Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to take a decent helicopter selfie in a hooded sweatshirt? DO YOU?

The hood opens around you like a massive poppy in full bloom and you end up with a dinner-plate halo like you’re a minor saint in a Medieval altar triptych.

Anyway, when you stave off a bipolar episode by sleeping all day and then chug a pre-workout shake before an evening trip to the gym, you end up wide awake at 11:45 pm. But I wore red for International Women’s Day and I gave a little hug to (I think) every woman at rehearsal tonight (though we were a bit chaotic so I may have missed somebody but please know that you’re all kick-ass and I love all of you every day) and even though I always feel guilty when I miss work, I count today as good but I just REALLY want to fall asleep now.

Turbo Fast Chest Day Because You Took Your Damn Sweet Time Leaving For The Gym is always more badass with the help of Dancing Switchblade Kitty

I made a meme ...

I felt a little unplugged and unproductive at work yesterday, but I went on to have a killer leg workout and 9 to 5 rehearsal

Then I woke up today totally scattered and exhausted, so I took my first sick day in months. It’s hard to discern an off day from the onset of a depressive episode, but I decided today was an onset and I’m glad I called in sick and spent the day sleeping to an Alexa playlist of classical orchestral music. Because I woke up human again. Lingeringly groggy, but human. Onward!

Alexa, LOUDER!

I’m kind of a big thing over at Politicked ...

Doing back, shoulders and biceps makes me all shaky and affects my typinf

Yup

Iowa stuff, yo

Twen. Ty.

Twenty—HOW IS IT ALREADY TWENTY?—years ago today I sat alone in my dining room with my phone pressed tight to my ear for my first listen to the cooing, contented breaths of my newborn nephew as he lay warm and pink and loved on my sister's chest two massive states away. I was an uncle. And I was instantly hooked. My little nephew and I (and later his precious little sister) have spent the majority of the last 20 years living in separate cities, but the time we've spent together through those years has been a steady progression of googly sounds, tosses in the air, impressively hearty belly laughs, long walks playing 1-2-3 Whee!, enough firemen toys and clothes to outfit a three-county volunteer brigade, underpants jokes, heroic efforts to make Apples to Apples card pairings inappropriate enough to elicit more of the aforementioned belly laughs, faithful monthly 529 payments, Mickey Mouse waffles, random uncle ‘n’ nephew meals at Village Inn, morally corrupting meals at Ed Debevic's and Dick's Last Resort, baseball games, show-choir concerts, hand-me-downs, and now a mature adult friendship that has come full-circle to the extent that we pretty much spend all our texting time exchanging the grownup equivalent of underpants jokes. He and I are currently in that brodude phase where we rarely exchange hugs and I'd somehow feel weird telling him to his face that I love him. But I love him. And this close, personal social-media post counts as one giant lean-in-don't-touch-and-pat-pat-pat bro hug. My once eternally jovial, read-to-me lap-sitting boy has grown up, successfully navigated his awkward years, and emerged as a well-informed scholar, a golden-armed pitcher, a freakishly tall monster and—as you can see in this last pic—a dangerous lady killer who somehow thinks fly fishing in the dark is fun. He's a great kid with a kind heart and a confident gait and a wicked curve ball and he's all grown up and gonna take on the world. By all accounts he’s thriving in his sophomore year in college—he just returned bursting with stories from a fascinating J-term in Indonesia—and we all delight in his texts that are a mix of proud academic accomplishments, insightful political commentary, excited details about the baseball games he’s pitched or pretty much anything else about his favorite sports teams, the occasional reports about his life in college ... and the occasional silences that tell us he’s off finding his way in—and making the most of—his life in college. And we all hope he comes back often for some more belly laughs and underpants jokes.

This is the crazed, shaky grimace of a man whose quads are screaming so loudly that his hip flexors are calling 911

Leg Day is here in all its fear-of-accidentally-tooting glory, and I’m not walking out of this gym until I’m physically unable to walk out of this gym.

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

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

This fearlessly, brutally honest 1995 memoir examines the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of manic-depressive illness (now more commonly called bipolar disorder) from the perspective of a psychiatrist trapped in the disease. Her frank and intimately personal insights bring the disease's cycles of terror, elation and crushing, abject despair into stark and sometimes heartbreaking clarity. It was recommended to me soon after I was diagnosed as bipolar in 2008, and it grabbed me on every level--from its smart writing to the recognizable, relatable, almost comforting details of its narrative--and I all but literally didn’t put the book down until I’d finished it. I have an indelible memory of reading it on the Red Line EL train home from work one night in Chicago, and a man who’d clearly seen me reading it made sure we made eye contact as he stood up and then he patted me reassuringly on the shoulder as he got off at the Sheridan stop. That encounter--a direct extension of this book--made me literally weep as I was coming to grips with label “mentally ill” and discovering the signs I’d never thought to notice until then that I wasn’t alone. If you are or love someone who is bipolar--or struggling with any mental illness--this book will make you weep, give you hope and quite possibly change your life.

On this holy and widely celebrated National Grammar Day,

let us pause—using the punctuation of our choice—to give thanks that the holiday’s name has been shortened from the National Violent, Racist Grammar Day that was established in the bygone era of this venerable childhood grammar primer that up with which my mom grew.

Things that shouldn’t be funny and yet are totally funny

Good night!

Apparently it’s International Back Day But Don’t Tell Jake Let Him Figure It Out For Himself When He Gets To The Gym

because all the back equipment is being used by guys who are way bigger than I am so I could never take them in a Back Equipment Smackdown! so I’m pecking-order relegated to the lesser back equipment and since nobody’s breaking down the back (HA!) door to use my lesser back equipment I have all the time in the world to sit on it and blog about my forlornity as my lats droop into my socks.

Also: I’m wearing a hat today. Which accidentally matches my shirt. Which is exactly why I never wear hats except in extreme hair emergencies; I’m too innately coordinated when I accessorize.

Why did Facebook randomly put my friend Sage's picture next to this bright blue top-of-my-feed you-have-memories-of-cats-to-look-back-on-today cat-photo-compilation-that-you-just-KNOW-will-be-all-about-Bitch-Kitty alert?

More importantly, why is Facebook sending me a bright blue top-of-my-feed you-have-memories-of-cats-to-look-back-on-today cat-photo-compilation-that-you-just-KNOW-will-be-all-about-Bitch-Kitty alert?

I got to spend the evening with the blurry Miss Bridget!

And with my nephew who came home from college to celebrate his birthday and we rarely get to see him blah blah blah BUT HOW ADORABLE IS MISS BRIDGET!

Mushroom Mouse doesn’t give a rat’s ass about back day

He’s too busy trying not to notice his secret gym husband’s ugly shoes.

I found this record a couple months too late for us to use in our Full Monty rehearsals

Given its glaring omission of John Cage’s 4’33” though, it seems to be a pretty sloppily curated compilation. To be fair, an LP holds only 22 minutes per side, but that in no way precludes this album from including the condensed 0’12” dance suite.

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

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

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