Bro

I’m man enough to admit that I’m not LIFTING the 95s—the only unoccupied incline bench just happens to be parked in front of them today.

But I AM proud enough to broadcast that I’m back up to incline-dumbbelling 75s after a summer of injury-induced absence from the gym and from the 90s that I’d been incline-dumbbelling last spring.

And yes, incline-dumbbelling is now a valid gerund. I’m a licensed copywriter and I am hereby verbing it so.

Throwback Thursday: American Boyfriends Edition

Fun fact: The house in Grant Wood's American Gothic is a real place that Grant Wood happened upon in his August 1930 wanderings around Iowa. It's in the city of Eldon 120 miles southwest of Cedar Rapids, so Grant Wood had to do some serious wandering to stumble upon it. He made a sketch of the house, painted his sister and his dentist in front of it when he got home to Cedar Rapids, and got a measly $300 when he sold it to the Art Institute of Chicago after entering it in a competition there.

Other fun fact: There's a visitors' center near the house that has an array of calico dresses and overalls you can borrow for keepsake photos, but if your boyfriend at the time is a no-fun stick in the mud you have to resort to getting photos in whatever you happen to be wearing.

Other fun facts: The house is built in the Carpenter Gothic style. The curve-up-to-a-point top of the Gothic window is called an ogive. The 1930 painting (Grant Wood conceived of and completed it in a matter of weeks) is in the Modernist style. You're welcome.

So what's this stuff in my hair?

What total dumbass would absent-mindedly rub hair pomade not in his hair but all over the Frankenstein scar from his summer mole excision in the morning and leave his wound covered in a thin sheen of goo that won’t wash off all day? (Though it leaves his wrist hair delightfully shiny and manageable.)

Donald Trump?

No. But that’s a highly plausible, highly informed guess. Five points for you!

It is actually I, your surgery-scarred, shiny-wrist-haired, correct-pronoun-using protagonist. And “protagonist” is an Old Norwegian (as in Jake, the Old Norwegian) word for “dumbass.”

There is SO. MUCH. TO. UNPACK. HERE.

Where to start?

1. What's the fucking point of this whole rage tweet?
2. There is no hyphen used or implied anywhere in this entire alphabet soup.
3. What the hell is "Liddle" supposed to mean?
4. Is it supposed to be some kind of colloquial abbreviation for "little"?
5. Are you trying to make "Little" happen as your attempt to create yet another puerile, wannabe-demeaning nickname for someone whose superior intelligence you resent?
6. Note to trump and trump supporters: "Colloquial" means "not formal or literary."
7. Note to trump and trump supporters: "Puerile" means "childish or trivial."
8. See: trump
9. See also: trump supporters
10. The standard abbreviation for "little" is "li'l."
11. With an APOSTROPHE.
12. NOT A HYPHEN.
13. HOW DO YOU EVEN REMEMBER THE PROCEDURE FOR WIPING YOUR OWN ASS EVERY DAY?
14. People who graduated reasonably sober from third grade know that you put an apostrophe where letters have been removed in an abbreviation.
15. NOT A HYPHEN.
16. Don't get me started on why "little" isn't abbreviated as "li'l'."
17. "Liddle" is just substituting d's for t's and doesn't require an apostrophe.
18. And it's actually almost beneath your limited intellectual capacities.
19. Which have no bottom.
20. So never mind.
21. Instead of those non-essential apostrophes, however, "Liddle" does require a marriage to a cousin.
22. And griddled possum at the wedding reception.
23. Or maybe grittled.
24. WHY IS THIS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO YOU TO RAGE TWEET ABOUT AT 4:02 AM WHEN YOU'RE LITERALLY BEING IMPEACHED FOR TREASON?
25. DO YOU EVEN FUCKING UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING TO YOU?
26. DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU DID?
27. DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND THE GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION?
28. Clearly not.
29. You don't even understand rudimentary punctuation.
30. Note to trump and trump supporters: "Rudimentary" means "limited to basic principles" or "an immature, undeveloped form."
31. And I'm sure the irony is completely lost on you.
32. Because it's not even hyphenated.

Vocabulary quiz

My cute little hexagonal-column knickknack pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my knickknack shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney knickknacks on them and how many times can I say knickknacks in one sentence?

OR:

My cute little hexagonal-column objets d’art pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my objets d’art shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney objets d’art on them and how many times can I say objets d’art in one sentence?

The N is for Nice Hair

And Nowledge.

Today’s Vocabulary

DONEGAL: a tweed characterized by bright flecks distributed over a light background

CLOSE ENOUGH: this couch isn’t really donegal but it’s not proper tweed either

KERNING: the spacing between letters or characters in a proportional font

EYE TWITCHES: what graphic designers are experiencing because of my super-cute shirt

synecdoche (sin EK doe key)

noun: a metaphor using part of something to represent the whole of something or vice versa

examples:

FACT: Donald Trump is a belligerent, puerile man-boy who doesn't know anything about anything; arrogantly thinks he can fake his way through everything; and spends his empty, appallingly entitled life sending meaningless, childish tweets, lying about his ongoing treason, ignoring his many wives and children, insulting and repulsing other countries to the point of diplomatic alienation, screaming FAKE NEWS! like an uncontrollably shitting toddler, and destroying America for his own financial gain.

SYNECDOCHE: The current White House is an international embarrassment.

I canceled my trip to the pain clinic last week because my headache pain was (and still is!) virtually gone

I decided to keep my ophthalmologist appointment today though because 1) I’m waaaaay overdue for an eye appointment anyway and 2) it took forever to get on the schedule and 3) ophthalmologist is fun to spell. Ophthalmologist! See?

So I’m here and artfully masking the signs for the ladies’ bathroom in my selfie and moments away from getting to tell people that I’m dilated to meet them.

Ophthalmologist!

In celebration of Pride month, I have burst out of the closet!

And by “burst out of the closet” I mean “removed the floor guides, carefully lifted the closet doors from their roller tracks, carried them upstairs to the garage where I have drop cloths and rag-draped saw horses set up, given them two coats of bullshit-one-coat paint, let them become thoroughly dry, and brought them back downstairs to wait for the door frame to completely dry so I can re-install them.”

Occipital Nomorealgia!

So today--after this epic, never-ending headache that started May 17 and necessitated weeks of checkups and tests and more checkups and finally a referral and then 10 days of waiting to get on the schedule--I was FINALLY going to be visiting the St. Luke's pain clinic for a nerve block ... literally as I'm writing this. But suddenly on Monday I felt remarkably better. Which may or may not have had a correlation to my first distance run of the summer that morning. And by Tuesday morning I felt so much better that I figured it would be pointless to go to a pain clinic. So I apprehensively called to cancel my long-awaited appointment.

And here I am: not at my long-anticipated pain clinic appointment and feeling relatively great (my ears are still quietly ringing and my eyes have a twinge of pain when I think about them, like right now--so stop making me think about them!) (oh--and did I mention I'm old so there's always a pain somewhere?). I like to think that my cancellation got some other poor in-pain soul into the clinic sooner than he or she was expecting. And the nurse I talked to said the referral is still active for three months, so I can get in without jumping through all the hoops if it flares up again. And then the billing department called me to warn me that my insurance doesn't cover visits to pain clinics so I should start selling organs to cover the epic-pain-inducing costs.

And even though I truly love my job and look forward to coming into work every morning, I can honestly say I've never been more happy to be here, considering the alternative.

So YAY! for me for hopefully never going through the breathtaking pain of occipital neuralgia again. And YAY! for all of you for hopefully never having to read my whiny posts about it.

Now ... ONWARD! I have some shoes to write about!

More things I found in my storage unit yesterday

• Clear salt and pepper shakers shaped like cats that I got as a housewarming gift when I bought my first house in 1993
• A teacup from my grandmother’s Blue Willow china
• Chinese-inspired objets d’art are called chinoiserie
• You’re welcome
• An Army rubber ducky that I got from my friend Mike who's a kick-ass Army veteran
• A plaque I bought at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona with a shimmery sky-blue frame that has never gone with anything in any house I’ve ever owned
• Picasso is tacky and his stupid “art” will never catch on
• Loser
• An authentic finger bowl or flower vase or vomit bucket or who knows what the hell it’s for that I rescued when I survived the Titanic sinking
• Or maybe it’s just a reproduction that I bought at a Titanic exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago
• At my age, my memory is shot so its provenance is now lost to the ages
• So shut up
• A French sign about reading on the toilet that I bought at a Euro-charming little shop in Montmartre high above Paris
• A Norwegian kitchen witch that I cross-stitched and framed at Skogfjorden language camp in 1983
• Shut up
• It’s totally not gay
• So shut up
• A stone coaster printed with a vintage Eiffel Tower print
• Though it’s neither real stone nor authentic vintage
• But I like it so shut up

Backstage at Ripcord tech

DR and FR stand for Djake Ris Ftotallt Rawsome. It’s theater lingo.

Cannula

Many, many people suggested that oxygen might help alleviate the still-breathtaking pain of my now eight-day headache, so I just purloined my dad’s COPD oxygen machinery and a fresh (I hope) cannula (fun fact: this thing in my nose has a name!) and I’m sitting here playing on my blog while the machinery hums and purrs and hiccups in rhythm with my breathing in the earnest hope that I’ll soon be up and pain-free and skipping and cartwheeling and bending over to put on my socks with wild abandon.

You had me at chevron

Even though this rapidly changing weather and barometric pressure have given me an almost week-long headache that is so stubborn and so intractable and so deep in my skull that it’s making it excruciating to move my eyes and bend over to put on my socks, it all HAS given me an opportunity to wear my super-cute new durable-ripstop, sporty-mesh-lined, boldly chevron-patterned hooded windbreaker. It has pockets!

los·er /ˈlo͞ozər/ (noun):

a person or thing that loses or has lost something

Good knight!

Never bring a spife to a knork fight

#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Felix Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64: A concerto is a musical structure dating to the Baroque period (roughly 1600-1750) that features a solo instrument backed by a full orchestra. It’s traditionally composed in three movements with a fast-slow-fast structure. Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto (composed in 1844, which puts it squarely in the Romantic period) is a lighthearted delight that explores a range of happy, inarguably beautiful and requisitely contemplative musical voices in its first two movements. But its third movement--a bouncy, exuberant celebration of musical virtuosity titled Allegretto non troppo – Allegro molto vivace (starting at 22:06 in this recording)--is completely joyful and captivating and downright triumphant for any violinist who masters it. Part of its joy stems from Mendelssohn’s placement of the violin solo mere moments after the downbeat of the movement instead of letting the orchestra introduce the solo, as had been the convention for 200 years. Romantic music is about emotion--often extreme emotion--and the joyful emotions of this third movement leap at you with no room for impatience or distraction.

Think of it as thrift ... as a gift ...

40 years ago tonight, Broadway theater audiences first attended the tale of a vindictive, murderous barber, learned the words lavabo and reticule, realized that nothing rhymes with locksmith, split both literal and figurative hairs between flaxen and blonde, discovered that coriander makes the gravy grander, agreed that poppin' pussies into pies is perhaps the very definition of enterprise, and didn't feel one bit sorry for that crazy hag Lucy because it was Mrs. Lovett who had made his arm complete again after all those years.

Happy anniversary, Sweeney Todd! I can’t come to your party tonight, but I’ll come again when you have judge on the menu.