Things to do on a rainy January weekend:

Sleep off the last of the flu that's been dragging you down all week.

Make homemade soup in your crock pot. Add lots of spices.

TiVo through a bunch of episodes of your new favorite show.

Fill your gas tank.

Have dinner and long conversations about architecture with a handsome friend. Then head to a drag-show fundraiser for the Chicago Spirit Brigade. Flirt with a cute blond in the audience. Leave with the blond's number. On half a dollar bill.

Meet an old friend for catching up and sharing scandalous gossip at Starbucks.

Buy photo albums and vitamins at Walgreens.

Do laundry.

Write a blog post that's actually not very interesting. Refuse to apologize.

Disney snapshots

Snow White and the seven of us

We’re back! Three and a half days. Four parks. Two kids. Five adults. We had fun, but we packed so much into our vacation that we were all more than ready to come home this morning. Here are a few highlights:

• Disney rocks. Except for the occasional rides that need to be dragged out of the ’80s. But for the most part, we had the most awesome family vacation with great weather and almost non-existent lines (the end of January is THE time to be there).

• I got a late Christmas present when we got to the hotel: A shirt that says “Hello! I am Uncle Jake.” I also got a bunch of hugs to go with it. Best. Present. Ever.


• There is no better feeling than walking with your family through Disney World and having a little hand reach up and grab yours. It says I trust you to take care of me and I like spending time with you and You are my hero all in one little gesture. And it almost makes me tear up every time.

• On the flip side, there is no worse feeling than being repeatedly gored in the balls by little elbows and fists and knees and feet. My niece and nephew—but mostly my niece—have an uncanny sense of balldar as they swing their arms and climb on laps and throw things, and Uncle Jake's jewels took quite a beating on this trip.

• My nephew has discovered Star Wars with a vengeance. Which is so weird to me because Star Wars will always be a relic from my junior high days, and here’s this six-year-old in 2006 who can recite entire lines of dialogue from movies I haven’t seen in 20 years. In any case, we took him on the Star Wars ride at Disney-MGM, which he thought was pretty cool:


• While we waited for the magic carpet ride in the Magic Kingdom, I taught him all the lyrics I know (all two phrases) to the “Prince Ali” song from Aladdin. He grew to love this song very quickly. My sister almost killed me over this.

• He also lost a tooth on our last day in the parks. Which we had to carry around so the Tooth Fairy could reward him for it the next morning. She gave him a collector set of pennies from around the world (she must have been at Epcot the same day we were—coincidence?) and a Florida quarter, though he had informed me he'd gotten $5 when he lost his tooth at his grandma's in California so he was expecting $10 for this tooth. He must know more about the California-Florida exchange rate than I do.

• My handsome friend Keith reserved us great seats for his show, Beauty and the Beast—Live on Stage, and even organized a meet-and-greet with Belle afterward for my niece. And my nephew. But mostly my niece, because my nephew is not gay. Unfortunately, our meet-and-greet photos came out kind of blurry:


• Speaking of live stage shows: Tumble monkeys*. Mmm.

* Tumble monkeys are buff little gymnasts in orange monkey spandex who do all kinds of goofy stuff on trampolines and high bars and rings in the Festival of the Lion King show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. They’re … um … distracting.

• This little sign appears on any ride that moves faster than your average insurance refund for your dental work (three weeks and counting, guys … ahem). I’m not sure if it’s telling me to keep my hands and arms in the ride at all times or if there’s some sinister no-dancing-at-Disney movement afootloose:


• This little sign appears over every sink in every Disney park bathroom. Seriously:


• I’m pretty sure I was the only gay in the kingdom all week. Except for two lesbians in line ahead of us at the spectacular new Soarin’* ride that mimics a hang-gliding experience over California, complete with wind in your face and little squirts of pine and orange grove up your nose.

* Soarin’ is NOT to be confused with Søren, the hunky counselor at the Norwegian language camp I attended in junior high school. When I was going through puberty.

• I have seen the future of fashion, and it is filled with terrible hair. Big mounds of pre-Raphaelite, post-Loretta Lynn tendrils scooped like gloppy ice cream on what must be very warm heads and very sore necks. Booshy moostaches that jut out like well-worn push brooms, creating permanent frowns and—bonus!—catching wayward boogers and bits of oatmeal. Bowl cuts. Bangs. Pony tails sprouting from the tops of adult heads. Uneven streaks of color that say Hey, everyone! I just lost a bet!

• I have also seen the future of American excess, and it is filled with people so obese they have to drive around on scooters. Stock tip: Invest in those scooters. There is a lot of demand.

• Doing Disney with parents and grandparents and kids is way different from doing Disney with adult gay men. Gay men fill their pockets with mints, a wallet and a camera and they’re off to ride the rides. Adults with kids fill their pockets and backpacks and purses and fanny packs with snacks and schedules and band-aids and water bottles and lotion and anti-bacterial wipes … and they make sure they have room to stuff them further with princess sweatshirts and bulky Star Wars memorabilia and old teeth and any other souvenirs they acquire.

• Parents with kids also schedule us into princess breakfasts, where Belle and Jasmine and Cinderella and Snow White and a whole host of other nubile young ladies saddle up to your table and demand to have their pictures taken with your awestruck kids.

• I looked and looked, but I found no scheduled prince breakfasts. Handsome or otherwise.

• Two tips if you ever go to Disney World: Stay in one of the Disney hotels. They’re convenient, they’re filled with Disney magic, and there are free buses and boats and monorails that take you everywhere you want to go. And get the new Disney Dining Plan. For about $30 a day, it gives you a snack, a counter-service meal and a table-service meal—which is all you really need, and it will save you hundreds of dollars.

• It’s hard to ride the hardcore rides when you’re shepherding a 4- and 6-year-old through the parks. My niece is pretty fearless, though, and we got her to stand tall enough at those you-must-be-this-tall signs that we got her on Space, Splash and Big Thunder Mountains. Which she loved. My nephew inherited his uncle’s timidity regarding trying new things, but thanks to some selective descriptions from some unscrupulous adults, we tricked got him on most of the same rides. Which he loved as well.

• I read The Devil in the White City on the plane and in little fits and starts before bed every night. Coincidentally, it mentions that Elias Disney helped build the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair, which directly influenced his son Walt’s ideas about family entertainment. It also contains a lot of grisly, decidedly non-Disney murders. But I don’t think it lives up to all the hype I’d been hearing; I give it a B-.

• True to form, we ran into a friend of mine from junior high and high school in the bus line on our last night at Disney World. This happens to my family a lot when we go to Disney. The biggest unexpected run-in happened many years ago when my mom was there for a conference and ran into the girl who had been a foreign exchange student in our house years earlier. The girl was from Norway.

• We all made it home safely, though it bugged me greatly that the six most important people in my life were all on one plane together as they headed home to Iowa. Especially when their plane had to abort its takeoff because it was broken and they had to find a different plane.

• I didn’t buy any souvenirs, but I did come home with a pretty unpleasant case of the flu. But not the poopy kind; I have the achy, shivery, hot-to-the-touch kind that makes me a little goofy every time I stand up.

• Goofy!

Opening new windows

My name's Jake (Hi, Jake!), and I'm no longer a virgin.

Now, before you get all excited for me and start giving me pointers about getting that fish taste off my tongue, I should clarify: I'm no longer a sushi virgin.

That's right. I, Jake, an almost 38-year-old man living in a major metropolitan city, had never eaten sushi. Until tonight. And it wasn't half bad.

And WHY had I never eaten sushi? No big reason, really. I've just always preferred beef and chicken over fish. And nobody's ever asked me to try it. And I really love my beef and chicken.

The straight tuna and salmon chunks—which my friends tonight said were more "hardcore" sushi—were actually my favorite. Right after the spicy tuna rolls. Which I almost could say I loved. I wasn't a fan of the crab and lobster rolls. And I can probably live a pretty happy life never eating another turtle roll.

And while I don't see myself actually craving sushi anytime soon, I can say I tried it. And I'll no doubt try it again.

It helped that I was with friends who promised to make my first time special painless. And that they promised not to laugh. And that one of them (a friend of my friend Bill, who organized the evening) was pretty hot and his knee kept touching mine under the table. Except the guy has said "nice to meet you" to me all four times we've hung out. So I don't get the feeling I'm really on his radar.

But there's more! While I was losing my virginity all over the place tonight, I decided to go whole fish hog and order an alcoholic beverage. Seriously. I have never ordered a drink before tonight, either. (Hell, I've probably consumed in aggregate the equivalent of two whole drinks in my entire life.) But I was with friends, I was feeling all grown-up … and the hot guy had already lost interest in me so there was no harm in letting him know what a social misfit I'd been for the last 37 and a half years. So I ordered a cosmo. And I drank half of it. And it was good.

And now I'm home drunk off my raw-fish-eating ass and packing my shorts and sunscreen because in 10 hours I'll be winging my way off to Florida for a family vacation—where my 4-year-old niece and 6-year-old nephew will experience the magic of Disney World for the first time. And they're almost as excited as their uncle Jake, who is such a lifelong Disney freak that he actually went and got a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his ankle. And we all know he wasn't drunk when he did it. Loser.

Be good while I'm gone!

The Jets are gonna look real gay to ni-i-ight!

The year was 1985. I was a junior in high school, and our theater department (which was pretty kickin’—we did about five shows a year in two different theaters) did West Side Story.

Now, I’d grown up on my folk’s West Side Story soundtrack. (We never had the cast album until I bought it with my paper route money in junior high school.) I knew every word, every note, every fake Puerto Rican nuance of the soundtrack, though. Hell, I’d sung along and acted out every role in the show in the privacy of my sad, friendless little bedroom for the better part of a decade. So the day our theater director announced over the school PA system (with very dramatic, very gay fanfare, which I just ate up) that we were doing West Side Story as our spring musical, I … um …

Let’s just say my show of enthusiasm probably didn’t win me any macho points.

And the role I wanted more than anything? Action. The wild one. The loose cannon of the Jets. The role that would show the world that I was not, in fact, a sad, terminally bashful little homo who does victory dances in AP History class when he hears the theater department is doing his favorite musical. I didn’t care as much about playing the role, though, as I did about singing “Gee, Officer Krupke!” It’s a totally cool song, and it starts on that hard-to-hear tritone that I was certain I was the only male in the whole theater department who could be relied on to hit it right on the money night after night. I knew the song cold—tritone and all—which meant the role was rightfully mine.

Unfortunately, my audition was too much tritone and not enough loose cannon. And Joel, a hunky little straight guy who had the presence of mind to actually act at the audition, got the part. And I was crushed. Truly, deeply crushed.

But I persevered through rehearsals in my role as Third Jet From The Left, and I got a couple featured dance roles (tritones and battements dégagés—is there no end to my homosexuality talents?) and I let myself revel in all the magic that came along with Actually Being In West Side Story.

And on opening night, when Joel (who was quite awesome in the part) went to sing my his big solo … he forgot the words. And I hung there (the set was all about scaffolding), three Jets in from the left, staring dumbfounded as he stumbled through his first verse. And I was filled with a weird mix of horror and pity and self-righteous indignation and even a little bit of Schadenfreude.

But that’s not actually the point of this post. The point is that I went through some old photo albums last weekend and I found a mountain of embarrassing pictures. And trust me: When you’re an awkward little homo in Iowa in the ’80s, every picture you take is pretty embarrassing.

But I’m 37 now and I can look back and laugh. On the outside. And I’ve been sneaking over to our scanning station at work whenever I could spare a few minutes the last few days, so my blog is going to be a very painful walk down memory lane over the next few weeks.

Here is the only picture I found from West Side Story. And man, there’s nothing sadder than a middle-class white gay boy pretending to be all butch and shit like he’s down with the PR kids, yo.

That’s my dad’s jean jacket, which was way too big. But I rolled up the sleeves. To the elbow. Just like they do in the gangs. And if you look closely, you can see the moussed-up nightmare of waves and curls I somehow decided gave my hair 1950s New York street cred. And then there’s that smirk. That I-live-a-very-comfortable-life-in-a-town-with-great-schools-so-you-better-run-sucka smirk. The whole effect is pretty scary, but not in the way I intended.

That’s Beth next to me. I was always impressed with her acting, though I think she was little more than Third Jet Girl From The Left in our show. (The next year, she and I played the leads in Oedipus Rex. Which was far more exciting than starring in some stupid old blockbuster dance musical.) Beth told me at our 10-year reunion that she was in med school, so maybe she can surgically remove the last of my embarrassment if I see her at our 20-year this year.

Stay tuned for more of Jake’s A Dork And I Have The Pictures To Prove It!

Next up: my horrifying experiment in gymnastics leotards.

I’m too sexy

Check out this throbbing hunk of man meat:

Nothing says high-class rent boy like an unbuttoned polyester Hawaiian shirt.

Nothing says my body is your playground like a poochy little tummy.

Nothing says 15 will get you 20 like the dubious charms of an awkward ninth-grade Lolito.

And nothing exudes sexual chemistry like the seductive chewing of a plastic lei—especially when it looks more like the lei is being vomited up than playfully licked.

This, I’m afraid to report, is what I looked like in 1983. Our class trip that year took us to St. Louis for a tour of the arch, some cheesy dinner theater on a boat and a day at Six Flags, where I coughed up way too much money (not to mention a green lei) for this picture in one of those put-yourself-on-a-magazine-cover photo booths. Worst of all, the shirt and the leis were smelly old props previously worn—and chewed—by legions of germy Midwestern tourists. I’m lucky to be alive even to talk about it.

And sorry, ladies: As much as my smoldering glare makes you want me to be the bananas in your cream pie, I’m as gay as a picnic on a Sunday afternoon. Worst of all, I even knew it way back when this picture was taken. Which makes me a pie tease bad choice from the dessert menu.

But I have been in the arch. If you know what I mean.

Things to do on a Sunday morning in January:

• Make your favorite bran muffins.
• Realize they taste like burned flesh.
• Discover the remains of a food spill—or possibly a hiding animal—at the bottom of your oven.
• Activate your oven's self-cleaning feature for the first time ever.
• Open all your windows and doors as your condo fills with smoke.
• Decide that, while you're running up your electric bill anyway, you might as well make homemade soup in your crock pot.
• Brown the stew meat you bought last night in the awesome new cookware you got for Christmas.
• Discover that, while you were shopping for ingredients, you were too stupid to notice the difference between beef bouillon and chicken bouillon.
• Make beef and vegetable soup with chicken bouillon anyway. As your punishment.
• Sort through the week's mail and discover that you somehow forgot to make your mortgage payment last month.
• Call your mortgage lender to see what you need to do to make amends.
• Punch enough phone buttons to start a nuclear war and finally reach a recorded voice that tells you you'll have to wait until after the three-day weekend to resolve the problem.
• Crawl back into bed. And hope the smoke doesn't asphyxiate you.

What does it say about a man ...

when a woman he works with—a sweet, demure, heretofore completely professional colleague—goes to visit her family in Taiwan over the American holiday break and—though she and he have never exchanged gifts in the past—returns with a souvenir for him … and it looks like this:


I think it says she knows me better than she lets on.

Let me count the reasons I love this gift:
1. It's a toilet-paper dispenser!
2. Or maybe it's just a toilet-paper cozy.
3. When it's not dispensing toilet paper, it looks like a huggable, plush sex doll.
4. And if you take the toilet paper out of the hole in its butt, it makes a very disturbing puppet.
5. It's 100% American kitch, but it's made in China and sold in Taiwan.
6. It has blush and eyelashes. Which means it's classy.
7. It's well-made. And I'm a man who appreciates quality.
8. You could use it as a mitten. Or a hot pad. Or—in a pinch—maybe even a boxing glove.
9. When you peek in its bra (and you know you want to), you discover a perky little set of Muppet-like hooters.
10. I just said hooters!

Things I’ve had in my mouth today:

Orange juice.
A vitamin.
A banana.
A clementine.
A toothbrush.
Yogurt.
Water.
The word “anathema.”
Effervescent creatine.
A peanut-butter sandwich.
Skim milk.
Another peanut-butter sandwich.
A toothbrush again.
A hygienist.
A dentist.
Tom Welling.
A camera.
A camera and a mirror.
A numbing gel.
Three shots of Novocain.
A rubber dam.
An O-shaped ring.
A bright light.
A suction thing.
A drill.
An audible whimper.
More Novocain.
More of the drill.
Even more of the drill.
Smoking, grainy bits of my own teeth.
My own dry, dough-like tongue.
Tooth-colored composite.
A bonding agent.
An agent named Bond.
Custom-fitted porcelain inlays.
Custom-fitted porcelain overlays.
A clamp.
Another clamp.
A white plastic implement.
A heat lamp.
A heat lamp guard.
A Buick.
An upholstered ottoman.
Another mirror/camera combo.
A lingering numbness.
Slurred speech.
A very sore jaw.
Homemade soup.
A happy “Mmmmm!” sound.
Tom Welling.

Fillings! Nothing more than … fillings!

Dr. B was a folksy, small-town dentist in the best sense of the word. He had a modest office decorated in dark paneling and wavy frosted glass and imitation Italian provincial furniture (hey, if it was good enough for the ’60s, it was good enough for all eternity). His receptionist and hygienist knew your name and where you went to school. He had Highlights magazine in the waiting room and a wooden barrel of cheap toys you could pick among to take home by the checkout. He talked you through what he was doing to your teeth and sometimes held your hand if you got scared. The gray terrazzo hallway outside his office smelled like rubbing alcohol. (I’m not sure how that last point supports my nice-small-town dentist description, but it’s a memory that lingers in my head to this day.)

And he took good care of my family’s teeth from before I was born until I was out of college. Every cleaning. Every filling. Every bit of basic maintenance and minor surgery.

And after he’d spent a lifetime building up his practice and taking care of his patients and planning his twilight years and finding someone equally compassionate to take over for him, he retired. And then the poor man promptly died.

And this afternoon, three of the fillings he put in my head when I was in junior high school are being replaced. By a big-city dentist I picked because he was in my insurance network and within walking distance to my office.

And, somehow, I feel sad that I’m erasing a bit of Dr. B’s legacy. Even though I’ll be replacing the silver amalgam with tooth-colored fillings, which will make me far more marketable as a teen model.

I also feel a bit apprehensive because I’m having three fillings replaced at once, but it seemed best to get them all over with at once instead of going through the fun three separate times.

In any case, I’ll be thinking about kindly old Dr. B and his rubbing-alcohol-scented office and the fillings he put in me that lasted more than 20 years as a strange new dentist is buried elbow-deep in my mouth today.

And I’d better get a toy when he’s done.

Things that irritate me for no useful reason

BATHROOM EDITION

Example! Toilets with mirrors over them so you have to watch yourself pee. Really. What value does this add to a bathroom? I can see the argument that a wall o’ mirrors can make a room look bigger … but a pretend-bigger bathroom is totally trumped by a lifetime of never having to watch fluids cascade out of your business. (Am I right, ladies?)

Example! Toilets with mirrors across from them so you have to watch yourself poop. You’re crowning. You race to an unfamiliar toilet in an unfamiliar bathroom—perhaps at a dinner party or in a hotel room. You slam the door, drop trou, whirl around to sit down … and there you are. Watching. Yourself. Poop. Watching that whole cycle of bloated discomfort/eyes watering from the strain/shock and awe/shiver of relief/lean over to wipe/lean over to wipe a few more times just in case—all on your very own face.

Example! Doors with mirrors on the backs that totally face the toilets. This is probably the most horrifying because it’s a stealth offense (you have no idea the mirror is there until it’s too late), it’s unavoidable (you have to close the door when you’re pooping—it’s the law), and it offers you a full-body view of yourself looking both vulnerable and uncivilized. Kind of like Dubya at a press conference. And nobody wants to see that.

Example! Faucets that reach only a couple inches over the sink. Once you’ve finished watching yourself poop and pee, you’re gonna want to wash your eyes hands. But if you keep banging those hands against the side of the sink because it was installed with faucets that are too short, you’re gonna get irritated. And soapy. And bruisey. And you’ll splash water all over the walls, which will loosen the mirrors from their moorings and they’ll come crashing down in a dramatic display of crashing-downiness and then how the hell are you supposed to watch yourself go to the bathroom?

Gettin’ rid of the ugly

I love my bedroom. I love the color I painted it. I love my bed. I love my bedspread. I love the crap on my walls. But I’ve never really loved my side table.

At first blush, the table looks pretty decent—though up close it’s full of gouges and water stains and related evidence that the thing is 40 years old. And that’s the other problem: While the stuff in my house is definitely eclectic, nothing I own really embraces 1960s colonial. Especially orange maple 1960s colonial. Which is just gross.

But damn if the table isn’t well-made—with real wood and actual dovetailing and sturdy legs and not a single scrap of laminated particleboard. Still, I never really liked it. Replacing it seemed like a waste of money, though, and refinishing it seemed like a waste of effort since it would still be orange maple 1960s colonial. Which is just gross.

Then I had a great idea: painting it—just like they do on TV! I found an ultra-dark blue paint (“midnight mist” or “urban decay” or “subdural hematoma” or something like that)—and one light sanding, one coat of primer and three coats of paint later (because “one-coat paint” is as big a myth as “intelligent design” and “Tom Cruise’s dignity”), I had myself a museum-quality piece of furniture. I dressed it up with a new knob, a vase from the handsome Nate Berkus™ collection and a brooding, masculine box of facial tissue—and just look how sexy it became:

(I know: Visible electrical cords are just gross. So are shiny white outlet covers on dark walls. But you see these things only when you’re squatting in front of my side table with a camera. The rest of the time (i.e., when you’re standing up) they’re naturally hidden. And if your standing-adult perspective doesn’t do the trick, there’s usually a huge pile of shoes there to help.)

Resolved:

There is no easier way to set yourself up for failure than to give yourself a massive list of new year’s resolutions. Here’s mine:

Take a tap class with some regularity. I found one Chicago studio with a convenient schedule but an inconvenient location and another studio with an inconvenient schedule but a convenient location. They did that just to make my resolution harder to keep, of course.

Practice the piano more. Or maybe I should have a more specific goal: Learn a new piano piece from scratch. Possibly something by Chopin, whose works I’ve never really studied.

Read ten books. I’ve been on a book-buying (and -receiving) spree over the last year or so. I’ve read two of them, and of the 15 remaining, I hope to have two-thirds knocked off by 2007:
• American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting, Steven Biel
• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson
• The Blood of Strangers: Stories from Emergency Medicine, Frank Huyler
• The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Erik Larson
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss
• John Adams, David McCullough
• A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, Cintra Wilson
• Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
• Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787, Catherine Drinker Bowen
• Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants, Robert Sullivan
• Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Andrew Sullivan
• Why Do Men Have Nipples?, Mark Leyner and Billy Goldberg, M.D.
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire
• Wobegon Boy, Garrison Keillor

Stop saying it’s 2007. It’s been 2006 (I think) for only 20 hours, and already I’ve said and written and thought that it’s 2007 about 2007 times.

Travel someplace fun. Last year I hit Madrid, Paris, New York and London. And Iowa. There are already tentative plans underway this year for Greece. And Iowa.

Decide once and for all if I’m on the right career path. And then follow up on that decision. (There are, however, potential career opportunities in Europe with my current company. But at this writing, the prospect of living with a social anxiety disorder and a language barrier doesn’t sound very appealing.)

Keep shooting for my four-hour marathon goal. Maybe in New York this year. But probably in Chicago, because 1) it’s easier to commute to Chicago when you’re already in Chicago and 2) I really dig knowing that there are people watching the race who actually know me by name.

Find a bigger condo. Now that I have this one looking almost exactly the way I want.

Add at least five pounds of muscle to my upper body. These saggy old-man tits are not making me feel pretty as I sneak up on my 38th birthday. Man, the older you get, the harder you have to work to reach your dream of becoming a teen model …

You say you want a resolution

I guess one of the benefits (?) of writing a blog is the accountability it gives you when you posted your new year’s resolutions a year earlier for everyone to see and keep track. How did I do? Let’s all find out together:

Repair the giant gap where the outside wall of my condo is ripping away from the inside wall. Done. And I even went one better: I repaired the over-expanded expansion joint at that same intersection. It had become an actual hole that made it unavoidable for me to smell my neighbor’s cooking and smoking; see her lights at night; and hear her phone ringing, her conversations with her hard-of-hearing sister, and her revolting screaming orgasms. And I took pictures (of the repair work—not the orgasms):

I filled the crack (crack!) with two kinds of expanding foam, which does not sand well, but it seemed to stop the orgasms. (I also got rid of that poor sun-faded, rippled bas relief world map, which I thought was the coolest thing in the … well … world when I got it for Christmas more than 10 years ago.)

Notice how nice and orgasm-free the wall looks when everything is sanded and painted. Notice how it doesn’t catch on the cheap plastic blinds. Notice the spiffy new valances my mom and dad helped me make last month to hide the cheap plastic tops of the cheap plastic blinds.

Change the HVAC filters. Since I don’t actually have central heat or central air in my condo, this was kind of a stupid resolution to make. My building has heating and air conditioning units (I said units!) built into the outside walls, though. I do know the difference, but blogger must have rewritten my post to make me look gay. In any case, I did take apart the units (I said units!) and wash the filters this summer. So we can consider this resolution achieved as well.

Learn to use a punching bag. There were times this year when I felt like I was a punching bag. Does that count?

Heal from lipo and never do it again. “Healing” is relative, I guess. I have no more pain. I have the remnants of two tiny scars on my hips. But the goo never totally went away, so I don’t count the operation as a complete success—which may or may not be considered “healing.” The never-do-it-again part of the resolution is gonna be pretty easy to keep, though.

Get rid of at least 100 things that are cluttering up my house. I’d estimate I got rid of three or four hundred things this year. And, again, I took pictures:

above: The top caption is supposed to give you a space-saving double read: Invisible jet phone! and Invisible jet clock! I was going for a really clever Wonder Woman reference, but since I had to explain it to you, the joke is lost. So never mind.

above: Shiny coats! Which I bought on purpose within the last five years!

above: Vinyl jeans! Which I bought on purpose within the last three years! (But I never wore two pair of the jeans, so I should get some credit for self-restraint.)

above: I haven’t had to play dress-up with any regularity since the early ’90s. But I obviously didn’t have to tell you that.

above: I really have nothing to say here.

above: De-crapping your life can be so cleansing.

above: Nothing says I kiss my sister. On the mouth. With tongue. faster than a string tank top. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind never to wear it.

above: Yes, that is The Sock you see in the upper right. And those are shorty-short short shorts you see in the upper left. And yes, they would have made a lovely ensemble with the string tank top. And no, I am not still in love with Richard Marx.

Run a 5K in under 8-minute miles. I don’t think I officially ran a 5K this year, but I did do an 8K in 8.5-minute miles. And I did some three-mile (which is about a 5K) sprints this year that I never timed. Chalk this resolution up as a kind-of.

Run the Chicago Marathon in under four hours. I shaved 16 minutes off last year’s time, but I was still 20 minutes short of my completely arbitrary four-hour goal. And I’m gonna keep trying.

Learn enough Web design that I can make a Web site of my own. I taught myself a ton of Photoshop. Does that count?

Get my long-dormant book published and/or my old newspaper column revived and syndicated. Oh, my goodness. Look at the time …

Continue in my personal quest to demonstrate to the world that gay people aren't abstract “threats” to the common good. We haven’t completely succeeded in destroying marriage, defiling the innocents, and filling the world with disgust and despair, but Secret Operative Dubya and Secret Operative Pope are still working on it.

Note to self:

Some things you should never try to get at a discount: Lunch meat. Surgery. Hiking boots. Back waxings.

And you should ESPECIALLY avoid back waxings at cosmetology colleges.

First of all, there's none of that zen atmosphere to give you the illusion that the experence is one of calm and tranquility. No dim lights. No soothing music. No sheets on the bed. In fact, there's really no bed; it's just a padded vinyl chaise that wobbles so much they'll ask you just to sit on the end of it to avoid potential collapse.

Then there's the whole amateur-with-a-pot-of-wax factor. Amateurs are clumsy. They slop wax on your jeans. They miss enough wax that you find yourself surgically attached to your coat when you get home. They miss enough hair that you wonder why you drove clear across town to save a buck when you could have done a more thorough job on your own with nothing more than a can of paint thinner and a match.

And speaking of saving a buck, that whole cosmetology college = deep discounts thing is a myth. They may cut your hair for only five bucks, but they'll end up charging you a dollar more than you'd pay at Nordstrom Spa for a more thorough waxing procedure. And Nordstrom Spa offers all that zen crap you thought you could live without. Hell, Nordstrom Spa even gives you complimentary bottled water.

On the flip side, though, Nordstrom Spa also gives you an immediate case of post-waxing pimples. And so far, the cosmetology college route has given you nothing but (mostly) hairless skin. But maybe the pimples are part of the post-graduate work.

To recap:
Wobbly vinyl chaise + Shania Twain + Clumsy McWaxSlopper = bad
Indirect lighting + fresh sheets + fake bamboo in the lobby = good

Reindeer Games

Canasta. It's a family tradition stretching back almost 10 years. We play it every time we get together. And I still hate to lose.

Deluxe Scrabble. After shamelessly coveting my friends' Deluxe Scrabble games--with their built-in turntables and their little ridges so the tiles don't slide around--for years, I finally got a Deluxe Scrabble of my very own for Christmas. And now I need a new commandment to break I've already gotten my mom and sister hooked. We played for four hours on Monday night, and I even took a picture of our best board to post here, but my folks are on dial-up and I frankly don't have the patience to crop and upload an image on a computer I have to pedal. If I had posted the picture, though, the caption would go something like this: See queen in the top right? I did that. My sister made it queeny (even though that's usually my job) and racked up a ton of points. And see fag down there on the left? That was my mom's handiwork. She got a double-word score for it.

Post-Holiday Sales. The crowds! The gridlock! The tempers! I used to avoid the Iowa post-holiday rush at all costs. But now that I live in Chicago, I think it's kind of cute. People bitch because they have to park ten spots away from the door and because there are six people in line ahead of them and what's wrong with this country if they have to wait more than five minutes to purchase a ceramic teddy bear, damnit?

Wireless Provider Smackdown! My first cell phone service provider (name forgotten) was spotty and unreliable and generally worthless, but that's what cell phones did, and we didn't complain. Then it got bought by Cingular, who made all kinds of promises that just called attention to its shortcomings: I still couldn't use my phone in my home or office, and I dropped more calls than I actually completed on purpose. And Cingular had corporate ties to SBC Ameritech, who treated me so hatefully when I moved to Chicago that I will never do business with them again (and I hate orange anyway). So I switched to T-Mobile, who offered a definite improvement, but I still couldn't use my phone in my home, and there were huge stretches of western Illinois and eastern Iowa that gave me no service when I was driving back and forth to visit my family. So now I'm on Chapter Four: Verizon. And I switched here in Iowa, where I don't have to plan my day around the process. And the verdict: So far, so good--except the phone they sold me has nothing but piercing, irritating ringtones to choose among. I did succomb to the camera-phone craze that all the kids are talking about, though. I'll let you know what develops.

Keeping up with the friendses. So far I've squeezed in holiday reunions with my ex, the girl my sister and I went to Norwegian camp with in junior high, a friend who is fighting admirably to recover from stage 4 ovarian cancer and a high-school friend who was a diver in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics (and who was practically bursting with the news that these hunky twins from our alma mater are doing porn in LA, though he couldn't clarify what kind of porn). Next on the docket: a reunion lunch with the fun people I used to work with.

Back, crack and sack. Well, actually just back, but I like saying "back, crack and sack." Back, crack and sack! I'm getting my wisps of old-man back hair ripped from my body this afternoon at the local cosmetology college. Which should cost about a million dollars less than it does at Nordstrom Spa. Same pain, less money!

Child manipulation. And by "child manipulation" I mean "being manipulated by a child." Example! "Uncle Jake, can I have some candy?" No. "Then can I have a Junior Mint?" Example! "Grandpa, do you want a Hershey's Kiss?" Yes, that sounds good. "Then I think I'll have one with you." Example! "Hey, that's MY toy! You don't get to play with it." "I was just getting it out for YOU to play with."

Eat-like-a-pig rationalization. An entire pizza. 20 cookies. Two cans of Coke. 20 more cookies. I'll ... um ... eat nothing but toothpicks and water when I get back to Chicago.

Merry Sithmas!

So the presents are opened, the food is inhaled responsibly consumed, the Santa myth tradition is preserved for yet another year ... and, once again, my family kept its promise not to get too vulgar with the Christmas consumerism.

I got some socks, a few extra pieces for my new dish set (in case a Clumsy McDishDropper comes for a visit), a deluxe Scrabble game (to replace the ghetto Scrabble I've been so embarrassed to use when my cruelly judgmental friends come over for an evening of Vocabulary Smackdown!), and a nice quilted flannel shirt to match the ones my dad and brother-in-law also got (1, 2, 3: awww!).

The kids, as should be expected, got the best haul again this year, racking up a (modest) pile of toys, books, more toys and even a bunch of mouse crap Disney consumer products to gear them up for the family's upcoming WDW vacation at the end of January.

Most painful toy: My niece's American Idol! karaoke machine. At 4, my niece has yet to master the art of matching tones--and the poor thing has NO grasp of reading lyrics off a TV monitor--so as the rest of us listen to endless loops of "This Old Man" and "I Been Workin' on the Railroad (Dancefloor Mix)," she just kind of moans incoherently into her microphone and creates A Very Yoko Ono Christmas atmosphere for everyone within earshot.

Most retro toy: My nephew's Battleship game. He's 6, and while he can figure out coordinates on the battleship grid (because he's our little genius), he's not so big on things like strategy or accurate peg placement. Which makes the game VERY long.

Least Christmas-like activity: My sister's family got the entire Star Wars DVD set, and we watched Revenge of the Sith this afternoon. All 843 poorly acted hours of it. I'm no science fiction/mythology/religion fan, and I think the last Star Wars movie I saw was the one where Harrison Ford got frozen in a block of stone. And I saw it when it was still in the theaters. Back when Parker Stevenson was steaming up my TV (and my hormone-addled adolescent brain) each shirtless week on The Hardy Boys.

Um ... where was I? Oh, yes: a galaxy far, far away from interesting. A galaxy where people and little puppets say things like "You fool! I have been trained in your Jedi Arts ... by Count Dooku!" and "Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo!" and "Into exile I must go. Failed I have." without once looking straight at the camera and mouthing the words "Sorry to have to put you through this, Folks. I took this job just to pay for the implants." A galaxy where the shag haircut never seems to go out of style. A galaxy where nobody has figured out that long opera capes are about as useful as oversized sombreros when you're jumping in and out of tiny space ships and engaging in heated swordplay. A galaxy that has mastered the science of holographic conference calls but seems to have lost the prenatal technology that would alert the wife of a fancy-highrise-dwelling military superstar that the baby she's carrying is actually twins. (If only they'd had the budget to hire Dr. Tom Cruise as her ob/gyn. If only.)

Unbearable Lightness of Being a Sith Lord notwithstanding, it's been a pretty spectacular Christmas. The family's all here, we're all healthy, and we're lucky enough to be able to buy each other's love nice gifts and stuff our tummies with Norwegian recipes that have been made in my family every Christmas for generations.

Plus, I got new socks!

Do I look dry to you? Do I smell?

It’s been A Foo-Foo Skincare Christmas Non-Specific Winter Holiday for me so far this year. To wit:

• Bliss lemon + sage products from the guy I dogsit for
• Bliss lemon + sage products (with bonus vanilla + bergamot products) from a co-worker (with no dogsitter overlap—which means I’m collecting the whole set!)
• Imported! Avène crème pour peaux intolerants products from a French co-worker

Best of all? I LOVE Bliss lemon + sage products! They’re (relatively) manly, they smell awesome and they don’t trigger my skin’s hypersensitive perfume issues. The Avène products are also (relatively) manly, also of the citrus family, and also magically engineered not to make me red, bumpy and itchy.

But … um … when you look at this fruity embarrassment of riches through cynical eyes, you have to wonder if there’s a subtext:

Jake! I got you some of your favorite soaps because your butt stinks when you walk.

You poor thing! You must be so uncomfortable with that dry skin and I swear I will push you down the stairs into the waiting arms of a very lonely sewer worker if a single flake of you drifts off and lands in my salad.

I choose to think, though, the gifts were given in the spirit of Jake Likes Lemon Things.

* * * * *

Speaking of dry, flaky skin, I’m finally back in the gym after two full months of Way Too Busy To Work Out. All the just-for-show muscles I’d been so carefully cultivating over the last few decades didn’t shrink as much as I’d feared during my hiatus, and they’ve actually bounced back pretty well over the last two weeks. But boy howdy (that’s cowboy talk) does my skin feel like it’s cracking and ripping every time I get a good pump going. And all the (relatively) manly lemon + sage essential oils in the world don’t seem to help. But if the Hulk had to rip through his clothes to get jacked, I guess I have to be willing to rip through my own skin.

* * * * *

I’m heading home to do laundry (so I don’t have to schlep it to my folks’ house like some poverty-stricken college student) and then I’m driving off for a week of Christmas Non-Specific Winter Holiday R&R with my family. Be good while I’m gone.

The darkest day

It’s the winter solstice—the day with the least scheduled sunlight all year (though it’s pretty bright and sunny today in Chicago). From this point forward, the sun will start sticking around a little bit more each afternoon, the days will seem longer and longer (in a good way), and eventually spring will save us from all this brutal coldness and dry skin and evening commutes through the inky blackness.

It was just as bright and sunny 17 years ago today in Iowa when my dad came to pick me up from college for the holiday break. I had finished all my tests, bought myself a fancy new Madras plaid watchband as a reward for surviving another semester (hey—it was the ’80s) and enjoyed a nice catch-up in the car on the way home.

And then my world came crashing down.

Mom met us in the driveway when we got home. She was sobbing. Hysterical. Without her coat. She had just undergone a radical mastectomy, and our first instinct was that she’d gotten some bad news from her oncologist.

But the bad news was something entirely different: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d been to visit her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had a great time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets.

I’d been so caught up in my own finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying home that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But my friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away.

Over time, of course, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. We started budgeting time for intrusive security searches at airports. We stopped packing forbidden objects in our carry-ons.

Seventeen years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can become in a global melting pot.

Seventeen years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Seventeen years ago today, I realized that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions. I discovered that unspeakable horrors played out on the world stage can be both vulgar and comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are just robbing you, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak do not make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should find solace in the fact that it will probably get better, or at least easier.

Seventeen years ago today, I became a man.

Big Gay Movie Weekend!

Work and the chorus show and general holiday cheer obligations have taken their toll on my movie-attending social budget, but this weekend I suddenly had some Jake time, where I: 1) finished my damn Christmas letter, 2) bought myself a little something-something (a vase and a tealight holder from the handsome Nate Berkus collection at Linens-n-Things) and 3) actually went to two movies. Two VERY gay movies.

Movie #1: I’ve never been a HUGE fan of Rent. I liked it enough, but it somehow never captured my soul the way other musicals have. (And though I loved “Seasons of Love” the first 525,600 times I heard it, the song has grown more than tiresome.) But I’ll watch almost any movie musical and find something to love in it. And I really liked the movie—waaaay more than I liked the stage version. (Maybe because I saw it on stage from the back row of the top balcony, which was so far away that it looked like the whole show was being acted and sung by trained fleas.)

My favorite part of Rent (the movie): The “Tango Maureen” dream sequence. (Who knew Idina Menzel sould dance so sexy?) My second favorite part: the opening scenes with all the burning paper falling to the street. Pretty! And the fact that they cast the guy from Xanadu to play Roger.

My least favorite part: All that fake steam coming out of people’s mouths to show that it was cold outside. I noticed it right away and then couldn’t tear my eyes away from its fakeness every time they digitally added it to a scene. Which is ALL THE TIME. My second least favorite part: Maureen’s protest. Yawn.

Movie #2: Brokeback Mountain is everything I’d hoped for … and everything I knew was coming, thanks to the endless coverage it’s gotten in the press and the blogosphere. I’d read enough about it that I’d kinda figured out what happens at the end, though the way it all happens was still a surprise to me. Still, the movie is beautifully told and intelligently written, with dialogue as achingly sparse and as rich with beauty as its settings.

There’s really nothing I can say about it that hasn’t already been said, but of course I have a few observations:
• A love story between two men should involve less boobie and more manbutt.
• I’d never seen Jake Gyllenhaal in a movie before. Now I understand what all the fuss is about. (He’s cute enough in still photos, but his charms are exponentially more obvious on the silver screen.)
• Anne Hathaway is hot. I’d do her. But just to get to her husband.
• Um … I guess all my observations are sexually motivated. Except this one: I was expecting it to be earth-shattering cinema, with high-octane emotional jolts and audible sobs. So I wasn’t prepared for its subtlety. For its just-like-real-life untidiness. For the way it stuck with me for hours after we left the theater. It’s a powerful story, but it’s told in whispers and mumbles. And that’s the way it should be told. Go see it.

Got your tickets yet?

There are only two more days until the cows come home ... and by "cows" I mean "fake cowboys" and by "come home" I mean "sing and dance like big gay homos."

A Cowboy Christmas is going to be a hoot, so click on the pretty picture above to order your tickets -- and you'll be able to see people like me and this guy and this guy singing and dancing and acting goofy and generally behaving like little girls do when they're pretending to be princesses (except we're big girls and we're pretending to be cowboys).

Performances:
Friday, December 9, 8:00 pm
Saturday, December 10, 5:00 pm
Saturday, December 10, 8:30 pm

Location:
The Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport

More Info:
Our endlessly clever web site

Copycat:
More gay cowboys