Gratuitous Nipple Shot

Here we are looking all macho and stuff in our adorable matching camo shorts (camo = très butch!) on last year's Atlantis cruise:
And we're about to go back for more! And compared to last year, this year really is all about the more: More adorable matching outfits! More tattoos! More body mass! More speedos! More gay!

We board the good ship Solstice in Ft. Lauderdale on Sunday and I'll go an entire week without access to blogger, facebook, gmail or joe.my.god. I just hope there's something to see or do on the ship to keep me entertained.

And I'll be sure to tell you all about it when I get back. Be good while we're gone.

I had planned to stand in place today

But my calendar said March 4th

Dear dude who asked me for directions last night,

By now you’ve figured out what a moron I am.

You wanted to go to the Palace Theater. You clearly could tell I’m a big ol’ homo because you singled me out of the entire crowd of people on the sidewalk you could have asked for directions to a big ol’ Versailles-inspired theater.

In my defense, I physically pointed you in the right direction: north and west. But I told you to walk up State and turn left on Roosevelt. It was only when we’d walked a good block away from each other that I realized Roosevelt was so not the street you wanted … because it was actually more than 10 blocks behind you.

So I sprinted back to find you and tell you breathlessly that you wanted to turn left on Lake. North on State and left on Lake.

You thanked me profusely and I headed back to my bus stop to play Words with Friends, my newest obsession on my iPhone.

And when the bus came and I got on it and we started driving north on State, it suddenly hit me. The Palace Theater is actually on Randolph.

The many ways I'm a douchebag

I stole photos
My third and final Hustle up the Hancock is behind me! And I did OK for not doing any stair training. I routinely do 100 squats twice a week, so I was counting on my newly beefy quads to propel me up 94 flights of the John Hancock Center. But my quads started quivering around floor 15. And I made it the rest of the way on little more than get-this-over-with-ness and the highly appropriate Dreamgirls snippet that got stuck in my head and fit perfectly with the seven-step chunks of stairs I was climbing: STEP! MOVE it MOVE it MOVE it RIGHT to THE top STEP (walk walk walk) STEP! MOVE it MOVE it MOVE it, etc. I did the climb in 19:09 the last two years, but my utter lack of training this year added a minute and a half to my time. So I staggered to the top-floor observation deck yesterday in 20:36 and gladly accepted the fact that my Hustle days were over. And as a card-carrying douchebag, I have no intention of forking over any money for commemorative photos. So all I have to show you that I did the Hustle is this proof (you can tell it’s a proof because of the giant word PROOF angling up the middle) that I stole from the photo people’s web site:

I destroyed a rehearsal
Hustle up the Hancock is a fundraiser for the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, so there is cruel irony in the fact that all those people climbing all those seldom-used stairs kick up tons of metallic-tasting dust that we all suck deep into our lungs. And by the time I went to rehearsal two hours later, I had a hacking cough and a throat full of rust-flavored pudding that prevented me from doing important rehearsal things like controlling pitch and matching tones and blending with other singers. All of which become glaringly obvious when everyone is singing a cappella. So I was the sucky douchebag who brought the whole rehearsal down for two hours.

I hoarded food for invalids
A friend of ours is currently recovering at home from a pretty horrific encounter with a car. He’s immobilized in casts and for the next few weeks pretty dependent on his devoted husband and the parade of friends who drop in and demand to supply vast mountains of food and flowers and assistance. And in the spirit of making their lives easier I thought I’d make him good and farty. So I made a massive crock of my favorite turkey chili for them, of course skimming off a few bowls for myself before I delivered it to their door. Because I’m not that altruistic.

I made a child cry
The domestic partner and I spent Saturday afternoon teaching our nieces and their mother how to make pies. We let the girls use the kick-ass apple peeler my folks bought us and we got flour and sugar and other surprisingly sticky ingredients all over the kitchen, but we managed to make a latticed apple pie and a crumbly Dutch apple pie without searing any flesh off any body parts except for my left pinky. While we waited for the pies to bake, the girls bounced around the family room to Just Dance, a Wii game that shows you an abstract-y girl doing arm-wavy choreography to trendy pop songs. You’re supposed to dance along as though the girl were your mirror, and every time the Wii remote thingy detects that your arms are moving in the right ways, a little shoe or hot dog or other cartoon symbol that you chose to represent your badass self rains sparkle dust into a giant clear tube to measure how well you’re doing. Just like any Tuesday night in our bedroom! Everything was going fine until the girls decided to challenge us uncles to a dance-off. And, being a federally licensed choreographer, I naturally smoked my little 8-year-old challenger on my first try. And being a total heartless douchebag, I turned to her and said, “I smoked you!” Not “Good job!” or “High five!” or “You rock!” or “You obviously do a lot of practicing!” or “Can I try on your shoes?” No. I went right to the trash talk I always do with people who have mortgages. And the look on her face made me want to stab myself in the heart. Once I pulled the knife out of hers, of course. In my defense, we were dancing to one of the most heinous-anus abortions of pop music known to man: that “zig-a-zig-HA!” dreck by the Spice Girls. So I get a thousand points just for playing along. Plus I totally did smoke her. And it’s not like I broke her nose with a hearty head-butt like I normally do when I win dance-offs at nursing-home sing-alongs and abortion rallies. But I was still a total douchebag. And even though she seemed to get over it once the next song came on … and especially once we served her pie and ice cream … I will always and forever be the uncle who made the little dancing girl cry. And I now have two reasons to hate that stupid song.

Finishing the tat

So I’ve been tossing around my commemorative roman-numerals-and-dots-for-each-race marathon tattoo idea since I was inspired by one in Runner’s World a month ago. I drew up some design options, I printed them and cut them out and held them up on various parts of my body to decide where I wanted the ink, and I finally told myself I’d wait until I’d actually finished the New York Marathon in November before I pulled the trigger … and then a buddy of mine got a similar (but WAY bigger) tattoo down the side of his torso last weekend. And it looks HOT:

And then all I could think about was fast-tracking my own commemorative roman-numerals-and-dots-for-each-race marathon tattoo. Especially because I’ll be on a cruise in a week so if I was going to get the tattoo before the cruise I had to do it now so it would have time to heal.

So I did it. Last night. And love it!

Why do I love it? It’s hidden in a peek-a-boo-ey spot that’s both out of the way and attention grabbing. It’s small enough that it didn’t take long to gouge into my flesh and it pretty much healed 24 hours after I got it. It’s meaningful in a personal way and badass in a symbolism-and-dead-language way. Plus it’s totally in my armpit! (And when I stand with my arms at my sides and flare my lats, it actually faces forward. How cool is that?)

I mapped out the dots in such a way that the six marathons I’ve run are represented, there’s room for the seventh, and I can’t run an eighth without totally screwing up the symmetry. So now I have an aesthetic reason to stop running stupid marathons after November. Which is way more compelling than an it-makes-my-knees-hurt-and-sucks-my-social-life-dry reason.

And next November when I have New York under my belt (and pounded into my arches and sucked into my lungs) I totally get to go back for another tattoo! Even though it will just be a tiny little dot. But still! I get to finish the tat! Look I made a tat! Where there never was a tat!

Funniest! Site! Ever!

Click here for ten thousand delicious kinds of wrong.

Vile, revolting things that have been yanked out of my body, Vol. 2

Those of you who keep up with such things through your Jake shrines and fan fiction and tribute musicales no doubt remember my epic adventures in pilar cyst excision. I had two of the little buggers hacked out of my head two years ago and then got to do it all over again last year. And I got to look at my dead little cysts before they were dried and made into necklaces by underprivileged children at state-run summer camps. And while they (the cysts, not the underprivileged children) were gross from a textbook-definition standpoint, they really looked no worse than exceptionally bloody boogers with a few stray nose hairs sticking out of them. Which was way more fascinating than disgusting to me. Then again, it takes a lot to gross me out. I mean, I’ve seen Sarah Palin on television.

Anyway!

One of the great things about entering your 40s is the way your body starts to betray you. You creak when you walk. You fart when you sneeze. You start wearing socks to bed. And your hearing starts to mess with you. In my case, ambient noise like traffic and bar din can completely drown out conversations I’m having where people’s mouths are literally inches from my ears. And I have to ask the domestic partner—whom I don’t think of as a mumbler—to repeat stuff he says almost half the time he says something to me. Whee!

So I got my doctor to refer me to an otolaryngologist, which is a fancy word for a doctor who specializes in otolaryngology. And I went yesterday to get my hearing checked. And because otolaryngology has so many syllables—or maybe because I have so many ears—I got to be checked out by two doctors. And before we were all done, I actually found myself thoroughly, genuinely grossed out by something that came out of my own body (but not without a fight … I can be macho like that).

The first doctor locked me in a tiny soundproof room with speaker-embedded plugs jammed in my ears so she could conduct two hearing tests. But that’s not the revolting part.

The first part of the test involved listening for wee tiny beeps that were not unlike what I imagine gnat farts sound like. I had to raise my hand every time I heard (or thought I heard) the doctor squeezing a gnat at the other end of the ear plugs. And I had no idea gnats could fart in so many pitches. They certainly are nature’s tragically overlooked musical prodigies. (That’s not the revolting part either.)

Then I had to repeat recorded words that were mumbled into my ear speakers at decibel levels that would make a librarian proud. If I couldn’t understand what the words were, I was told to take a guess. And, though quiet, the words were fairly easy to understand … or at least to guess: garden, mixture, table, Lautner … and then what I SWEAR was … um … date rape. I seriously couldn’t imagine what else the word I heard could be. And instead of politely keeping it in my head I actually said it out loud. To a female doctor. Who was 97 months pregnant. It wasn’t until this morning—after endless wondering all evening—that I figured out that the word was probably gateway. Or possibly Jake Pavelka. In any case, yelling date rape at a pregnant woman wasn’t the revolting part either. If you can imagine.

Once the pregnant doctor had scraped the look of horror off her face and released me from my padded room, I still wasn’t done! Because I still had to see a doctor who actually stuck things in my ears! And that’s where the revolting part comes in.

As I’ve said, I have a pretty high tolerance for gross things. Aside from the aforementioned excisions of bloody keratin lumps from my scalp and the Vice Presidential debates, I also routinely consume giant bowls of chili in front of grisly autopsy dramas like CSI and Bones. So I can handle a lot.

But when the second doctor put a gauze pad on my shoulder and tiny metal funnel in my ear and then poked around deep in my head with an alarmingly lengthy implement … when I felt him pull something out of me that might as well have been a marabou boa … when I felt the tickle of something warm and moist-y bounce off my ear and roll off my shoulder gauze and land in the cook of my bare arm … when I looked down to find what I can only charitably describe as a dried Raggedy Ann tampon staring up at me through a film of matted rat hair … I almost physically gagged. Almost.

And when he’d finished with both ears and showed me the accumulated mass of brown, waxy bulldog bile he’d pulled out of me and I realized that it could easily fill a tablespoon and that I’d been walking around with a full tablespoon of the cheese that collects on Rush Limbaugh’s taint every time they have corduroy pants day at his Sweatin' to the Hateys jazzercise classes crammed in my head … well, I probably reacted in a less-than-awesome way. Then again, I’d just yelled date rape at a pregnant woman so it’s not like I had a firm grasp on the awesomeness yesterday afternoon.

What’s worse, my ears keep pooping out little pellets of the stuff a full 24 hours later, like I have some goddamn bunnies strapped to my head as part of a low-budget production of Star Wars: Revenge of the High-Fiber Plant Eaters featuring Jake as an Earwax-Shitting Princess Leia.

And after all this, the diagnosis from the doctors wasn’t terribly promising. I have minor hearing loss, mostly in the high-frequency range. And there’s nothing they can do about it. They said the earwax removal shouldn’t improve my hearing … though it certainly makes me more aware of the sounds around me. And more aware that I’m capable of producing alarmingly large clumps of waxy brown-black hairballs deep inside my own head.

If that weren’t disturbing enough, I just took a detailed look at the audiology report they gave me as I was writing that last paragraph. And it shows that the pregnant doctor gave me a word recognition score of 100%.

Stars upon thars

I finally did it. I finally joined the vanguard of hipness and ahead-of-the-curve technological superiority. Three years after the fact.

I got an iPhone!

My relatively awesome little Verizon flip phone hadn’t given me a lick of trouble in the three years I’d been schlepping it around, but it didn’t do anything more than take pictures and send texts. And, um, sometimes make calls. Though in the last few months it had lost its ability to hold a charge for more than a day.

I wanted an iPhone in the same way Sarah Palin wants to matter. But the domestic partner and his brother were on our Verizon family plan and were both under contract. And we had no beef with Verizon … and tons of concerns about AT&T.

Then! The domestic partner got out of contract. And so did his brother. We thought. But we were too lazy to try to get all three of us in one AT&T store at on time so I could cross over to the side of the mountain with all the sheep.

Then! The domestic partner’s phone went blank. Kinda like when Sarah Palin accidentally wears mittens at a speech. And we had no choice but to pack up the herd and head to the trendier meadow last night.

And in three hours (it seemed) we stumbled out the door with an iPhone for me, a plain old phone for the domestic partner (who can barely be bothered to check his emails and his Facebook on his regular computer) and a plain old phone with a temporary number for the brother-in-law, who it turns out still has another month on his contract. So we’ll cross him over next month when he’s safely a free agent.

Getting an iPhone is just as exciting as getting a tattoo. Except an iPhone doesn’t bleed. And you can figure out how to use a tattoo on the first try. And you pay for a tattoo only once. And a tattoo doesn’t punish you for having big meaty fingers when you try to send texts on it. And a tattoo makes you look badass. Or delusional. But you can take pictures of a tattoo with an iPhone and not the other way around. So there’s that.

And the first two apps I downloaded—Facebook and the CTA Bus Tracker—are so far more irritating than useful to me. Especially the CTA Bus Tracker, which incorrectly predicted FOUR bus arrivals this morning … two of them by 15 minutes. But maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand the words “2 MIN.” Or something.

In the mean time, I can’t be bothered with Middle Ages technology like blogging and laptops. I have apps to download! And texts to misspell! And—as always—Sarah Palin insults to dream up!

Things I have cleaned

My pee shoes
Even after repeated scrubbings with harsh chemicals and a stiff brush, my favorite tennis shoes still smelled like, well, a cat peed on them. And since they float, their one adventure in our crappy old top-loading washing machine was as effective as a Sarah Palin. But! Our magical new front-loading washing machine rotates and re-rotates and sloshes and spins in such a way that my incredible floating shoes couldn’t get away from the water and the suds (and the dash of bleach I threw in as a precaution) … and now they’re as clean and awesome as the day before the cat even discovered I owned them.

My weightlifting gloves
They’re made of leather and some stretchy elastic material. They’re designed to wick away moisture and improve my grip and prevent calluses and make me look extra-butch when I’m throwing the ol’ weights around the gym. But lately they’d started to smell like my arm did after it had been in a cast for six weeks. And if you’ve ever smelled cast rot you’d know it’s not the way to attract the ladies. Even if you look extra-butch. So I threw them in the wash with a load of darks thinking the worst thing that could happen is they’d come out in pieces and I’d be out a $15 pair of one-year-old gloves. But! They came out just like they were before … minus the smell of rotting flesh. Everyone wins!

My winter coat
This paragraph does not come with a compelling story. My big old puffy Gap winter coat hadn’t been washed since I lived in my highrise and had access to the front-loading washing machines in its vast laundry room. And now that we have a front-loading machine in our low-to-the-ground vintage condo I decided to wash it again. And it came out nice and clean. See? Boring story. But with a clean-coat ending!

My family’s clocks
The domestic partner and I spent Valentine’s Day weekend in Iowa with my family, where my eight-year-old niece and I proceeded to kick the, well, clocks off of the domestic partner and my sister (both of whom are well over eight years old) at Sequence. And then the domestic partner and I tied for the win in a full-family Game of Things, which would be a lot more fun with just adults but we all managed to squeeze in some inappropriate answers without corrupting the children too much. For instance! The thing that would make school more fun: I won with Underpants day! The thing you’d hate to find in your sandwich: I won with Grandma! The thing you should never do when you ride a bike: I won with Hold a leaky bag of pudding! I am clearly a winner. Which is why we won’t mention the three games of Rummikub I played while I was there. And if you try to bring it up, I’ll just shout out one of my winning Game of Things answers until you give up and go away. Underpants day!

Our new baby

Here's what happens when your hamper gets full

and you have a guest-bathroom tub that’s not being used anyway:

The halfway decent washing machine installed by the halfway decent developer of our totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo only six years ago died two weeks ago. And the not-even-halfway-on-time repairman we called said the transmission was shot (who knew washing machines had transmissions?) and wasn’t worth fixing. Once he eventually showed up and looked at it, that is.

So we went online to research stackable washer/dryer units and discovered that 1) there really aren’t many of them on the market and 2) only one of them (front loading!) is Energy Star rated. At least of the models available at the stores where we can afford to shop. Normally I give myself a couple days to make a decision about a big expensive purchase, but it looked like we had exactly one choice so I just bought it on the spot. Online. I never even had to talk to a human! The Internets are made of the awesome.

Anyway! The delivery couldn’t happen until today. And in the mean time we kept wearing clothes. And they were spilling out of the hamper to the extent they were impeding our walking about the totally-awesome-because-we-fixed-it-up Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo. So the domestic partner had the genius idea to start dumping them in the tub. And I had the genius idea to take a picture. After hiding all but apparently one pair of underwear.

On the plus side through all the waiting, our closets were totally easy to pick through because they weren’t bursting with clothes. On the minus side, the stuff we had to pick through wasn’t the favorite stuff we usually wear. So we’ve been looking kind of 2007-y this last week. Please don’t laugh.

But now! We have our tub back! Oh, and we have a new Energy Star-rated stackable washer/dryer (front loading!). And the domestic partner has been home all day playing catch-up on our laundry. And as soon as I get home tonight, I’m totally gonna start dressing like it’s 2010.

The cell-phone self-portrait king

I'm FINALLY getting caught up on my Disney stockholder obligations.

A self portrait from the camera phone

I'm in NYC! And I just spent a shit-ton of money on a bridge. But it reportedly has a view.

I saved $19.30 with coupons and rebates this weekend!

Plus I had an MRI.

I’m probably about to tell you waaaaaay too much medical information about myself. Or maybe not enough, depending on your level of fascination about such things.

Anyway! I got the lab results back from my annual physical last week. And it turns out I’m about a quart low on whatever it is that’s supposed to squirt out of my thyroid. So I’m now taking thyroid medication. Every morning. For the rest of my life. Like an old person. At least like an old person with an underperforming thyroid.

I mentioned this fact to a handful of friends and … um … all of Facebook last week. And it turns out a number of people I know are hypothyroidic (if that’s the adjective form) as well. And they universally claim that their diagnosis and subsequent better living through pills completely reignited their saggy old lives. Like me, they just thought they’d become the kind of person who’s chronically rundown and plagued by dry skin and stubborn bodyfat, among other more personal problems. And everything I’ve read about the drug therapy I’m on tells me that the small indignities I thought were just the cost of living into your 40s are probably tied to easily correctible thyroid issues. So I’m eagerly awaiting the second coming of my youth once the meds kick in.

In the mean time, I also have another problem: too much of some other chemical being squirted out of my brain. And apparently the first line of defense is a look at the damn thing. And the easiest way to get in my head and poke around without completely collapsing my facelift is an MRI.

Having an MRI is like being buried alive in a coffin that screams at you.

Here’s how it works: You’re dressed in an embarrassing little hospital gown. You’re immobilized on a sliding deli tray. You’re squirted full of dye. You’re slid into a tiny little tube where you don’t dare open your eyes in case you suddenly discover you’re claustrophobic. You’re told to lie perfectly still as unseen Thor-like monsters have anvil-and-garbage-can fights mere millimeters from your ears. And you don’t … dare … move … for a full 45 minutes.

But you wanna hear something funny? I actually fell asleep about 10 minutes into mine on Saturday.

And when I woke up, I had what turned out to be an all-day sinus headache. Plus a bleeding hole in my arm where the dye needle had been. Plus a Grammy Award. Oh, wait. That greedy Beyonce took all the Grammys. So apparently Squirty Brain and the Bleedy Armhole won’t be going platinum this year.

Awesome news!

ONE
I installed new windshield wipers blades on my car yesterday! You don’t realize just how shameful and empty your life is when you drive around with wiper blades that leave wide, semi-opaque streaks right where you want to see. Probably because your blades fail slowly, so the growth of that shameful emptiness is like a gradually building storm cloud over your cold, dead soul. But the moment you install new blades that wipe your windshield bright and clean, you find yourself following semi trailer trucks on the highway so they’ll spray you with their backwash just so you can wipe it clean with one flick of your fancy new blades …all the while finding reasons to sing “I can see clearly now the rain is gone” to everyone who will listen.

TWO
I bench pressed 90-pound dumbbells this morning! Eight reps! Three sets! More loud grunts than I care to admit making! Before I started with my trainer, I struggled to get ten full reps with 60-pound dumbbells. Now I’m routinely pressing an entire grunge band (because it’s the ’90s! get it?) over my face without much worry about crushing my head or dislocating my shoulder. Though I doubt I’ll ever be able to tone down the grunting. So I hope the grunge band plays extra-loud.

THREE
I’M GOING TO NEW YORK, BABY! After three years of always-the-bridesmaid rejection, I’m finally gonna be rocking the New York City Marathon this November!
Since it’s a month later than the Chicago Marathon, I don’t have to start training until June. So I can have a leisurely spring … and I can finally enjoy the Chicago Marathon this year without actually running the damn thing. Of course, the 2010 Chicago Marathon will probably happen in perfect weather now that I won’t be there tempting the weather gods to make it stifling hot or tundra cold. But who cares! NYC! Marathon! Me! Finally!

Singing Reading Drinking Mocking

SINGING
I’ve been invited to sing in a brand new all-male a cappella ensemble called Voices 12. It’s the pet project of a friend of a friend, and yesterday he hosted an open rehearsal/audition, which was a great way to test people for sight-reading and blending skills on some pretty challenging music. We didn’t quite have a quorum of singers—at least not if we’re shooting for 12 total—but the guys who were there were all outstanding musicians, except for one who kind of freaked after the first page of the first song and packed up his stuff and left before we could hear what he could do. But the rest of us proved our mettle enough that we were all invited to be in the group. Woot! I’d gone to the rehearsal actually hoping I wouldn’t enjoy the group because I’ve pretty much given myself emotional permission to leave the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus after six years and I was just starting to enjoy a life free of weekend obligations. And now it looks like I’ll be spending my Sunday afternoons singing barbershop and early music and ’60s guy-group staples and (I hope!) all the fun stuff from the Chanticleer and Straight No Chaser catalogs … only this time I’ll be in a tiny ensemble, which means I can’t be lazy and assume that the 23 basses standing around me know their music and I can just coast along because I decided to watch Law & Order reruns all week instead of learning my music. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

READING
Our Big Gay Book Club meets on Thursday. It’s been six weeks since our last meeting, so of course by yesterday I was a whopping three chapters into our book. Instead of going home to read the book where I could easily be distracted by a DVR full of Bones (my new obsession!) reruns and an Internet full of … um … articles, I headed right from rehearsal to my friendly gayborhood Caribou Coffee, ordered a chi tea latte and a chocolate-chip cookie, settled into the leather club chair by the fireplace (location score!) and finished reading my book. The moment I sat down, though, two guys who were what I’m going to go out on a limb and describe as clearly on an Internet first date sat at a table in front of me and started their awkward look-as-impressive-in-person-as-they-did-online dance. But! They kept discreetly looking over at me. Like 25 times each. And one kept smiling when he’d catch my eye. It didn’t help that my book (The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World) was not really holding my attention and the Coffee and Impossible-to-Maintain Eye Contact Date was. Eventually, the boys ended their date, stole a couple last glances at me and at least one other dude in room and left out separate doors, I managed to dribble tepid tea down the front of my shirt, the girl sitting opposite me who was equally not engrossed in The Lovely Bones gave me her napkin … and that’s pretty much the end of my story.

DRINKING
Until! I went right from Caribou to meet the domestic partner at a fabulous little couples’ cocktail party at some friends’ house. They’re selling their place, and once they purged and staged to optimize their showings they realized they had way more room than they’d thought … which of course brought them to one conclusion: cocktail party! So we spent a lovely couple hours chatting and hors d’oeuvre-ing and making catty comments about how fat all the women looked on the Golden Globes until we realized the aspect ratio on the TV had been set to slightly widen the images to fit the screen.

MOCKING
Speaking of mocking people, a series of bus-stop ads has popped up all over Chicago that appears as though it’s trying to humanize the probably-perceived-to-be-impersonal online University of Phoenix. The campaign uses giant pictures of what I assume are real students over the service-marked tagline “I am a Phoenix.” But the dude (I think it’s a dude) in the ad on the bus stop by our condo seems to be a weird choice if the goal of the campaign is to make people say Hey! That person is just like me! I should totally enroll at the University of Phoenix! The dude (I think it’s a dude) is markedly androgynous with kind of a football guy’s build and kind of dykey lesbian hair … and what appears to be some serious drag-queen lipstick, which looks exponentially lipstickier when it’s backlit in a six-foot ad. (It's so lipsticky, in fact, that it shows up pretty clearly in the camera phone photo I took at 6:00 on a dark January morning. Click on the picture below to embiggen!) I stare at the ad every morning when I wait for my bus and I still can’t decide if the problem is really bad makeup at the photo shoot or really bad color correction in post production. Either way, by my reckoning neither a football guy nor a dykey lesbian would wear even a hit of lipstick—especially in such a ruby shade of coral—so every morning when I see this ad I think Hey! I’m neither an androgynous football guy who buys his makeup in the clearance bin at Walgreens nor an androgynous dykey lesbian who failed lipstick training! That person is nothing like me! I will totally not enroll at the University of Phoenix!

Adventures in personal health

Being a responsible global citizen involves taking care of one’s health. I am a responsible global citizen. I floss. I take my vitamins. I got my flu shot and my H1N1 shot. I use the Ped Egg®.

And I made an appointment this week for my annual physical. Which is never a bad thing—I’m in relatively excellent health and my company gives me embarrassingly good insurance—but when you have a physical the doctor drains gallons of blood out of you to make sure things like your kidneys and liver and HDL and LDL and VCR and prostate are working properly. (Which is WAY better than the old way they used to check your prostate … though they still haven’t found a way to check for testicular issues without squishing your balls.) And the doctor doesn’t want the information he extracts from all that blood to be altered by a gutload of fresh nutrients. So you have to fast for eight excruciatingly long hours before your appointment.

Now, a smart person would schedule a physical first thing in the morning so he could roll out of bed, put on some clean underwear, head to the doctor, get leeched and then run right to the nearest IHOP for breakfast.

But! A vain person wouldn’t want to miss his morning leg workout with his alarmingly muscular trainer. So he would schedule his physical for late in the afternoon after he could gorge himself on eggs, toast, pre- and post-workout shakes, two bananas, a bowl of oatmeal, two Greek yogurts, a chicken breast, and a ton of steamed broccoli and then struggle mightily to stave off an afternoon of ravenous hunger emanating from his two freaked-out, food-demanding quads.

Completely out of character, I took the vain-person option on Wednesday. Though I did my own math and decided that fasting from noon until my 3:45 appointment was equal to eight hours. I survived the afternoon and got my grumbly tumbly and my rubbery legs to the doctor’s office without eating anyone on the train … only to learn that my doctor’s office had lost power two hours earlier and I had to reschedule my physical. For Thursday night. Which meant another morning of pre- and post-workout gorging, another afternoon of fasting (this time from noon until 6:30), another grumbly tumbly/throbbing delts train ride … and eventually a physical. Followed by a staggering loss of blood. Followed immediately by the Normandy turkey burger with a side of steamed vegetables and a Diet Coke at Nookies. Followed immediately by two giant, delicious cookies at a Project Runway party. (Don’t you just love the cryer? I haven’t learned her name yet, but she’s gonna make for some quality television. And apparently some puckered pleating.)

I also left with a referral to an otolaryngologist to determine whether there’s anything I can do about my glacially gradual but increasingly frustrating hearing issues. I’ve discovered over the last few years that I just can’t hear people talk when there’s a lot of ambient noise. And I’m not talking about deafening bar noise (which causes the same issues but I never go to deafening bars so who cares?). I’m talking about the background din you’d find at a small party. Or the noise of tires on pavement when you’re having a conversation on a sidewalk. Or the hum an aging DVR or laptop makes when it’s busy spinning its little innards. With these noises in the way, I can hear that people are talking. I can hear that other people can understand them and respond to them. I just can’t understand a damn thing anyone’s saying. And I can’t participate when all I hear is aaeuuiiyyaiinooeeeouu.

So I called the otolaryngologist this morning to make an appointment. And while I expected to be routed through a whole maze of number pushing, I was a little alarmed to discover that the instructions in their voicemail system are set cruelly at the “death whisper” level on their volume control. With a layer of static on top of them. So it’s a very good thing I wasn’t calling from a bar or party or sidewalk. And that I’d eaten so my rumbly tumbly wouldn’t drown out the fact that the scheduler asked me if I wanted the hearing test or the whole hearing test but couldn’t really tell me the difference between the two or how I should pick the best option for me. So it’s a good thing I hadn’t let all my blood grow back. Because it might have started to boil.

New year's resolution: Stop spending money

Especially on stuff. We have plenty of stuff. Too much stuff. We don’t need more stuff. Besides, our addiction to gym memberships and personal trainers is quickly slimming down our financial reserves while it slowly (oh, so slowly) bulks up our vanity muscles. But we’re not about to abandon our dreams of being huge, so we’re gonna slash the budgets for our other household departments. Like our bloated Department of Stuff.

Corollary: Drink up all the half-finished buckets of protein shake powder in our Cupboard of Delusions before we buy any more:
I’m amazed how quickly we’ve managed to accumulate so many not-quite-empty buckets of protein shake powder. You’d think we’d finish one, then buy another, finish it, then buy another, etc. ad nauseam. But you’d be wrong. Because ad nauseam is not just a hard-to-spell-correctly Latin expression. No matter how delicious (or revolting) we find a certain flavor or brand of protein shake, it eventually makes us gag. So we move on to something different for a while. Etc. Ad nauseam. And all that nausea eventually leads us to ad more buckets of half-finished protein shake powder to our collection. Ad! Nauseam!

Corollary: Use up all the lotions and soaps and other tools of our ablutions that are accumulating in our little medicine cabinet before we buy any more:
This accumulation is more insidious than the protein shakes. When you’re a gay man of a certain age, people buy you fancy soaps and lotions as gifts. Or you get them free when you make large purchases of soaps and lotions—which we all do—at fancy soaps and lotions stores. Or you simply steal them from hotels. And so the pile grows. But! It’s currently dry skin season, so my dirty, thirsty dermis will be absorbing the stuff in our cupboard with unprecedented levels of greed over the next few months. And I should emerge on the other side of winter with cleaner, softer skin and way more storage in our bathroom.

Caveat: Buy more stuff. I made a list of all the stuff I still intend to buy in the new year. And it’s not pretty. And quite a bit of it is not terribly optional. To wit:

• Fireplace mantle
• Gas fireplace insert
• Living room valances
• Living room rug
• Four dimmer switches
• Front door soundproofing
• Door knocker that doesn’t look like a dog penis
• Tattoo that doesn't look like Newt Gingrich*
  
• Master bedroom valances
• Master bedroom dresser
• Master bathroom renovation
• Guest bedroom stencils
• Guest bedroom curtains
• Guest bedroom nightstand
• Guest bedroom stripper pole*
• Dining room curtains
• Dining room chair upholstery
• Kitchen sink disposal
• Kitchen sink water heater
• MacBook Pro
• iPhone
• Your grandma’s underpants*
• Wiper blades for my car
• Airfare/hotel for the cruise
• 13.1 Marathon registration
• Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon registration
• Chicago Half Marathon registration
• New York City Marathon registration
• Airfare/hotel for New York City Marathon
• Six gallons of premium cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, one giant spoon and a hammer to beat away anyone who wants to share*

* I just put that in to see if you were still reading

This tattoo is SO not my fault

My most recent tattoo was my sixth tattoo. And since six is coincidentally the same number of marathons I’ve run, I’d decided I wouldn’t let myself get another tattoo until I’d earned it by running another marathon. That way I could better control my slow-ish descent into my mother’s nightmare career as a person with more than zero tattoos. Or a member of the notorious Trailer Park Kids street gang.

But!

I subscribe to Runner’s World magazine. Mostly because it’s really cheap. But also because it sometimes has shirtless guys on the cover. And in this day and age, it’s almost impossible to find pictures of shirtless guys. Especially on the Internets.

And since it’s Runner’s World, it’s filled with things of interest to runners. Like stretching exercises. And hydration suggestions. And shoe reviews. And directories of races. And pictures of shirtless guys. Running. With their shirts off.

And, apparently, entire articles devoted to undermining my self-control in the tattoo department. Because this month’s issue features running-inspired tattoos on people across the country. I think most of them are pretty ugly (the tattoos, not the people) … but it takes just one sexy tattoo idea to break my chain of resolve. So of course there’s one tattoo idea in this article that’s so cool I might have run right to my computer to design it for myself.

Here’s the pic of the guilty ink. It’s Roman numerals for 26 with a dot for every marathon this dude has run. And bonus! It’s right on the last little bit of skin on my body where there currently is not a tattoo:

Being a purist about these things, I of course want the full marathon-regulation extra two-tenths of a mile included in my version of the tattoo. But since I have only Microsoft Word at my disposal, my design is limited by the available Word fonts and Word’s frustrating snap-to-grid technology that won’t let me line up the dots exactly where I want them. But this should give you an idea of what I want:

Also! Since this hypothetical tattoo would hypothetically appear on some of the most painful-to-tattoo real estate on my body, I thought it might be a good idea to design an additional option that didn’t require so much ink. Or linguistic translation:

So now I’m left struggling to justify a violation of my self-imposed tattoo statute (tatute?). And to quantify how much more ink on my person that my mother’s heart can handle. And to find a time in my busy schedule to get inked and fully healed before my March cruise. And to write my acceptance speech for my Trailer Park Kids induction ceremony.

From scratch

I woke up New Year's Day morning with a bloody gash on my forehead and a dead hooker in my bed. And I have no idea where the gash came from. I must have scratched myself in my sleep. Or gotten in a knife fight during the Oklahoma! dream ballet. The gash is way gorier than it photographs, too. I fact, it barely shows up in a photo. It must be a vampire.

I just made my first apple pie! All by myself! I bought myself a pastry blender and a little serrated latticework roller for Christmas and spent this afternoon rolling out dough and coring apples and figuring out how to interlace the latticework and completely forgetting to add the butter. But the pie turned out pretty delicious so who needs butter? Plus I had extra dough left over so I made little leaves to arrange along the edges in what looked to be little pastry-based marijuana plants once it was all baked. Dude. I totally just said baked.