Oh, look!

Jake took another artsy-wannabe picture of the moon with his iPhone!

I bet he posts it on his blog next.

Get with the program!

Russia is so yesterday. Now I only do my treason with Ukraine.

I HAD SHIT TO DO TONIGHT

But this morning’s awesomely brutal Hello, Dolly! choreography rehearsal literally sent me home into to a three-hour coma. AND LOTS OF CREAKY JOINTS. So instead of doing active shit tonight, I passively sent some photos from my phone to be printed at Walgreens as possibilities for the dramatic Jake-stars-in-the-theater wall I’m curating for my bedroom. My verdict: meh. The cropping feature on the app isn’t entirely accurate, and the cropping feature on the app isn’t accurate at all. Neither is the cropping feature:

And did I mention passive? Because I also bought two pints of Ben & Jerry’s when I picked up the photos and headed right home to binge on Lifetime Intimate Portraits of Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Betty White and Estelle Getty. WHICH. IS. SO. NOT. GAY. NO. NOT. AT. ALL. SHUT. UP. SHEESH.

Rude.

Last night the weather thingie on my phone promised me it would be a cool, comfortable 63° right now

But right now my phone tells me it’s actually a global-warmingy 66°.

I suppose next you’re going to tell me the Arbor Day Cow who frolicks through the cobbled suburban streets munching on squirrels and bringing all the attractive children immunity from smallpox isn’t real.

MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.

The perfect storm:

• I have 90 minutes to do a 45-minute workout
• There’s nobody here to keep me focused, motivated, accountable and working out instead of playing on my phone
• I have a full battery
• And a super-cute T-shirt
• For selfies!
• It’s Friday and I’m not terribly motivated
• And by “not terribly motivated” I mean “Look! A phone!”
• For selfies!
• It’s so hot outside that we started measuring in Celsius so we don’t horrify the Europeans
• Heat makes me hot
• And sweaty
• And glisteny
• For selfies!
• I have to be at rehearsal in half an hour
• So there’s no time to start a new exercise
• But do you know what there IS time for?

You know how it’s almost impossible to take a decent picture of the moon with an iPhone but you keep trying over and over anyway in case it’ll finally work just this once?

I think this is that once:

Don't walk on the grass

I can think of no better way to paint woodwork than to do it while warbling along with this richly orchestrated and gorgeously sung tongue-twister of a jewel of a song on infinite repeat:

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.

I made a meme ...

Observations from the field

The secretive, elusive and—DUH—stealthy stealthfier has developed a heightened feeling of comfort in his new brodude gymnasium surroundings and is escalating from his initial timidity and instinct for social self-preservation to now displaying a precipitous drop in common sense and a brazenness not traditionally observed in any heavily populated, non-stand-and-model gym habitat. To wit: Observe how he has abandoned his heretofore steadfast habit of sneaking up-the-nose-to-the-harshly-lit-ceiling stealthfies from his sweaty lap and begun to purposefully suck in his gut and blithely twist his iPhone for a quickie (a quickie STEALTHFIE, perverts) with devil-may-care concern for detection, focus, observable F-stop comprehension or rudimentary photographic composition.

What could cause this abrupt deviation from his deeply entrenched norms? In-the-field brocial anthropologists have posited the highly plausible theory that he’s nauseated to the point of profound disorientation by today’s brodude-gymnasium-sound-system song playlist titled Painful, Instantly Forgettable Songs That Each Repeat The Same Six Words Ad Nauseam Until You Poop Uncontrollably On The New Equipment Or More Preferably Just Take Slightly More Brazen Gym Stealthfies.

We will need to undertake more rigorous in-the-field observation to establish a possible causal relationship. Hopefully with a slightly less shitty playlist.

(CONFIDENTIAL NOTE to the guy in the tight gray technical shirt and butt-hugging black shorts so you all better not read it: Dude. I’m as addicted to my iPhone as the next powerless-over-checking-Facebook-every-three-minutes guy, but even I know to put away my damn phone WHEN I’M LITERALLY PEEING NEXT TO SOMEONE—ESPECIALLY ME—AT A URINAL. It honestly looks like you’re pretending to be on your phone so you can not-so-secretly peek over the partition at my winkie. And that is NOT the story of how we met that I want to tell our grandchildren.)

(CONFIDENTIAL NOTE to the guy in the red sleeveless shirt and loose gray gym shorts so you all better not read it and I really mean it this time: Never stop jumping rope.)

#BitchKittyCode

Step 1. Display soft tummy to the fully-conditioned-to-be-apprehensive Jake Monster in the most inviting, eminently pettable way that is catly possible

Step 2. Endure the inhumane humiliation and (let’s be frank) abject horror of having tummy tentatively rubbed 5.3 times by the fearsome, repulsive Jake Monster

Step 3. Hiss and swat at the Jake Monster’s fully-conditioned-to-pull-away-in-what-is-no-longer-alarm hand

Step 4. Retreat to the Prison Of Both Your Own Psychopathy And Vintage Ethan Allen Duxbury Dining Room Set

Step 5. Center self perfectly under the end vintage-Ethan-Allen-Duxbury-dining-room-set chair and glare threateningly but unwillingly adorably at the fearsome, repulsive Jake Monster’s iPhone camera to be mocked humiliatingly but uncontainably in a surprisingly well-composed photo on social media.

Cadet Bonespurs apparently has only figured out the Twitter feature on his iPhone

We would expect nothing less.

When you’re in a show but you’re not onstage much and you clearly spend too much time on your phone when you’re waiting backstage and your damn phone narcs on you

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

So we have it on good authority ...

(you wouldn’t lie to us, Thomas, would you? because I haven’t had breakfast yet and we just got in line) that this is “the best ride at Disney World”—which, actually, was just confirmed by the repeat riders in front of us in line. Which softens the blow a bit. Plus I reserved our FastPasses online two months ago and it wasn’t even on the menu, which I guess double-confirms.

For a bit of 150-minute perspective: I ran an entire half marathon yesterday in 179 minutes. My 5-Hour Energy will be exactly halfway done keeping me upright by the time we get on the ride. THE ENTIRE AVATAR MOVIE IS JUST 12 MINUTES LONGER THAN WE’LL STAND IN LINE.

Thankfully, the kids in line behind us are whiling away their time with a quiet, respectful game of SCREAM AND SHRIEK LIKE SUGAR-FUELED LITTLE ASSHOLES. We’re all sincerely hoping it goes into overtime. Plus lightning rounds. Plus a final death match. Or perhaps an extra-early death match.

Ghosts?

I’m not Russian to judgment or anything, but I think a certain bot’s country needs to take a rudimentary caller ID technology class ...

The kick-ass new color-changing light posts on the Third Avenue bridge and the kick-ass new Breast Cancer Awareness pink uplighting on the Alliant Energy building are totally kick-ass. I swear.

They just look kind of yawn-ass in this iPhone photo.

Fun fact: I wasn’t the only person who found the sight so kick-ass that I stopped my car to try to capture it in a yawn-ass iPhone photo just now.

Oh, the irony

STOP! TELLING! ME! THIS!, new iPhone platform software, because 1) you’ve told me every single morning since I installed you SO YOU’VE MADE YOURSELF PERFECTLY CLEAR, 2) I don’t give a shit and 3) you’re just reminding me how unimpressed I am overall with you ... especially with the new three-step scavenger hunt you’ve created for adding pictures to texts.

Our final “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?” is playing out onstage as we speak

“Why Can’t Jake Put Down His Phone and Watch?” is playing out backstage right as I sit with Eliza Doolittle and Mrs. Higgins.