Shhhhh! I'm catching guys ...

FACT: My 1890s-gentleman-with-an-excruciatingly-precise-side-part hair is still totally on point two hours after the show.

FACT: My fireworks-and-sailboats shirt is objectively sexy and makes me factually catnip to the ladies.

POSSIBLY: And the dudes.

FACT: I’m watching a National Geographic documentary on the recovery of the Costa Concordia.

FACT: Every diver and salvage engineer in the entire Mediterranean is HAWT.

FACT: That’s Mediterranean for HOT.

FACT: If they could only see me through my TV they could see how irresistibly catnippy my on-point hair and fireworks-and-sailboats shirt are.

FACT: The combination is romantically lethal.

FACT: The documentary is really quite fascinating.

FACT: So I’m too busy to date all those hot Mediterraneans.

THEREFORE: Sorry, fellas. Now shhhhhh!

HOW TO ADULT:

1. Get an estimate to have the ugly, bubbly rust on your car repaired
2. Contain your flinching instinct when you get the original ballpark number
3. Head from there to get your oil changed
4. Remember to bring your coupon
5. Refrain from awkwardly flirting with the nerdy straight guy with the ugly shoes in the waiting room
6. Refrain from super-embarrassingly giggling and flipping your hair when you talk to the super-cute guy behind the counter
7. Head from there to the gym for the first time in over two months
8. Make up for all that lost time and all those atrophied muscles in one workout*
9. Sign an international supermodel contract*
10. Read the fine print

* delusions may vary

My name’s Jake, and I’m (mildly) dilated to meet you

The scheduling fates lined me up with back-to-back (hot) doctor appointments this morning. I’ve gone from getting my hot-dermatologist stitches out to getting a hot-ophthalmologist vision baseline as a follow-up to my (fully dilated) migraine visit a month ago. And while Hot Ophthalmologist an awesome band name, both hot doctors have wedding rings and photos of their wives and kids in their offices. Which means we won’t be scheduling any cake tastings for the wedding reception just yet. Plus being dilated has made it profoundly challenging to type this. So please excuse any lipos.

HEADACHE UPDATE:

I got a shot of Toredol industrial-strength painkiller in my shoulder this morning, and OHMYGODITHURT. It took its sweet time killing the pain in my head—and it never killed the pain from the damn shot—and now, just seven hours later, it’s quickly wearing off. I feel my eyes trying to cross as I type this.

I finally got my CT scan at 4:30, and apparently there’s nothing remarkable in my head. So I’m back to ingesting mountains of painkillers and snorting gallons of squirty sinus stuff, as they say in the ouch-my-head-hurts medical world. And in the mean time I just saw—and subsequently googled to discern the marital status of—Rob Marciano and Will Carr reporting on the ABC Nightly News. In summary: They’re both hot, they’re both married, and they’re both not offering to provide curative hugs and kisses to me and my achy head.

The hottest guy in the gym just dug a Richter-scale booger out of his nose in front of me

Which totally knocks him off the top spot, and if I can score well in the cha-cha I can probably improve my ranking on the leader board.

Also: I just did ten unassisted triceps dips. That technically triples my advantage over Booger Boy.

Notes on an unexpectedly long visit to New York:

• The bustling, clueless-tourist crowds are exciting and almost amusing for exactly five days. Add two more against your will and they become murderously intolerable.
• You cannot go ten feet on any New York sidewalk without walking through a crowd of marijuana smoke.
• No matter what they’re wearing, New Yorkers just dress cooler than the rest of us. Even when they look ridiculous, they OWN IT.
• Hot, athletic men with perfect lats and well-broken-in T-shirts walk alarmingly fast in Hell’s Kitchen and make it frustratingly difficult to keep up with them and fulfill your creepy-old-stalker obligations.
• THE. ARCHITECTURE.
• I would drive myself to abject bankruptcy if I lived in such a vibrant world overflowing with theater, art, music and museums. But especially theater.
• tiny. bathrooms.
• I’m not much of a foodie and I’m trying to avoid fast food, and there just aren’t enough plain-old, boring diners to suit my proletarian needs.
• Apparently the cabbies are contractually obligated to yell FUCK YOU! at pedestrians and other drivers. But in a sexy Brooklyn accent.
• I love hearing and seeing the melting pot of languages and clothing and cultural indicators that you walk through every ten feet (between the marijuana clouds) everywhere you go.
• People lose their humanity and become mere obstacles on the narrow sidewalks. Nobody looks up to say hi or even meet your eyes. It is what it is, but if I moved there and didn’t know a soul it would make me feel profoundly lonely.
• Thankfully I do know someone there. I’ve known my friend Chris probably since kindergarten, and he and his husband and their futon graciously saved me the cost of a hotel when my flights got canceled.
• THE. ARCHITECTURE.

Word to the wise:

There are two dance studios next door to each other on West 45th Street. Only one of them necessitates tap shoes.

And next door to these establishments WAS Kinky Boots, which required ridiculous heels. The show closed last weekend though, and rough-looking guys named Vinny and Dude and Here’s My Number Jake Call Me are currently hauling the remnants of the show out the side doors and across the sidewalk into trucks for what doesn’t look like a promising fate.

Oh—and tap class was the perfect level of challenging, so I therefore deem it awesome. Except the teacher randomly started many of the technique drills and combinations on the left. Which is the dance equivalent of pushing us into pits of lava, but with a compelling beat.

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.

#TotallyCrushing

And not just because of that super-cool jacket.

Note to self:

Guys who get up and come to the gym first thing on a weekend morning are clearly disciplined about their fitness and clearly disciplined about their health and clearly disciplined about their distracting hotness and clearly disciplined enough to put down their damn phones and do their damn workouts.

Howard Dean: Demanding a border wall “is a ridiculous argument by a ridiculous person who’s pretending to be the president of the United States”

Howard is in FULL-NO-BULLSHIT MODE tonight. And Chris Cuomo needs to stop smoldering at me through my TV and propose already.

The bad news:

I've been lying to all our Full Monty audiences. I have not at any time during our rehearsals or run been fully naked; I've been wearing stitches in my head for the last 12 days. I've also had a band-aid on my ripped fingernail since Wednesday, but in comparison that barely qualifies as unsexy so stop whining and demanding refunds on your tickets.

The good news: I JUST GOT MY STITCHES OUT! (Also, the lab results showed the cysts were benign, but they're by nature benign and the lab work was just a precaution in case they were an abomination of nature like those damn gays.) Anyway, my stitches-less scalp and I are finally going MEGA FULL MONTY this weekend!

The bad news: The cute dude in the doctor's waiting room never once said hi or gave me butterfly kisses. Probably because I didn't put any product in my hair this morning because of my stitch-ectomy so my hair is doomed to be man-repellent-level floofy all day.

The good news: The temperatures here have yet to drop to sub-arctic levels, so nobody's cysts or stitches have frozen off for free yet--which would be totally unfair to me. But the snow has drifted a foot above the bottom of my office window (and I'm on the 94th floor, which makes it borderline alarming) and my skin is itchy to the bone, so once the temperatures drop I think it's safe to say that winter is finally here.

In the interest of establishing a universal standard of objectivity,

I’m in the process of developing and applying rigorous scientific methodologies to create measurable efficiencies in plotting my eternal existential frustration as I rank my gym husbands in order—most to least—of who makes me giggle like a lovestruck schoolgirl.

I currently have three gym husbands in the #1 ranking—the system is clearly not ready to be published to undergo scientific review—but ONE OF THEM IS HERE TODAY GIGGLE GIGGLE GUSH GUSH WILL U B MY BOYFRIEND CHECK ONE [ ] YES [ ] NO (PLEASE CHECK YES PLEASE CHECK YES PLEASE CHECK YES)!

In other news, I just super-setted 21’s palms-up and 21’s palms-down. BEHOLD MY BOSSY BADASS BOUNCIN’-BABY-LIKE BICEPS!

Well hello, rakishly asymmetrical gym stealthfie!

It looks like you’re shaking things up on a different lat-pulldown machine. Your initiative and resourcefulness are sure to get you completely unnoticed by an entire gymful of muscular, handsome, manly men. Again.

Well hello, Shoop Shoop song on the gym speakers! In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a gymful of muscular, handsome, manly men. They prefer working out to the genre of music called Not The Shoop Shoop Song. Go back to your retirement-center elevator.

The gym tonight is (please select all):

1. Teeming with masculine pulchritude
2. Collectively doing chest, shoulders and triceps because EVERYONE’S USING THE EQUIPMENT I WANT
3. Celebrating the entire discography of Wilson Phillips
4. Rudely ignoring the awesomeness of my Mew Mew Kitty shirt
5. Bringing back the man-bun

Back, Biceps and

BOY I WISH THAT GUY WITH THE BALL CAP AND THE BEEFY QUADS WOULD LOOK UP SO WE COULD MAKE EYE CONTACT AND EXCHANGE SMILES AND SCHEDULE THE CAKE TASTING FOR THE WEDDING.

Also: BOY I NEED TO CLEAN MY GLASSES.

WOW but there’s a lot of objectification going on in the gym tonight

I just hope some of them are objectifying me back.

Also: EL CAMINO SHIRT!

Things I’ve accomplished today:

• Had my first formal voice lesson in 30 years, and already determined some bad habits I can start working on unlearning
• Went to Target and bought only what was on my list
• Did my first leg workout since I started running last spring ... and freaking KILLED my legs without sacrificing proper form
• Accepted a very romantic marriage proposal from one of my 934 freakishly hunky gym crushes as all the rest of the guys in the gym struggled to mask their jealousy through forced smiles and wan applause*
• Attended a Full Monty line bash where I remembered more of my lines than I’d expected
• Sat down and actually played the piano for the first time in months as an overture (for lack of a less obvious metaphor) to my New Year’s resolution to practice with specific regularity
• Made it to my 11th day without having Diet Coke
• Wrote a blog post that doesn’t use the word “boobies”
• Oops
• Didn’t kill anyone intentionally
• Did some laundry without expecting a gold star on my chores chart
• Boobies
• Oops again

* This one is a total fucking lie

A letter to one future husband

Dear Boy-Next-Door-Handsome-But-Also-Holy-Shit-Alarmingly-Handsome Dude At The Gym Who Looks Like A Young Keanu Reeves But More Meet-The-Parents-Respectable With One Of Those Sharp-Edged Haircuts And A Degree In Maybe Applied Biochemistry Or Entrepreneurial Public Policy Or Conversational Latin Or Something Equally Impressive That You Got On A Non-Threateningly-Hot Supermodel Scholarship At A Small But Not Elitist College Where You Also No Doubt Selflessly Fostered Ugly Puppies And Tirelessly Tutored Dead Children: Even though I was studiously not noticing you so as not to appear twice-your-age creepy, you made my night when you not only noticed me but also ASKED ME TO SPOT YOU.

Also: When I said “that’s quite an impressive feat, dude” about you benching 90-lb. dumbbells, that was just me showing you how witheringly awkward I am capable of being around non-threateningly-hot supermodels.

Also: Not that I noticed, but let’s talk about how we can fix that problem with your missing wedding ring.

Another covert gym selfie

Another chest day so I don’t have saggy moobs when I de-shirt in Full Monty. Another gym full of holy-shit hot men who refuse to ask me to marry them.