Yup

I still can't decide if I should be appalled or amused--or somehow a combination of both--that Stable Genius actually said "my crimes." That puerile man-boy is too stupid to wipe his own ass.

#Pride101

Before the 1969 Stonewall riots, virtually every aspect of being gay was illegal to varying degrees in America: being openly gay, showing public affection, having any kind of sex, marriage, adoption, assembly in public, assembly in private, going to gay bars … even owning bars with any form of gay designation. The only gay bars that existed were owned by crime syndicates, who definitely weren’t at the vanguard of fighting for gay liberation; they saw in the gay population a steady and highly dependent form of revenue that the mobs could protect via their considerable influence over law enforcement. We were exploited for our desperate need to find each other and for the money we were willing to pay to feel like we weren’t alone. We paid exorbitant prices for watered-down, bottom-shelf liquor. We gathered in buildings that were unclean, unsafe and unimportant to society. The subtexts were shame, risk, secrecy, and arrest and public humiliation if we were caught entering or exiting these bars. But in the gathering momentum of our achievements in equality over the last half century, our forebears demanded--and slowly, surely got--our growing equality and our freedom to live our lives openly and safely and without imposed shame and exploitation. THIS IS WHY WE CALL IT PRIDE.

Nobody is safe in New York. Not even RIGHT BY THE POLICE CARS.

Gross. Just gross.

If you're too dumb to know that everything you post online is searchable and will live forever ... if you're too dumb to know that treasonous conversations with Russian officials will be recorded and most likely used to blackmail you ... if you're too dumb to take rudimentary steps to conceal your compulsive hypocrisy and corruption ... then you're staggeringly too dumb -- and too grossly incompetent -- to be president.

$500 breakage

Fulfillment is a retail industry term for delivering rewards and rebates to customers. When your paid magazine subscription comes with a free tote bag, when your rewards card offers bonus points at specific types of stores, when your certain-dollar-level purchase enters you to win round-trip airline tickets … someone somewhere has to make sure that you meet the qualifications to receive the thing that was promised to you and then fulfill on that promise.

Breakage is the industry term for the actual unspoken goal of fulfillment: that consumers will make an initial purchase and then be too lazy or confused or disorganized or frustrated with the artificial hoops they have to jump through to get their free thing that they’ll miss a deadline or overlook a step or lose a receipt or just get angry and give up. It’s why you have to request your $25 check when you reach 25,000 points on your cash-back card. It’s why you have to supply original receipts and cut out bar codes and fill out an official form to get your $10 rebate on light bulbs. It’s why merchandise returns after 30 days get you store credit that’s issued on a plastic card or slip of paper you can put in a drawer and forget about. It’s why your points expire and the fine print is on a separate website and there’s no number you can call if you have questions.

And I—the 20-plus-year advertising copywriter who writes promotional stuff every day for retail clients and who actually knows how to survive the system—recently racked up $500 in breakage losses.

$100 gone
I bought matching flight suits for the domestic partner and me a couple Halloweens ago at Belmont Army Surplus, whose website sucks so much I’m linking you to a google search instead so you can hate them from lots of links. But the domestic partner is freakishly tall and even the biggest flight suit they carried wasn’t long enough for him. So I took our flight suits back. But Belmont Army Surplus has a Draconian returns-for-store-credit-only policy. They told me they keep all the store credits in a database organized by email address so I didn’t even need to worry about a receipt. Of course, when I went to cash in my store credit for something else, there was no record of my return or even my email address in their database. Since I was dumb enough to believe their database story, my receipt was long gone. And when I asked the guy behind the counter what my options were, he treated me like I was trying to rob him. Moral of the story: NEVER shop at Belmont Army Surplus.

$400 gone
I changed a return American Airlines flight from a business trip last year so I could stick around and have a weekend vacation. Since the ticket was non-refundable, I was given a $400 credit that I had to use for a new flight within a year. Fine. Whatever. But six months later when I went to redeem my credit over the phone, American Airlines informed me that I had to schedule my replacement fight in fucking person at a fucking O’Hare ticket desk. And since I never fly out of O’Hare, it took me (what I thought was less than) a year to finally book a regular O’Hare flight so I’d have a reason to make the trek out there and book my replacement flight. Of course, by the time I got there I’d missed the deadline by three fucking days. When I complained to the desk agent about their stupid schlep-out-to-O’Hare policy, she said I might be able to bypass the rule and book my replacement flight with a supervisor … over the fucking phone. Fucking seriously. And when I called … wait for it … the supervisor told me I’d missed the deadline and I should basically go $400 myself. I fucking hate you, American Airlines.

Crap I have bought

A garlic press. One of the side benefits of being burgled is you find stuff you forgot you had. Last month’s burglar had torn through all the drawers in our kitchen, and as we cleaned up the mess we found a $50 gift card for the Chopping Block that said it expired in February 2009. So I put it in my wallet and forgot about it all over again … until last night when I was finally leaving the office at 8:00 and a co-worker said she had to run to the Chopping Block before it closed. I tagged along with her and learned two things when I walked in the door: Contrary to what they might say, Chopping Block gift cards never expire. And contrary to what mine very clearly said, it was actually worth $150. So I ended the day in a gleeful little shopping spree, and I stumbled out of the store with the abovementioned garlic press (I've always wanted a garlic press!), a cheese slicer, a new cutting board (the same kind they use on Top Chef! not that I ever watch that show! but still!), a Silicone pastry brush, a set of magnetic tongs (they stay shut!), a bottle of premium olive oil and an ultra-sharp cheese grater that promises to create pillows of fine cheese shavings … and wicked damage to the face of any future burglar I find in my kitchen.

A backpack with a footprint in it. I feel like my body has grown used to the protein shakes and pre-workout energizers and other related vanity potions I’ve been using since I started working with my trainer in July. So when an amateur bodybuilder friend told me about NO2, a supplement program that had given his training a dramatic boost, I spent a week researching it … and then spent a shit-ton of money to buy a cycle of the stuff. And the folks at GNC loaded me down with swag in appreciation. They gave me a huge pile of protein powder samples, a heart-monitor device and a really cool backpack. And when I got the backpack home and started digging through it to admire all its secret compartments, I found a dusty shoe print on the inside of one of its pockets. And while I don’t really care that I got a used free backpack, I am slightly concerned that I can’t get the footprint out of the backpack fabric.

Xanadu. We saw the fabulous Xanadu stage musical on Sunday, and I haven’t stopped singing the theme song all week. Or threatening to leave my husband for the guy playing Sonny Malone. But I hate to ruin a happy marriage, so I did the next best thing: I went on Amazon and bought the Xanadu Broadway cast recording. And since I think it’s a waste to order one thing from Amazon when I could easily order two, I also bought the Xanadu movie soundtrack. And since I think it’s a waste to order two things from Amazon when I could easily order three, I also bought …

A camera. Thanks to all the suggestions and recommendations from you fabulous people, I narrowed down my search and finally bought a shiny new silver-and-blue Canon PowerShot SD1100IS. It’s loaded with features! It fits in my pocket! It actually takes pictures! So now I can finally go on a cruise and come home with more than a sunburn to help me remember it.

Team shirts. I’m racing up the John Hancock Center stairs a week from Sunday. But while Hustle up the Hancock is a pretty cool event, its official shirts are, to put it charitably, lame. The palette is kind of feminine, the design is uninspiring and even the shirts themselves suck. They’re almost as wide as they are tall and they look good on exactly nobody. Luckily, we’re not expected to wear them in the race. Even luckilyier, I’m racing up the building with a team of co-workers. And one of our co-workers is a graphic designer. And he made us a logo. And I just ordered logo shirts for all of us … logo shirts that actually fit. And because our shirts won’t suck, we’re gonna be the kick-assest team next Sunday. See for yourself why all the other climbers will have no choice but to bow down and worship our awesomeness:

We’ve discovered one more thing that got burgled

Thomas can’t find his earbuds for his CD player. Though the CD player is still in his room. So they must have been stolen last week as well. Poor Thomas. Nobody is immune when your house gets broken into.

And we’re still having moments of I wonder if the burglar also stole THAT long-forgotten thing, but when we check, those long-forgotten things are always where we remember leaving them. I had kind of hoped the burglar had relieved us of the domestic partner’s broken camera that we’ve never brought ourselves to throw away or get repaired. But when we checked this morning, it was still taking up valuable space in the cupboard were we store it. So no such luck.

And as we continue our ongoing mental inventory of the valuables in our house, I can’t decide if it’s a mark of consumer restraint or financial failure that we really don’t have much stuff that would be attractive to a burglar. At least not anymore.

In any case, our insurance company finally called … and the guy on the phone seemed genuinely shocked when he started reading the information on his computer screen to us and he discovered that his company had taken five days to get back to us. So we’re chalking up the delay as an unfortunate oversight. I’ve never filed a burglary claim before, so the whole process has been uncharted territory for me. And I’m pleased to report that most of it has gone as pleasantly as one could expect. The insurance company reimbursed us for everything—including the cash and our last-minute addition of the earbuds—with no questions asked. Unfortunately, some moron bought us insurance with a high deductible, so I’m going to hold off replacing my iPod until everything else is replaced. So with all your helpful camera recommendations, I may be going on an electronics binge sometime next month.

And if any of you burglars try to come steal our new stuff, take the damn broken camera too. And be prepared to endure a grisly, painful death if I catch you in my house.

Question:

Have any of you been burgled? How long did your insurance company take to return your calls? It's been four days now, and after calling our insurance company five times all we've gotten back is a whole lotta nothin'.

We renew in April, and as much as I hate shopping for insurance, I'm thinking we're gonna have to start the whole process over. Burglary is fun!

Rule #1 For Being Burgled:

Don't post about it on Facebook unless you have a couple hours' time to respond to hundreds of calls and emails and texts from your friends.

Stupid friends. Why do they always have to be so nice?

While I'm on the topic of being burgled, the domestic partner is suddenly in the market for a new laptop PC. I'm a Mac guy, so I can offer no direction in that world. Do any of you lovely people have recommendations (or warnings) for PC manufacturers or models or affordable suppliers? (Plus I'd love some recommendations for an affordable, pocket-size digital camera that takes decent pictures. The one I have is as big as my head, and you have to pedal it to start it.)

I just learned something

Robbery is when someone takes property off your person. Burglary is when someone takes property from your home.

We were burgled today.

The domestic partner came home from the gym around 6:30 pm and noticed the locks weren't locked the way we usually lock them. When he got inside, he found muddy footprints everywhere. And a few things in the house were not where they normally are, which is a lot to say right now because our house looked burgled well before it was broken into.

Then he noticed his computer was missing. And his backpack. And $600 in cash, which we NEVER have in the house. And when he called me at work to tell me about it, I asked him to look for my iPod, which I'd last seen sitting right where any burglar could find it near the little speaker thing in our bathroom. Sure enough, it was gone too. But the speaker thing was still there.

Fortunately, nobody was home when it happened, so nobody got hurt. Because if I had been home, you know damn well I'd try to play the hero and my boneheadedness would have left someone injured. My biggest concern when the domestic partner called me was whether or not Thomas had been home. I can't even begin to imagine the outcome of him stumbling on a burglary in progress. But he wasn't, so we don't have to think about it.

The freakiest part of the whole experience is the fact that there's no sign of forced entry. No jimmied door locks. No broken windows. No dynamite residue. In fact, the muddy footprints all over the house aren't anywhere near any doors or windows.

Except.

There's a muddy footprint on the lip of the SINK. But there's no way you could break into our house by standing on our sink. So I'm thinking we were burgled by a muddy-shoed acrobat:


In any case, the police came, asked a lot of questions, took a lot of notes, left fingerprint dust everywhere, and even knocked on all the doors in our tier to see if any of our neighbors saw or heard anything. The verdict? Nobody noticed anything. Our stuff will never be recovered. And we should change our locks. Which we're doing first thing tomorrow.

Assuming we don't get murdered in our sleep tonight.