't be home until tomorrow, I might go buy some stuff tonight to strip the hardware on the front door.

While it's not the most ideal second anniversary celebration, I know we still have time to spend an anniversary or two ... or 48 ... together; we made a pact that we'll give this relationship 50 years and then just cut our losses if we decide it's not working out.

Fortunately, early poll data indicate a long, happy run.

Things I'm thankful for

The lump was nothing.
My little sister sits at the confluence of two family lines of breast cancer. On the plus side, it has yet to kill any of our forebears; our two grandmothers survived long enough to die of basic old-people diseases, and this October will mark our mom's 20th cancer-free year. So when my sister found a lump in her breast this week, she had legitimate cause for concern. Fortunately, she and I are of the Jake School of Worry, which dictates that we not waste time dwelling on potential bad news until it becomes actual bad news. I don't talk about it much, but we're a lumpy people anyway; I have six pilar cysts on my head that are nowhere near as grotesque as the ones in these pictures (mine are more like nipples—worthless Barbie-size head nipples that don't even do nipple-like things like alert me when it's cold out). Anyway, when my sister found a lump in her breast earlier this week, she calmly went in for a detailed checkup. And then calmly emerged with a clean—albeit slightly lumpy—bill of health.

The glove was found.
The fiancé was in scenic Islip, New York, early this week, so he took a train into Manhattan to see The Farnsworth Invention. By the time he left the theater, he discovered he'd lost his glove somewhere. He called me all forlorn and glove-bereft to tell me about it on his trudge back to Union Station. And then he called me half an hour later from the train to say he'd found his glove. He'd randomly entered the same car on the same train to get himself home, and his glove was actually still sitting on the seat where he'd left it.

It was only a flesh wound.
I was cutting some crusty bread for dinner a few nights ago with my freshly sharpened bread knife when whoops! I sliced right into the top of my thumb and across my thumbnail. It didn't bleed much, but it hurt like a Romney presidency. Once we determined the gash wasn't an immediate threat to my career as a hitchhiker or a concert pianist, we put a bandage on it and ate the part of our dinner that didn't have any blood on it. And now that the pain is gone, I'm mostly concerned about my sliced-up thumbnail catching on things until it grows out. So I'm still wearing a bandage, which is so bulky it's wreaking havoc on my typinb.

Thursday in the audience without the fiancé

We gave ourselves a week off from the gym after we got home from the cruise. Of course, that week stretched to two. And it would have made it to three if I hadn’t found myself wide awake this morning at 3:00. The fiancé had just left for another long trip* and I was suddenly alone and very wide-eyed in our big bed.

*For the record, this marks our second Valentine’s Day apart. But every day in our house is like Valentine’s Day (blogsickness bags are located in the seat pocket in front of you) so we don’t mark the official Valentine’s Day by exchanging any more saccharine text messages than we would on any random Thursday.

So there I was all alone in our big bed. And I did what any lonely, red-blooded man would do in my situation: I fired up my laptop. And there, by the warm, flickering glow of my screen, I furtively played with my impressively lengthy—and uncomfortably hard—list of Scrabulous!™ games on Facebook. Then I answered about 10 emails that had been languishing in my inbox. Then—since it was already 6:00 and my alarm was within an hour of going off anyway—I got dressed and headed to the gym.

It wasn’t until I was well into my 20-minute stair climb that I looked down and realized it was a good thing my husband-hunting days were behind me. Because in the dark this morning I somehow ended up dressing myself like a bar mitzvah clown: white running shoes, yesterday’s black dress socks, yesterday’s moss green undershirt and terrorist-alert orange running shorts that had climbed clear up my thighs to celebrate the invention of static cling. I was definitely looking less than my best. And husbands, my lord, are weak.

My day has been a sleep-deprived fog ever since, though I’m proud to report I did manage to assemble a reasonably color-coordinated office ensemble in time for work.

And now it’s almost 8:00 pm. And while I’m still at work, the fiancé is nestled snugly in a Broadway theater digesting a faux-Mexican dinner while watching a British revival of an American musical about a French painter. I’m engaged to the goddamn U.N.

But before he got his passport stamped, he sent me a saccharine Valentine’s Day text message telling me how much he wishes he could be sharing all this with me tonight:

Golden dreams

The fiancé likes to fall asleep to The Golden Girls. He grabs an episode off the TiVo, turns the volume way down and sets the TV timer for 30 minutes. And both of us are usually out cold before Blanche says something slutty, Rose says something stupid or Dorothy wears something asymmetrical.

Which is weird. And not Bea-Arthur-in-a-diagonal-zippered-caftan weird. I mean weird in the sense that normally I'm a moth to a flame when the TV is on. Even for things I find ridiculous like football or home shopping or Mitt Romney. Even when I'm already doing something that usually totally engages me like playing Scrabulous!™ or cataloging my sparkly underpants. If there is a TV on and I'm within three ZIP codes of it, I will find it. And I will be powerlessly drawn to it. Bright screen ... warm glow ... flickering images ... mindless content ... must ... watch ...

And yet The Golden Girls has almost no sway over me. Oh, sure—once in a while when I'm not particularly sleepy or I'm feeling extra cuddly with the fiancé pressed up against me and I just want to savor the moment for a while before I drift off, I'll stay up and watch the show in the hopes that one of the girls will say lanai or Blanche will bring home a guy who's actually attractive for once.

But otherwise, the show is as compelling to me as exclusive coverage of a starlet with a drug problem.

Then again, if there's one thing I can do better than anyone on this planet, it's fall asleep. I hate to brag, but I can climb in bed and be asleep before the lightbulb gets cold. And usually nothing can wake me—not thunderstorms, not marching bands, not flaming housepets ... unfortunately, not even my alarm on most mornings. So it's not surprising that The Golden Girls continues to lose Bedtime Smackdown! every night.

But all bets are off when the fiancé is out of town. Like tonight. When I have the whole bed to myself I seem to lie awake forever—albeit with my fair share of the pillows for once. And as luck would have it, the only Golden Girls on our TiVo is the one where Dorothy wears that turquoise top with the gold lamé shrug. And it's waaaaay too loud to let me sleep.

Nothing left but the running

And the carbo-loading. And the hydrating. And the packet pickuping. And the nail trimming. And the sunscreen slathering. And the pre-emptive pooping. And the outfit picking. And the hair cutting (so I don’t look like a fluffy bunny in my marathon pictures).

In case you haven’t picked up on the hidden subtext of almost every freaking post I’ve made since April, I’m running my fourth marathon this Sunday. This is the second marathon I’ve run on behalf of the AIDS Marathon organization, and as I make my final preparations, I need to add one more gerund to the list above: The thanking.

People all over the country have given (to date) a total of $2,805 to sponsor me. Most of you I know. And if I have your addresses and you haven’t received your thank-you notes from me, they should be in your mailboxes today.

But there are about 10 names on my donor list I don’t recognize. Which I assume are some of the generous readers of this here blog thing. And since the AIDS Marathon web site gives me only names and donation amounts for my sponsors, the only way I can thank you strangers is through a blog post. So thank you. Your generosity both to me and to the countless people living with HIV and AIDS is touching. I will carry all your names—along with the stories some of you have shared—with me as I run this Sunday.

You-all can continue (ahem) sponsoring me for a couple more months if you want. But in the mean time, I want to list everyone who’s made donations to date. You people truly rock:

JaneAnne P.
David L.
Bill L.
Jerry G.
Jennifer D.
Craig N.
Gare U.
Jane H.
Hope M.
Stephanie G.
Catherine Y.
Stephen M.
Brandon V.
Rad S.
Danelle F.
Lou D.
Peter S.
Frankie M.
Nick & Kay G.
Mikey T.
Eric W.
Julia D.
Amy M.
Richard N.
Pat M.
Gingie H.
Sue A.
Sonelius K-S.
Andy T.
Jay H.
Jeffrey R.
Tamina P.
Chad R-P.
Dominic G.
John D.
Dan B.

After a summer of relatively mild training weather, we are now supposed to have demoralizingly hot, muggy weather for the marathon. But once in a while weather.com changes its mind and says we’ll have rain. Whee. In any case, I’m still psyched, and I can’t wait to share 26.2 glorious miles with 45,000 runners and a million cheering spectators.

Think of me this Sunday from about 8:10 am CT (when I should have slogged through the crowd to cross the start line) and 12:10 pm CT (when I hope hope hope hope hope to cross the finish line and finally beat my 4-hour marathon goal).

And think of my awesome fiancé as he pounds out his first marathon. He runs at a slower pace, so we won’t be marathoning together. But I’ll be waiting to celebrate with him as he crosses the finish line.

And then be sure to come back next week to relive the whole adventure in stories and pictures with me.

Oh, there’s nothing halfway

The fiancé and I are due to make his first trip to Iowa to meet the whole fam damily this weekend. On the docket: hours of him being adorable for the niece and the nephew, pizza from Happy Joe’s or Tomaso’s (or both!), a 10-mile run past every school I ever attended and every house I ever lived in, perhaps a meet-n-greet(-n-show-off) soirée with as many old friends as I can scare up, and—if we can squeeze it in between rounds of canasta—some free labor as my folks and my sister’s family continue settling into their new homes.

Be good while we’re gone.

Pix from Las Vegas!

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Romantic reverie

When you’re enjoying an outdoor concert at Millennium Park on a lazy Wednesday evening with your fiancé … when he packs blankets and pillows to relax on along with sodas and snacks to enjoy including individual containers of cherry Jell-O that he made with fruit cocktail just the way you like it … when you get a spot on the lawn that’s close enough to the orchestra that you can hear more of the concert live than through the latticework of speakers over your head … when the sun is warm and the audience is enthralled and you’re just happy to be alive … when you lie back with half-closed eyes under the open sky with your fiancé’s hand in yours and Tchaikovsky’s lush Swan Lake suite and Sibelius’ mighty Finlandia washing over you … when some woman wanders by and steps a little too close to your blanket … you can totally see up her skirt.

Harry Potter and the Irrelevant Blog Post

SPOILER ALERT:
There are NO Harry Potter spoilers in this post

So a co-worker spent the weekend devouring the last Harry Potter book. She was being VERY careful around the office not to say anything that could remotely spoil the fun for anyone else who may still be reading the book. But since I haven’t read any of the books and I’ve seen only one movie that I barely remember anyway and I honestly see no future involving me reading any of the books, I followed her into her office, closed the door and asked her in hushed tones to tell me how it all ends.

Which she did. In hushed tones. So now I know. And I am not spoiling anything by saying that the ending is so convoluted (it took her about 15 minutes to explain it all to me) and involves so many characters I’ve never even heard of that I couldn’t possibly explain any of it to you even if I were the sort of asshole who went around deliberately spoiling people’s fun. (Hermione’s a dude!)

Even though I don't plan on reading the books, I’m thrilled that the series has people (especially kids) reading so enthusiastically. And that it has religious wingnuts so apoplectic over its juggernaut-like influence in the spread of witchcraft, child-eating and kitten-spanking. I also love stories about curses and secrets and magic and castles and intrigue and girls named Hermione who turn out to be dudes, so you’d think I’d be eagerly devouring Harry Potter books as fast as they’re written. But as it is, I can barely keep up with my growing piles of Times and Newsweeks and New Yorkers, so I have no interest in piling seven hefty Harry Potter books on my shrine to reading failure.

I have had time, though, to make two date nights in a row with the fiancé. Last night we saw Hairspray, which we adored. I know some homos were wanting to get all boycotty on the movie because of John Travolta and Scientology and homophobia, but we quite frankly couldn’t work up much of a lather over any of that. (Since virtually all religions have underpinnings—or downright foundations—of homophobia, what religious actor isn’t involved in a homophobic religion? And how perfect is “lather” in a paragraph about Hairspray?) In any case, the movie is delightful, the costumes and wigs are fabulous, the choreography (though filmed in a way that makes it hard to watch at times) brings a fresh take to ’60s standards, and James Marsden is positively dreamy. John Travolta doesn’t bother me at all in the movie, and in fact I like the humanity he brings to Edna. I do think Zac Efron is way too young to play Link, though, and Amanda Bynes is kind of dull as Penny. And holy shit is Elijah Kelley charismatic as Seaweed. And even though I’m still bitter I didn’t get cast as Velma, we’ll totally see it again.

Then tonight the fiancé met me at work and we walked to Millennium Park with a blanket and a bag of treats and enjoyed Ravel’s hypnotic Boléro on a program of 20th Century French Orchestral Works That Jake’s Otherwise Never Heard Of on the lawn of the Pritzker Pavilion. It’s all part of Chicago’s free Grant Park Music Festival, and we intend to go back as often as we can this summer. And next time we plan to bring snacks that are a little healthier (but no more refreshingly delicious) than these:

After the concert, we wandered through the Millennium Park grounds and even took an obligatory tourist picture of our reflections in The Bean (officially known as Cloud Gate):
Let the record show, though, that The Bean is a curved surface, so any weird distortions you see here do not reflect the naturally manly shapes of our bodies. Or our names aren’t Hermione.