Who’s your Hoosier?

I am! I am!

I spent the weekend visiting my formerly-of-Chicago friend Bill in his fabulous new Indianapolis home, with its cool architecture and its multiple bathrooms and its endless supply of closet space. (Bill, knowing the depths of my storage envy, showed considerable restraint by not rubbing my face in his ample closets. So to speak.)

Our weekend was packed with the best kinds of fun, much of which involved lounging around chatting. But we also squeezed in two lovely brunches, an expert driving tour of Indianapolis’ fabulous neighborhoods and museums and historical buildings, and a lovely afternoon in the ultra-cool Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The IMA building is an authoritative structure situated in a corner of the sumptuous Oldfields-Lilly House & Gardens. Like much of the newer architecture Bill showed me in Indianapolis, the IMA building has a sense of adventure, achieving its intended purpose with creativity and humor and a little visual experimentation. And the collection inside, while not as exhaustive as the building’s epic scale would suggest, is thoughtfully displayed, with useful information and a logical flow of ideas.

The best part of our tour: The Amy Cutler exhibit in the museum’s Forefront series. Amy (I call her Amy) has defined her own post-feminist genre, commenting on the social and familial experiences of women with a visual vocabulary that’s at once amusing, resigned, earnest and at times unapologetically ridiculous. Her images walk a line between the disturbing grotesqueries of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and the oddly pedestrian horrors of Edward Gorey—especially in my favorite of her works, Dinner Party (left column, middle row), which features corseted ladies in gargantuan farthingales fighting each other with antlers made of upturned chairs and strapped-on cutlery.

If you do go to the museum—and you should—take care not to gesture too closely as you point out the carved penises on the wooden chair in the African exhibit. Because you’ll set off an alarm. And a suspicious-looking guard will follow you around and treat you like the penis-obsessed threat to moral decency you are.

One more word to the wise: Don’t go see The Hills Have Eyes just because your friend Bill’s hunky friend Eric wants to see it. Eric will still be attractive if you elect to do something more useful with your time, like organizing your celebrity crushes in the order of who has the prettiest feet.

My bad-movie-dar started beeping the moment Eric suggested it to us, but I was being polite—and for a man who saw all of three movies that got any Oscar nominations this year, I was in no position to pretend I was any kind of cinema authority.

But oh, the pain! With all the production qualities of an early episode of Land of the Lost and the kind of snappy, smart dialogue you’d find in the rough draft of a junior-high book report, The Hills Have Eyes was most definitely NOT alive with the sound of music. In fact, its best feature was its tagline: The lucky ones die first. And it wasn’t even true! Bill and I left soon after the first sleestack mutant desert creature appeared munching on a very unrealistic severed limb, and we learned that the lucky ones leave after losing only an hour of their lives—and get a refund without even a hint of resistance! We figured the road had already been paved for us by armies of equally insulted movie-goers who opted instead to get their money back and head home to watch Dynasty reruns on the Soap Opera Channel. Just like we did. (Maxwell Caulfield … mmm …)

Butt-stupid movies notwithstanding, the vacation was a delight from start to finish, and it ended way too soon. But I did get to enjoy a sunny drive home in the land of 70-mph speed limits. And there were no laughable mutant desert creatures hiding in my tiny closets when I got home.

People I have seen this week:

Name Unknown, the foreign cab driver who was extremely proud of his hybrid cab when he picked us up at LaGuardia at 12:30 am on Wednesday after a long evening of delayed flights. (The car actually sounded like it shut down when it came to a stop, only to rev up like nothing had happened when he stepped on the gas again. We were pretty impressed by this.) But when New York’s finest pulled him over in a fund-raising sting on the George Washington Bridge (I think) and cited him for his bald tires, he had to ask us, his exhausted business-trip passengers, what that meant. And we were left to wonder how a 2006 vehicle could have completely bald tires, especially when it’s only March.

Name Also Unknown, And Also Technically Unseen, the miscreant and/or drunken asshole who repeatedly tried to get into my room at New York’s grossly overrated Hudson Hotel early Wednesday morning. I heard the key card in the door, I heard the handle jiggle, I was very much awake—and I can’t tell if my heart was racing over the potential fright of it all or from the white-hot anger I felt toward the design tard who decided laminate flooring, with its magical abilities to magnify sound in the middle of the night, was a good idea for a hotel room. (Note to the Hudson Hotel: I know it’s trendy and cool to make your lobby seem like a nightclub, but if your guests can’t hear what the desk clerks are telling them about their bills, then your loud thump-thump music is anything but cool. Besides, “Funky Cold Medina” is what wedding reception DJs play—and what Pat Robertson listens to behind closed doors when he's feelin' kinda sexy. Seriously.)

A giant bald bodybuilder in a T-shirt that would be too tight on me wandering the hallways of LaGuardia before our flight home Wednesday evening. He was notable for his immense size, his extremely handsome face and the fact that there was nobody else to look at in the airport. And because he filled my mind with all kinds of Vin-Diesel-in-the-airport-bathroom fantasies.

Some woman from NPR whose name I didn’t recognize but whose voice I totally did, this afternoon at a luncheon to kick off The Economist’s new Chicago survey. I didn’t realize the event would be a Big Deal, so I wore a foo-foo trendy dress shirt (untucked, just like the gays wear them!) and expensive jeans. Every other man there was in a suit.

Dr. C, the dermatologist who looks and talks like Sherry Stringfield (and if she reminds me of an actress who plays a doctor on TV, she has to know what she’s doing). I had my annual celebrity mole checkup today, and she told me not only that I “did a good job healing” from my biopsy scars from last March (Stop! I’m blushing!) but that I had no new moles that gave her concern. Oh, and she and her nurse agreed that I was in “excellent shape,” presumably for a man my age. (I find it funny that they always make a big production of giving me a moment of privacy to strip to my underwear and put on a hospital gown, only to have me take off the gown the moment they come in to examine me.)

D., the well-muscled fella with the megawatt grin and the ability to inject New Yorker references into any conversation. He makes my calloused, untrusting heart do tentatively bouncy things. And he’s not afraid to give me a peck on the lips in front of his co-workers. We’ve been seeing a (relative) lot of each other these last few months, though neither of us is in the market for a boyfriend.

Weekend adventures

FRIDAY
8:15 Go on one of the shortest dates of my life. (He showed up high. Like ADHD high. I told him he was a loser.) Go home and watch TV instead.

SATURDAY
7:00 Wake up at the crack of dawn. For no useful reason. On my one day to sleep in. Stupid sunshine! Why do you have to peek in my windows and make my bedroom all warm and cheery and wake-uppable? Curse you!

9:00 Get my hair cut. It’s funny how you can go from shaggy fluffball to droopy power fro overnight. I’d reached critical droop earlier in the week, and I had to go to two client meetings looking like I had a nest on my head. So put a visit to the nice hair lady on the top of my weekend agenda. I go to one of those walk-in, no-appointment-necessary, take-your-chances salons haircut stores because 1) I don’t see any reason to spend $40+ on a basic ’do I can get just as easily for $12 and 2) I can walk there from my house. And when you get there the moment the door opens in the morning, there’s (almost) no waiting!

9:45 Pick up dry cleaning. I own nine dress shirts (10 if you count the one that’s gettin’ kinda ghetto), and I’ve been traveling for work (the only time I play dress-up) so much lately I’d completely depleted my stockpile. Now everything’s clean again. Which means it’s gonna be that much harder to make decisions when I get dressed in the morning.

11:00 Begin Journey of Pain. I didn’t realize the St. Patrick’s Day parade was yesterday. I got on the train at 11:00, and by 11:01 I was regretting ever being born. The train was PACKED with drunken college kids in unnatural shades of green. And they all had their volumes set on Shriek. And they sprayed beer on each other. Oh—and there was some kind of problem four trains ahead of us, so we sat on the tracks for achingly long periods of time. Stupid loud, drunken kids. Always after me Lucky Charms.

11:46 Arrive a minute late for my back and upper-arm waxing, thanks to the abovementioned train delays. I don’t mind body hair on men, but I’m not a big fan of it when it’s on their backs and upper arms. And I’m REALLY not a fan of it when it’s on my back and upper arms. And the older I get, the more I seem to devolve into a hairy-back-and-upper-arms monkey-like state. Intelligent Design doesn’t seem to be making it go away, so I have a nice Polish lady who rips the hair right out of my skin for me. She has pictures of her Asian daughter (“she’s adopted”) all over her salon, and she chats away the whole time she’s tearing the flesh from your body. She usually does an awesome job, but this time she missed a few little islands of hair and I broke out in little pimples all over my arms by Saturday morning. Sexy!

1:00 Arrive for my first-ever visit to the Field Museum. I did a one-hour tour of the permanent exhibit (including an emergency meal at McDonald’s) and then met three friends at 2:00 for the last days of Pompeii: Stories from an Eruption. Giggly title notwithstanding, the exhibit is pretty interesting, but I’d hoped for a lot more frozen-in-time bodies and a lot fewer amulets and melted coins. It is well-researched, though—and it does a nice job of helping you understand the staggering enormity of the destruction.

5:00 Do some shopping for birthday cards, Chapstick (except I accidentally bought the Walgreens brand, so for the next couple months people will think I’m too poor to spend an extra 80¢ for name-brand lip balm), and other various and sundry items. Oh, I also bought a gift, because the next adventure on my schedule was:

7:30 Birthday party. My friend Paul had a nice little get-together last night for his 40something-th birthday, with homemade roast beef sandwiches, some shockingly delicious cake, and a nice gathering of men who laughed and snorted together over Stewie Griffin – The Untold Story and drooled together over the shirtless Timothy Olyphant (and the coupling of Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) in Go. Then we watched a TiVo’d episode of Ghost Whisperer, which is so staggeringly retarded it could almost be elected POTUS. Except with worse dialogue.

8:30 Ruin the ending of Wicked for a friend AS HE’S WATCHING IT. My friend Mike called me from NYC to tell me how amazing the show was, and I—not doing the time-zone math right—thought he'd seen it to the end. So I asked him how soon he figured out that [element X in the show] would turn out to be [surprise element Y in the show]. Then I heard the announcement in the background telling patrons to return to their seats for Act II. And I felt very low. As low as a Munchkin under a farmhouse.

11:30 Aborted trip to the Eagle. I’d been in a skanky-bar mood for a while, so I brought my leather vest and wore my boots and low-slung jeans to the party so I could go trolling afterward. But by midnight I was too tired put myself through all the trouble. And the guys at the party were frankly a little horrified I would even consider it. One of them even used to work there—which was all the decision-making influence I needed.

SUNDAY
12:00 Meet Stan for coffee. We met at a Starbucks in Lincoln Park. Which makes us Trixies. Except we talked about politics and religion and other deeply, profoundly intellectual stuff. And while we did talk about boys for a bit, we never once compared purses or shared the names of our pedicurists. So we’re SO not Trixies.

5:00 Leave for rehearsal. The show is gonna be pretty awesome. Got your tickets yet?

8:45 Dinner at IHOP with Matt. Just like every Sunday.

Business travel tips

Print your travel itinerary the night before you leave. Look at it long enough to give yourself a general idea of when your flight is and what airline you’re on. Leave it at work.

Discover when you get home that you can’t remember exactly when or how you're flying and you can't log onto your business email account or your account with the airline you’re pretty sure you’re on. Go to bed wondering if you’ll lose your job if you miss your flight the next morning.

Breathe a sigh of relief when you learn at the airport the next morning that you guessed the correct airline and flight.

Eat McDonald’s for breakfast at the airport. Feel fat and gassy the rest of the day.

Plop down in your seat on the plane and discover you're sitting next to someone you used to work with. For the second time in a year. Shiver over the cosmic coincidence.

Don’t pee before you give your client presentation. And wear underwear that climbs so far up your ass you can taste it. Discomfort breeds confidence. Clients pay a lot for that.

Arrive at the airport in plenty of time to discover that your return flight is delayed three hours.

Sit for an irritating half hour next to a lound cell-phone talker who actually yells says, "they'll probe you for whatever probative information they can probe out of you."

Travel with a colleague who has one of those fancy VIP-lounge memberships—and enough pull to get your entire party in the lounge with her.

Pee before you find out you can join her in the VIP lounge, so you have no excuse to check out the undoubtedly cool VIP bathrooms.

Wear a dress shirt you got at Filene’s Basement when you’re in the VIP lounge to reinforce your paranoid fantasies that all the VIP members can tell you’re an interloper just by looking at you.

As you’re finally boarding your return flight, get in line right in front of a belligerent crazy lady who will yell Fuck you! at the gate agent who’s double-checking that her carry-on is an acceptable size. Enjoy your front-row access to the gate agent telling her on no uncertain terms how she’s just fucked herself off a very delayed, very overbooked flight. Continue to stand there, now in awkward silence, as the belligerent crazy lady cries and apologizes to the other gate agent and pleads for her very life because she’s apparently missing her grandfather’s funeral as we speak.

Discover on the plane—using only a very innocent (innocent!) scratch of your upper-lip area—that you are way overdue for a nose-hair trimming. Worry that you've had bats in the cave all day. Be thankful the guy sitting next to you is so asleep he's drooling.

Get home feeling fat and lethargic and plagued with dragon breath. And nose hairs. Blog readers pay a lot for that.

I can't have children.

No, I'm not talking about my shrunken ovary.

I can't have children because I can't stand the noise. And the mood swings. And the noise. And the fighting. AND THE NOISE.

For instance! I'm in Iowa this weekend to help my adorable nephew celebrate his seventh birthday. Yesterday morning I was left in charge of the nephew and niece while my family ran errands. Our time together started out as delightfully as possible; the kids invited me to snuggle under a blanket with them and watch a movie. (OK, it was a Star Wars movie, so "delightful" was relative, but I was bonding so I pretended to enjoy it.)

We were being all cozy and cuddly, and every time there was hand-to-hand combat and gruseome death on the screen, my adorable nephew--who obviously had watched this movie enough to know his cues--jumped adorably up and swung his toy light sabre at his villains and returned adorably to the blanket after all foes had been vanquished.

But! Eventually the niece jumped up mid-vanquish and wanted demanded to use the light sabre. And there was grabbing. And pushing. Then there was crying. And screaming. And accusations that the niece would "never get [her] strength back" after a particularly grievous push to her arm.

And then we decided the movie wasn't fun anymore and let's play a game! But the nephew wanted to play school and the niece wanted to play Battleship (and the readers kindly kept their gender-issues comments to themselves) and Uncle Jake refused to be the tie-breaking vote because neither option sounded particularly fun so a vote was railroaded through by the nephew that we would play some electronic counting game instead but the niece was screaming too loud for the nephew to hear the electronic questions every time he stepped on the buttons. Because pushing the buttons with a finger is apparently how crazy monkeys would play this game. And we're not crazy monkeys! We're screaming children! We use our feet!

And then! And then the niece became Angry Drama Queen From Hell and started screaming like Medea over her dead children and Sally Field off her meds on ER and Janet Leigh in the shower all at once. And she's never even read Medea! (Neither has her Uncle Jake, but he's pretty sure Medea does some screaming after she kills her kids. If not, please substitute the screaming of Oedipus after he goes through his patricide/motherfucker/self-blinding phase. Only in a womanly voice.)

And then it was Uncle Jake's turn to scream, only in a manly voice. And he actually YELLED ANGRILY! at a four-year-old girl. He yelled to STOP SCREAMING! And that fighting over a game DIDN'T MATTER! And WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? And he didn't feel guilty about it. Not one bit.

And then he asked her if she wanted to go to her room. (Bad move; he should have TOLD her to go to her room. But he was new at this. And kind of a pussy.) And through her hyperventilation and gutteral sobs, she said no, she did not, in fact, want to go to her room. But she'd like some money. And after a little sobbing-child-to-English translation it was determined that she actually wanted her bunny. But the little stuffed bunny was nowhere to be found.

And then: the deus ex machina! Uncle Jake's sister came home! And though the bunny remained steadfastly in its hiding place (and could you blame it?), the screaming ended, the sun came out and Uncle Jake went to the kitchen and had a banana.

And eventually he went shopping and came home with four shirts, a new set of 400-count sheets, six new serving pieces for his fancy new dishes and a mountain of kitchen utensils--all on sale and all with an extra 20% discount from a coupon his mom had.

And he loved his new possessions like they were his own flesh and blood. Because they didn't scream.

And that's why I can't have children.

I feel an eating disorder coming on

My neighborhood is pretty devoid of life. We have lots of high-rise and mid-rise multi-family dwellings, so we’re theoretically packed with people. We have a dry cleaner and two banks and two storefront convenience stores and a whole grocery store and a Curves and a dentist and two restaurants and an Enterprise (who promises to pick us up) and we’re a block from the friggin’ beach, so we’re theoretically a hotbed of potential sidewalk culture.

But the people I see on our sidewalks are few and far between. And they’re usually clustered at the bus stops.

Oh, yeah. We have bus stops. Lots of them. One on every corner.

And each of our fancy new Chicago bus stops includes room for two six-foot-tall backlit advertisements.

And the two neighborhood bus stops I walk by the most are covered in six-foot-tall backlit abs. Sexy, flat, rippled, hunka-hunka-burnin’ man abs that taunt me every time I just try to go about my everyday, relatively-nice-abbed business:


Full disclosure: Google couldn’t find me the exact Equinox ad from my neighborhood bus stop and I was too lazy to go take a picture of it myself, so the Jeremy Bloom image on the left is merely proxy abs.

And while the image on the right isn’t supposed to inspire me to do everything in my power to achieve a body like the one the model is sportin’, the whole no-meth message is lost on me the moment I lay eyes on his sixpack. And by the time my eyes have traveled slowly up to his soft, perky man nipples, I find myself wanting whatever magic substance he’s using to achieve such ripped masculine charms. So: not the best choices by the ad agency.

In any case, this daily, two-pronged absault (HA! ABSAULT!) makes me want to renounce my four-pound jars of Jif and devote my life to the worship of Dysmorphia, the bitch goddess of ridiculous self-image issues.

Which, in some ways, has helped keep me pretty honest in my gonna-be-half-naked-on-stage-in-April workout and diet regimen. Seriously! A trainer at my gym helped me revamp my workout in January, and it’s kept me in a constant feel-the-burn, watch-the-muscles-grow state since then. And I’ve kept my EZ-Bake Oven fired up to cook all kinds of vegetables and egg whites and lean-cut meats, and I’ve been satisfying my insatiable sweet tooth with fresh fruits and sparkling waters and skim-milk puddings. (This diet tastes better than it sounds. Honest.) And everyone knows that low fat + high protein + good calories + ass-kicking workouts = abtastic results. Right?

Right?

Well, kind of. While my abs stubbornly remain more ironing board than washboard—which is infinitely better than washtub—my legs and shoulders are showing gradual improvements … enough that two people have complimented me on them in the last week alone. And I didn’t even have to pay them.

In summary: I’m in no danger of dating becoming an Equinox model or killing a crystal meth poster child in my basement. I actually love plain, unflavored steamed vegetables. Jeremy Bloom and the guy he's proxying make me feel fat. In more than one place. And Dysmorphia Pudding would make a great drag name.

A look in my crevices

My house is not always the tidiest place on the planet, though my clutter is more about stacks of mail and unfolded laundry than mazes of unread newspapers and cockroach-infested litterboxes. So I’m not a crazy old cat lady. Yet.

But I am really good about keeping my cupboards organized. I see them as a sanctuary from the other messes; I may trip over seven pair of shoes to get to the linen closet, but I’m rewarded with a total Zen experience once I open the doors.

And aside from my date on Friday night (which was lovely, thanks for asking, but I’m not going to talk about it here) and the handful of used CDs (Dusty Springfield! Mel Tormé! Bernadette Peters! Peggy Lee!) I bought on Saturday, my weekend hasn’t given me much to blog about. So I’m going to show you the insides of my cupboards.

(Dear LORD have I sunk to new lows. And yet you keep reading. Symbiotic boredom!)


This is my stemware cupboard. Clockwise from the top left: The cozy oversized mugs that match my new dishes. The Crate & Barrel mugs that say HOT CHOCOLATE TEA COFFEE around the rims. (They’re the last gift my grandmother bought me before she died, so even if I hated them (which I don’t) I could never get rid of them.) Some plain old mismatched mugs. (Required in every household.) Delicate parfait glasses etched with the family initial. (I’ll never use them, but I’m queer and childless the last one to carry this initial so I’m stuck with them.) A huge Mickey Mouse mug. Wine and martini glasses. (Often dusty from lack of use.) My day-to-day glassware.


This is my other cupboard. I won’t go into the mind-numbing fascinating stories behind every piece, but I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love my new dishes, which I bought in November. They’re glazed with black on the outsides and bottoms and a brilliant red on the insides and tops. They’re hefty. The serving pieces are square and rectangular—perfect for assorted cheeses! They make me feel all grown up.

Yawn. I’d offer you a fancy beverage to distract you from your boredom keep this party going all night, but I don’t want to mess up my cupboards. Help yourself to a drink from the garden hose in the living room.

Dear Twin Cities,

Though we don’t have a long history together, I’ve always liked you. I like the playfulness and diversity of your downtown architecture. I like your celebrated skyway system that keeps your businesses and consumers interacting even on the coldest of days. I like the sheer capitalist obscenity of your Mall of America. I like the fact that you let me buy all sorts of souvenirs that practically jump into my possession with no pesky sales tax to slow them down.

I like your people. They’re friendly and no-nonsense, with pure, articulated vowels and a warm, practical fashion sense. And while you have more than your fair share of mom-style hair, you also have more than your fair share of smokin’ hot men whose masculine charms are far more believable than the hyper-macho cartoons one encounters in bigger-city gay circles.

I like the work that comes out of your advertising and design firms. In fact, I’ve contemplated moving up your way just to be a part of your marketing magic on more than one occasion.

I like the word Hennepin. It sounds so … gay.

I like your Metro Transit light rail train system. It’s clean and efficient and easy to navigate. It’s populated with quiet, respectful riders. And I like the fact that it’s apparently free; we bought our (very affordable) tickets today to ride from downtown to the airport, but no machine demanded to eat them before letting us board, and no pesky conductors came around to see if we had them in our possession while we were riding.

But. Seriously. Who are you trying to fool (OK, whom are you trying to fool) with the little commuter train at your airport? While it’s as clean and efficient and wonderfully roomy as everyone would expect, the recorded voice that announces all the stops is conspicuously British. Worse yet, it’s Ennui British, as though the woman who recorded it was distracted by her indecision over whether to shop for D&G with Madonna at Harrods when she was done or to head off for yet another dreary weekend of polo and crumpets at the Cardiff manse instead. To top it off, you call the system a “tram.” Which is, quite frankly, criminally pretentious. At least when you live in the Midwest.

To recap: I love everything about your city. Except the mom hair. And the winters. And that ridiculous faux-British “tram” business. Please stop.

Other than that, you can turn the world on with your smile.

And please send some of your men to Chicago.

Veal Prince Orloff!

I'm winging my way to the land o' lakes and tam o'shanters and Mary o' Richards herself tomorrow for a client meet ’n’ greet.

Then I have a date—a second date—with a stunningly attractive really nice guy. Our first date was a year and a half ago, and though it was very nice and we both had a great time and he wrote me a bunch of really clever emails, we never followed up on it. Then we entered that post-nice-date-drift limbo where we totally lost track of each other. But we ran into each other again last week and we got to talking, and now I'm cooking him dinner on Friday night.

And though I haven't yet decided what's going to be on the menu, I'm gonna make it after all.

A story ends.

She was born with profound physical disabilities. Her childhood was fraught with challenges and horrors mitigated by the love and devoted care of her mother and brother. She had undergone more than 20 major surgeries in her relatively short lifetime, and her world had been endless cycles of pain, sickness, hospitalization and hopeful recovery.

She had outlived her life expectancy by a good decade.

And this weekend, she finally died.

I was related to her distantly, through marriage. She and I had met only three times, and most of those times she was too sick even to sit and visit very long.

Her story is not her own, though; it is deeply intertwined with the lives of the people around her. People who are close to me. People who are important to the people who are close to me. People whose emotions are still raw and whose pain is both bittersweet and unprocessed.

I don’t have enough facts to write a fitting tribute to her spirit and her struggles. And I don’t feel I knew her well enough to presume she’d want her story told here.

But I do want to think I can perhaps use this space to make sure she is not forgotten. At least for a moment. Even if it is by complete strangers who don’t even have enough details to picture her mentally or locate her geographically.

And I’d love to think she is finally free of her physical limitations, running and skipping and laughing in whatever elysian fields await us when we leave this earth.

And I leave you with this: Life is short. It’s not always fair. It’s not always happy. Make the most of what you have. And thank the people who make your life richer. You may not have the chance tomorrow.

Ah, but underneath

I’ve worked out in predominantly gay gyms, but the rabid poodle factor always made for a hostile, unpleasant workout environment.

I’ve worked out in predominantly bodybuilder/model gyms, but the distraction/intimidation factor always made my workouts unfocused and unproductive.

Now I work out in a predominantly gym gym—and I go over lunch—so the only factor in play is regular people trying to stay focused and healthy and get back to work in an hour so they can have lives at night. It’s not about gay or straight. It’s not about sociophysical class lines. It’s not about sex in the showers. It’s about efficiency. And I like it that way.

(There is one other factor in place here: convenience. The gym is in the basement of my office building, so even on my most wall-to-wall-meetinged days, I can usually sneak down and accomplish something for at least half an hour.)

One byproduct of this focused-businessperson-at-noon factor is predictability; I see the same people almost every day, usually in the same limited selection of T-shirts. (I’m guilty of this too—I’ll work out in the same shirt for two weeks before I can finally summon the decision-making power to pick a new one. Unless it starts fighting back when I try to put it on. Then I go just one week.)

And because of this predictability, when someone new appears in the gym, I tend to notice. Like this week.

I saw him as soon as I walked in the locker room. He was well over six feet tall, with a booshy moostache and a Harry Middlepart both dyed a brassy brown-black. I’d guess he was in his early 50s, but he moved like a man in his 80s: slow and deliberate, with audible wheezing and groaning to accompany every gesture.

And every gesture was an obvious effort. Though he clearly couldn’t hold his balance, he stayed standing to undress himself, bracing one hand on the locker frame while he reached down with the other hand to untie and remove one shoe, slowly, inefficiently, laboriously, and then the other one, slowly, inefficiently, laboriously. And then he started with the socks, which slowed him down even more.

I usually don’t fill in the backstories on the strangers I see in the gym, but I found myself wondering if this man was maybe a heart patient forced to get more exercise by his doctor—or by his looming mortality. Or perhaps he was a new grandfather who suddenly realized his sedentary lifestyle could rob him of a lifetime of playing with the baby, cheering him on at soccer games, watching him graduate.

By this time, though, I was changed and headed out to the gym floor. As I passed him, he started—still with one hand—pushing his pants down off his hips.

And then I saw it: A flash of red. Electric red. Sparkly electric red.

This feeble old man who could barely undress himself was wearing a shiny Spandex stripper thong.

What’s more, the thong was at least two sizes too small; it stretched tightly across the middle of his butt, a good two inches below the top of his buttcrack. And it could not have been comfortable.

But it spoke volumes about his real backstory. He was no longer a man in his twilight, staring death in the face; he was a man who, despite obvious obstacles, was trying to live. And if living for him meant dyeing his hair and walking around with a wad of petroleum-based fabric wedged in his butt, I could only applaud his proactivity. And his sense of humor.

This man, who probably takes a good half hour just to start his workout, is exactly the reason I like my gym. Unafraid of others’ opinions, able to see promise where others might see pre-emptive defeat, disciplined enough to go out and get some exercise, he personifies everything I like about the people I work out with every day. Even though we all rarely talk to each other.

But I could offer him one little bit of criticism. It’s more of an observation, really, and I say it only out of concern for his appearance and self-esteem: Jewel tones are so not his color.

Jake’s Excellent Leg Workout:

Squats
2x8 @ 135 lbs
2x8 @ 155 lbs
2x8 @ 135 lbs

Lunges
4x8 @ 80 lbs

Quad extensions
4x8 @ 180 lbs

Hamstring curls
4x8 @ 113 lbs

Calf raises
4x20 @ 250 lbs

Tap class
90 minutes of shuffling and flapping and ball-changing and general hopping around on the balls of your feet @ 190 lbs bodyweight


So I finally took a tap class tonight—a couple hours after a pretty productive leg workout—at a new studio I stumbled on last December. The studio could not be more inconvenient as far as the CTA goes, but the teacher is awesome and the class is nice and fast-paced. I couldn’t make it to the Tap III class I wanted to take, so I went to Tap II, which focused more on fundamentals than on cool combinations, but that was probably for the best since I hadn’t had my tap shoes on in … well, in at least a couple very visible millimeters of tap-shoe dust. So I was glad for the refresher course.

The class was filled with a lot of frustrated beginners who just couldn’t seem to relax their ankles or trust their weight shifts. But they were quick learners with a lot of focus and even more smiles. Especially the cute gay couple in the tight T-shirts and bleached teeth who kept flirting with talking to me. Happy Valentine’s Day indeed.

Now my legs are sore and wobbly all the way up to my shoulders. But not in an I-just-got-shot-in-the-face-by-the-vice-president kind of way. I think you have to pay, like, $2,000 extra for that.

Birdshot bukkake!

While I didn’t shoot any gun-lovin’ Republican lawyers in the face this weekend, I did have a productive, fun-filled 48+ hours.

It started with my three-hour deep-tissue massage on Friday night, which left me bruised and exhausted but able to turn my head again like an actual human. And I slept like the dead—the head-movin’, locomotion-enabled dead—the moment I got home.

On Saturday I met my friend Jamey for a trip through the Swedish American Museum in Andersonville. We’d been talking about going there for ages, and we’d finally set a date and made it happen. The museum is nice, but it doesn’t have a lot of content. And a museum dedicated to Swedish history and culture that makes room to display—and I swear I am not making this up—furniture from Ikea probably should work a little harder to counterbalance such trifles with richer overall education and context. It does have a fun little area on the third floor, though, where kids can don the simple garments of rural 19th century Swedes and pretend to do backbreaking farm labor. So there’s that.

After the museum, Jamey and I spent an hour poking through the shops in Andersonville to find me a cool martini glass (more on that later), and then—on impulse—we headed to a spectacular little chamber concert at a local college. The guest performers were the Vermeer and Arianna String Quartets, who played works by Haydn, Shostakovich and Mendelssohn. Now, while the Haydn and the Mendelssohn pieces were positively transcendent—and played with such effortless virtuosity that they were almost orgasmic—the Shostakovich (Quartet #10, Op, 118) was a bit trying. He was one of those atonal Romantics, you see, and though the second movement of the #10 had that relentless urgency that can electrify even the most curmudgeonly among us, the final movement—with all its screeching and mewling and whimpering—Would. Not. End. But it’s Shostakovich’s 100th birth year, so we had to applaud politely. And there was a lovely snowfall blowing and whirling around the campus, so I spent the better part of all that noise contemplating its fluffiness through the windows.

And then it was time for the drinkin’! My friend Barb had invited me to a 40th birthday party Saturday night because she wanted me to meet all her cool gay friends. The party was martini-themed, and instead of real gifts, everyone was invited to bring a funky martini glass to drink out of for the night and then leave behind. (Mine was herringbone faux crystal with a manly stem, only $5 each at Pier 1, in case you wanted to re-create the magic at home.) There were huge pitchers of gasoline-powered cosmopolitans everywhere at the party, and my one glass of the stuff lasted me a good three hours. Then I politely switched to Coke (with wedges of lemon, because some occasions just call for fancy).

And the party was a blast! Many of Barb’s friends are professional artists, complete with galleries and installations and commissions and tenured positions and tons of interesting stories. The rest of her friends are just plain fun. And smart. It was exhausting just keeping up with some of the conversations. We even had a spirited roundtable discussion about the first sex scene in Brokeback Mountain, which I was surprised to discover elicited drastically different interpretations among different genders and sexual orientations. The gay men saw it as simple animal lust between two horny, possibly-in-love guys. The straight men saw it as two guys getting off any way they could in a desperate, lonely situation. The straight women saw it as rape. (Even when it was pointed out that Jack dropped his own drawers and hungrily backed his own ennis up to Ennis' jack before it was really established that the men’s fumbling would turn sexual, they still saw it as rape.) And the lesbians didn’t really weigh in; they were off building workbenches in the garage or something.

Five delightful hours later, the party started winding down and I headed home with a new Friendster connection and an admittedly very casual invitation to vacation in an Italian villa this summer with a group of very fun people. Which I’m still actually thinking about.

Sunday was putz-around-the-house day. I pulled all the furniture away from the walls and vacuumed up a sizeable herd of dust buffaloes. I filled two dust rags with unspeakable filth. I took a massive pile of old clothes and dog bowls and pots and pans and tacky holiday decorations to the Brown Elephant. I came home with a sturdy little table to display a ficus tree I got free from a neighbor in my building. (I’ve always thought a ficus tree covered with Christmas lights would look super cool branching up from behind the TV in the corner of my living room. I’ll find out tonight (once I pick up the tree) if I thought right—for only the cost of a $3 used table!) And I finished off the weekend shooting a gun-lovin’ Republican lawyer in the face at chorus rehearsal and then indulging in one of my favorite Sunday traditions: dinner at IHOP with my friend Matt. Who, technically, is a Republican lawyer. But not to the extent that he should be shot.

If you could see me now

you’d see a man who can finally turn his head all the way to both shoulders without any pain. OK, with a little pain. But I’ll take it after the epic, tears-in-the-eyes-every-time-I-move debilitating pain I’ve endured this last week. Stupid back spasm.

And I have a few thank-yous I’d like to dole out:

1) Ibuprofen. So cheap, so plentiful, so reliable.

2) Biofreeze. I’ve amassed quite a stockpile of free samples of this stuff after all the races I’ve run. And I’ve never even opened one of the packages until this week. Now I want to rub its gelatinous, camphor-scented goodness all over my body. Especially where its now-it’s-cold-now-it’s-hot tingling properties will feel exceptionally … um … invigorating.

3) My kaz-brand SmartHeat™ heating pad. It provided hours of searing, water-boiling heat right to my neck and shoulders every night for a week. And it was the first to break through the initial lockup and melt my muscles back into something capable of actual movement.

4) My friend Tim, the world’s hunkiest massage therapist. I just got back from a profoundly satisfying deep-tissue massage, where he rubbed and pummeled and pulled and elbowed his way deep into the sit-bolt-upright-and-scream pain regions that ran from my occipitals (the rotten kids who got me into this mess, if you ask me) all the way to my toes. And he stretched my 90-minute session to three whole hours. It pays to have friends with tireless hands and nothing better to do on a Friday night. Best of all, Tim doesn’t subscribe to the peace and quiet = Zen relaxation paradigm that most massage therapists use. No, Tim talks. A lot. Which is fine with me because the things he’s doing to me are so painful and make me grunt and moan so loudly that Zen relaxation is as realistic as Pat Robertson dignity. Plus, did I mention Tim’s HOT?

Now I’m off to bed with my lightly oiled skin and my bendy, pliable flesh and my minor light-headedness.

And my kaz-brand SmartHeat™ heating pad. Just in case.

Getting back

So I read this article that listed 10 ways to exercise when you think you have no time. Some of the ideas I’ve been doing for years, like taking the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator. Some of the ideas are a little out there, like doing calf raises while you brush your teeth. (I actually walk around the house while I brush my teeth; I’d read on some other list* that it makes you brush longer so you do a better job of cleaning.)

* There was no word on the physical benefits of endless list-reading.

And one idea struck me as kind of fun: doing butt clenches while you’re standing on the train or bus. I am a natural buttless wonder, and anything that could firm and tone my sagging assets (HA!) while I was being otherwise unproductive sounded like it might be a good idea.

So I’ve been trying it for the last week. Please don’t laugh.

The list included no instructions, so I’ve had to make it up as I go along. And I’ve discovered there are two ways to flex your butt muscles: the way that kinda forces your knees to go out to your sides and the way that kinda forces your butt to expand to the back. Assuming you have any butt to expand to the back.

So I’ve been standing nonchalantly on the bus every night, trying to look like I’m engrossed in my New Yorker or in the fascinating world outside the window, and alternately squeezing and pursing my sad little mancheeks: knees out, butt back, knees out, butt back!

And sometimes I just hold one of the squeezes for as long as I can stand it, doing the fabled isometric exercises I learned so much about from the Charles Atlas ads in the backs of the comic books I bought as a kid just so I could stare at the Charles Atlas ads.

And all the while I’ve been doing this, my ears have been on high alert for the sounds of giggling or pointing or—worst of all—the accusations of nosy children: Mommy! That man’s butt is moving! Does he have angry chipmunks in his pants?

And I’ll be damned, but it seems to be working. I have yet to develop one of those cantilevered melonbutts you see on the bodybuilders these days, but I do feel an ongoing burning sensation. And it’s the kind of burning sensation you actually want to have in your underpants region.

I took no “before” pictures to chart my progress. Mostly because 1) it’s almost impossible to take a decent picture of your own butt and 2) I really don’t see a compelling reason to record an image of the poor little thing for posterity. (HA! Posterity!)

But believe me: If my butt gets firm and round and toned and able to crush a chipmunk skull in one squeeze, I will so be showing you pictures of it.

Just as soon as I get caught up on my New Yorkers.

What a spaz!

So I woke up Thursday morning with a bit of a sore neck from sleeping on it wrong. No biggie, I thought; I'll stretch it out and be fine in a couple days.

But it got worse. The sore neck turned into a full-fledged back spasm the next night, and by the time I woke up Friday the whole back of my neck had locked up, and I had a client meeting that morning where it was all I could do to concentrate through the pain while I presented bajillions of dollars worth of creative ideas to a moderately packed conference room.

Friday night was the little party where I met the handsome fella from the post below, and his smile alone made it worth the trouble of squaring my shoulders toward him every time he said something to me.

Saturday I spent mostly in bed. Or on the couch. Drugged up like Rush Limbaugh at a circuit party. Only with Advil. And no self-destructive hypocrites. I did manage to cook dinner for a friend that night—and for once I didn't burn the cheese bread—but eating in a civilized manner when you can't move your head in any useful direction is a bigger challenge than you'd expect.

Before I went to bed, though, I remembered I owned a heating pad I'd bought years ago for a running injury. So I spread it out on my pillow, set the thermostat to broil and actually slept through the night.

And I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Which could be from sleeping on my back, which I never do. Or else I'm dying of meningitis.

I was supposed to have some pictures taken today just for fun, and I'd been weightlifting and teeth-bleaching and bottle-tanning and fresh-haircutting and wadrobe-selecting all week to get ready. But nobody wants a picture of a hunchback, and I wasn't sure I could fake a believable smile through the pain. (Hell, I can't even fake an interesting post through the pain.) So I postponed my modeling gig for a week.

And ... um ... that's my boring little story. If any of you know Nick Lachey personally, could you send him over in a towel to give me a neck rub? I think it would really help.

Because the sooner the pain goes away, the sooner my posts become less boring interesting.

You've been warned.

Rules to live by

ONE
When you meet an articulate, charming, well-muscled fellow at a party and his eyes keep catching yours and you both find every reason in the book to accidentally brush against each other for three hours and you give him your number and he calls you the next morning to tell you it was great meeting you and ... um ... would you like to go on a date sometime, try not to giggle like a drunken schoolgirl.

TWO
When you're cooking a nice little dinner for two, don't wear your store-brand teeth-whitening strips as you're mixing and baking a delicious double-chocolate dessert. You're gonna want to lick the beaters.

THREE
Also, don't use your mini Bundt pan for the first time ever when you're baking something for someone besides yourself. There could not be a bigger guarantee that your little chocolate cakelets will come out looking like scrap metal.

I have always been a skinny person.

I graduated from high school at 6'1" and 155 pounds, and I graduated from college four years later at 6'1" and 155 pounds. Tired of being ignored by the guys I was attracted to, I joined a gym soon after graduation. Then I was a skinny person who worked out obsessively five days a week. I slowly bulked up, but I have never become much more than a skinny person who filled out a shirt a little bit better than before.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to laugh at my horrifying skinniness. And then to laugh even harder at my pathetic attempts to hang out with hot guys pretend I was some kind of athlete by joining my high-school gymnastics team.

And nobody is better at gymnastics than a bag of bones. Especially a bag of bones with no gymnastics training.

In 1982, I became a freshman. At the time, freshmen were the big kids at the junior high school instead of the little kids at the high school in my home town. There had been some kind of join-the-gymnastics-team recruitment demonstration at a junior-high assembly that year, and my delusional little mind somehow reached the conclusion that competitive high-school gymnastics was something I should really get involved in.

And, for some reason, they let me in.

The team was small that year, but it comprised some really good gymnasts. And me. And while the other guys spent our afternoon workouts perfecting their tumbling routines and swinging majestically over the high bar and soaring over the vault without aborting in midair like big girls, I putzed around on the one piece of equipment where they planted me because we really needed another body to compete on it: the pommel horse.

After the rings, the pommel horse is the only piece of equipment that requires tremendous upper-body strength and almost no visible shoulder bones when you’re wearing a droopy gymnastics leotard tank top. And I was just as bad on them as you’d expect. Especially because I had no idea what I was doing.

I actually competed on the pommel horse in every meet we went to, though. And I always got a courtesy score, which is a nice way of telling you you suck but you get a nice 2.0 (or maybe it was a 3.0) anyway so you can head home to your parents with some shred of dignity.

But enough about me and my dubious talents. I have a picture of the team:

I am on the bottom left, for those of you who really can’t tell. See that boy sitting to my left? Biggest. Crush. Ever. See the boy in the bottom right? He came in a close second in Jake’s Gymnastics Crushoff. (Both of them were seniors, though. Popular seniors. And I was SO not on their radar.)

Here’s another picture of us, the moment we they actually won the state championship:

Take another look at my arms. Are those the arms of a gymnast? Are they even the arms of anything bigger than a cockroach?

Ironically, though, my presence on that state-winning team actually earned me a JV letter—before I even physically attended my high school. That’s right, bitches—I’m a letterman.

The next year—not having fully absorbed my lesson in humility and droopy leotards—I went out for gymnastics again. Unfortunately, our dreamy superstar seniors had all graduated, and our remaining superstars weren’t enough to carry us to state victory again. And, of course, I hadn’t bothered to look into any kind of ongoing gymnastics training over the summer.

Notice once again what a non-athlete I look like in our team photo. And check out my wrist wraps! They’re code for Jake means business. Just as soon as he irons the unsightly wrinkles out of his special pants.


Fortunately, the Iowa high-school gymnastics program was killed the next year, saving me a mountain of embarrassment—and clearing up my evenings for more productive things. Like dance rehearsals.

And my post-graduation gym workouts eventually beefed me up from 151 pounds to a peak of 201 pounds and back down to a 190–195 range, where I currently stay.

And I just met with a new trainer today, who revamped my entire workout and kicked my droopy-pantsed ass. I just may look like a gymnast by summer.

65 years ago today

a precious little girl was born into a loving family. And she grew up to become a teacher, role model, community pillar, friend, moral compass, survivor … and a living example of the powers of unconditional love.

And a mother. She also grew up to become my mother.

Actually, these words describe both my parents—heck, they describe my entire family—but it’s my mom’s birthday today so she gets to take center stage.

We kid my mom a lot. Probably too much, but she’s a pretty good sport about it. You see, she collects things. Grocery bags. Old butter tubs. Styrofoam cups. Expired boxes of Jell-O®. (She’s still applying for the funding to open a Jell-O® Museum.) Opening a cupboard in her kitchen can often become a literal shower—assuming you embraced the cleaning powers of gently used plastic containers.

But the little piles of things she likes to accumulate make a great metaphor for the less stackable accumulations that fill her life: A tight-knit family of truly best friends. The interlacing circles of lifelong friends who extend that family to both coasts. The network of former students and colleagues and board members and fellow volunteers and cancer survivors and their families who make it impossible for her to go anywhere and be a stranger.

Most importantly, her children and grandchildren, who will someday look back with fondness and profound appreciation as her daily examples of love and sacrifice and friendship and respect continue to drive their decisions and move their lives forward in productive, meaningful ways.

Mom (and Dad) have set valuable examples for my sister and me, extending as far back as I can remember:

• We have regularly volunteered as a family at soup kitchens and invited people to join us for the holidays who would otherwise be alone.

• Mom and Dad have quietly helped countless people in need, doing everything from paying for other kids’ school supplies and clothes to hiring a frail old cleaning lady who needed her dignity more than we needed her meager services to housing a neighbor girl when her family situation became unhealthy.

• Mom and Dad have also taken great care of their own parents and siblings (possibly as karmic insurance against my sister and me stashing them in a refrigerator box by a river when they finally reach their dotage).

• Mom has weathered a host of maladies from a detached retina to breast cancer with dignity and grace and humor. In fact, her prosthesis (It’s a giant nose! It’s a fart machine! It’s a flying boob!) has provided us with hours of inappropriate fun.

• When a friend’s elderly mother was brutally murdered, my parents swooped in to offer every bit of support and assistance they could—my dad and I even helped clean up the murder scene after the police released it to the family.

• When their only son turned out to be a big homo, they worked to unlearn the lifetime of prejudice they had been taught, eventually treating my sexuality as the unremarkable trait that it is.

• When I first set out on my own, Mom let me have the car with air conditioning while she drove the oven on four wheels. Which was a HUGE sacrifice in an Iowa summer.

I think you get the picture.

So happy birthday, Mom! And thanks for everything. You are an inspiration, a source of pride and a friend.

I love you.

It never fails.

You’re at Walgreens, stocking up on a few things: vitamins, photo albums, lotion, hand soap … and you’ll be damned if you can remember the fifth thing you told yourself you needed to buy.

You wander the aisles to try to trip your memory: Batteries? Nope. Hole puncher? Nope. Tampons? They’re out of the ones that that are lightly scented with Drakkar Noir. So nope.

As you stumble into the dental-hygiene aisle, you see that Walgreens now has its own store-brand version of Crest Whitestrips. For like $15 less. So you add a box of the things to your basket and head to the checkout because you’ve given up hope you’ll ever remember what the hell it was you actually needed.

You get home. You open the package. You discover that where Crest Whitestrips were dainty little slips of plastic that are almost invisible in your mouth, the Walgreens version is like a box of Drakkar Noir-scented tampons bulky mouth guards that football players wear.

You assume that when you blog about this, people will be impressed with your endless knowledge of sports trivia. ¿Quién es más macho?

You decide to try them out right then and there. And though they are as bulky as a cableknit sweater on a pie-eating contestant, they stay in place. And they’re wider than Crest Whitestrips, so your new, whiter teeth will extend farther back in your mouth. Assuming the damn things work.

The next morning you decide to multitask, so you wear your strips on the train as you commute to work.

Of course, you find yourself sitting next to a talker, who seems blissfully clueless that the protuberance under your nose is not a bad collagen injection or a mouthful of adult-onset braces. Because the discount whitestrips kind of make you drool, you decline to explain your predicament and just politely mumble yes-and-no answers to the talker’s endless questions. The talker doesn’t seem to notice.

You get off the train and race to work so you can take the damn things out of your mouth in the privacy of the bathroom.

You ride in the elevator with a coworker who really wants to hear about your weekend.

After you drool out a few words that sound like fluffleuaneluf, she finally asks you if there’s something wrong with your mouth.

You make it to the bathroom to remove the upholstered ottoman that seems to have taken residence in your head. But the bathroom is locked.

You head to the bathroom at the far end of the building and finally yank the things out over the sink, mere seconds before your toxic drool threatens to leave long, unsightly streaks of bleach down the front of your shirt.

As you rinse out the last bits of bleaching gel, you finally remember what it was you forgot to buy: Toothpaste.