I’m seven months pop-free today!

I credit my success with gallons of wistfully flavored sparkling water and the occasional (OK, almost daily) intravenous 5-Hour Energy.

For the record, I do not claim the beer bottles lying in repose in my empty Klarbrunn box.

Those are not Mickey Mouse ears perched on my head

That is not a light saber jammed in my neck. But that IS the confident smirk of a man who just did 3x10 on the incline bench with EIGHTY-POUND DUMBBELLS.

My summer thong bod is finally here.

Today marks three months without Diet Coke for me! And there’s only one way to celebrate!

It’s my first time benching this big-boy weight!

I’ve been able to do only six reps per set, but I’m kind of amazed I’m able to do it at all without destroying a shoulder or breaking a hip. Plus it’s easier to sneak a pic of my weight plates than it is of my nostrils and chins.

I may have turned 50 on Wednesday but my car turned 80000 tonight, and that’s MORE

Flashback Friday: Milestone Birthdays Edition

I’m not sure what’s most disturbing about this picture: the bar mitzvah clown smile, the Disney villain eyes, the dinner-plate glasses, the scarecrow neck, the weird-ass way I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist or the pink-on-white shirt that hung on me with all the sex appeal of a Mayan burial gown on an immolated corpse. The girls on my floor (Loser alert! I was living in the Foreign Language House, a co-ed dorm filled with language dorks who stayed in on Friday nights studying verb declensions!) had decorated my door with pink 21s. Probably to match the shirt. Or the homosexuality. I’m not sure where I got the wine, but I am sure I had only a sip of it to celebrate reaching such a milestone age. Because actually drinking a whole glass of alcohol on my 21st birthday would have been something the cool kids would do.

Sweet 16!

Happy 16th birthday to my delightful niece, who has grown from being a squirmy toddler who refused to be snuggled to an adorable little girl who charmed everyone into giving her cookies and hosted clown- and cheerleader-themed birthday parties to an inquisitive student who’s rocked at basketball and tennis and cello and show choir and debate to a kind, talented, brilliant young woman whose passions for academics and social justice (and I suppose I should mention the Dodgers) inspire all of us to be better people.

Fun facts about my nephew

1. I've changed his diaper exactly once because for some reason when he was a baby and he needed changing, my mom was all "He POOPED! That's so ADORABLE! Let me change his diaper for him!" and she hogged all the fun.

2. He had a belly laugh that would put a mall full of Santas to shame, and it didn't take much to fire up his hearty laugh machine: tossing him in the air, making a funny face, poking him in the tummy and -- for some reason once he was old enough to talk -- just saying the word "envelope."
3. His head was so round and so bald for so long that I'm pretty sure when he was about five my sister traded him in for a kid with cheekbones and a tube of Rogaine because I totally don't recognize my nephew of today in the pictures of my nephew as a baby.
4. Once he could walk, I bought him some rain boots with feet decorated to look like duck bills and ankles decorated with duck eyes that he wore every chance he got until well after he outgrew them and his toes stuck out of the cracked rubber and the smell coming from them sometimes made him difficult to hug but for some reason I was proud to the point of tears that he loved them because *I* bought them for him.
5. He more than once wore those duck boots with a hard hat and a pair of safety goggles and went into a DEEPLY focused zone as he pretended to edge the lawn with his toy weed whacker. We adults kinda saw this as alarming but mostly saw it as a profoundly funny way to keep him quiet for remarkable lengths of time.
6. He loved fire trucks. FIRE TRUCKS! I bought him a fireman suit with his name on the chest one year for Christmas and I thought we'd have to throw buckets of water on him to calm him down after he opened it.
7. I'm a gay man and I have no innate knowledge about how to raise children -- not that those two are mutually exclusive -- but I had no idea how to incorporate the gay part of my life into his understanding of who I am as he grew up in a world of naturally heterocentrist assumptions. And whether he figured it out gradually or all at once, one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me was totally not caring one way or the other. And one of the second greatest gifts he ever gave me was his enthusiasm about making totally tasteless gay jokes with me as he got older.
8. I'd kinda hoped that as he grew up he'd see me as the cool best-friend/trusted-confidant uncle in whom he could confide the vicissitudes of his teenage angst or from whom he could get private, non-judgmental answers to his questions about girls (or boys, but it ended up being girls), but all I really ended up getting was the friend part. Which I'm totally cool with.
9. Every kid's age is the best age, but I'm firmly in the camp that right now is the BEST best age because it comes with thoughtful conversations and informed opinions about current events and inside jokes that are a few steps above using the word "underpants" and -- and this is my favorite part for some reason -- the exchange of texts filled with inappropriate humor and exponentially inappropriate memes that show I have successfully completed my avuncular mission to thoroughly corrupt the boy.
10. After a whirlwind few months of senior awards ceremonies and final choir concerts and poorly-attended-by-me baseball games -- which cap off a whirlwind 18 years of time-has-flown-by-way-too-fast-for-me-to-savor-each-moment -- my nephew graduates from high school tonight. And I know it's just a milestone in a family of lives filled with milestones, but this milestone carries the weight of signifying the end of his childhood, of his belly laughs, of his duck boots, of his fire trucks, of his joy over eating Mickey Mouse waffles when he visited me in Chicago, of his need for me to pick him up from school, of his influence on me to make sure I live my life in a way that he grows up with a good example to emulate and a proud memory to eventually look back on. We're certainly not done raising him -- and I still have a niece I need to finish corrupting before she graduates -- but right now I'm overflowing with joy and sadness and worry and calm and immeasurable pride that I got to play a part in raising such a kind, intelligent, clever, responsible, conscientious, loving, eminently outstanding young man.