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.

I feel like I've run out of interesting

Or even mildly droll. Because I obviously haven’t blogged much in the last month … and when I have it’s just been lame-o lists and pictures and recipes and other manifestations of phoning it in. But the last few months—holiday adventures aside—have the ironic distinction of being filled with a lot of nothing with no time to write about it. Ask me how far along I am with my epic holiday letter. Go on. Ask. But I doubt I’ll have the time or energy to tell you I’ve written exactly four paragraphs of what usually tops out at 30 or 40 paragraphs of all-about-Jake holiday cheer.

But! Something exciting finally happened last night: I had the spiciest chicken tom yum soup in recorded thermonuclear history. Seriously. It was mega-hella-smackya-mama spicy. So spicy that after one sip my nose started running and I broke a sweat. So spicy that by the time I was halfway done with it (which ended up also qualifying as being fully done with it), the spicy tuna roll I was also eating tasted like vanilla pudding. So spicy that an hour later—about the time we realized Nine was not panning out to be the cinematic masterpiece we’d hoped it would be—my churning innards were gathering more media attention than that little seismic anomaly currently sputtering adorably over in Indonesia. So spicy that I pretty much shit fire this morning at the gym. (How sexy do you find me right now? I mean really.)

Speaking of the gym, Equinox has finally replaced the generic eau-de-suburban-teenage-lothario brand of soap and shampoo and body lotion in its locker rooms with some foo-foo high-end brand-name stuff. All to much emails-and-posters-in-the-lobbies fanfare. Starting this week, after every workout I now wash my hair with a tropical-smelling Kiehl’s shampoo and scrub my body in a grapefruit-scented effluvium of Kiehl’s suds and smooth away the dry discomfort of my overly scrubbed skin with a creamy layer of Kiehl’s body lotion. Unfortunately, the lotion isn’t the fast-absorbing kind. Because I rub the stuff all over my dry areas about 8:00 am and by noon—which usually takes four pees and four vigorous hand-washings to get to—my fingers are still sliding waxily down my mechanical pencil whenever I try to write. And that’s not a metaphor for anything.

Speaking of writing, you may have noticed while you were patiently waiting for me to finally get off my ass, do something interesting and then blog about it that there’s a new email address at the end of my little bio under my little picture over to your right. You may now email me personal notes if you want. And I may email back. But be warned: Three of you have already noticed the new email address and dropped me a little hello and I’ve found time in my busy, busy schedule of not doing anything particularly interesting to respond to exactly one of you. Also! Haloscan, the free commenting software I’ve been using since I started this blog, is now called Echo. And it’s no longer free. So for the first time in recorded thermonuclear history, I’m paying money for this blog. Well, technically, I’m still blogging free, but I’m paying money to give you a way to tell me how much you love the way I blog. The Echo moderator settings are anything but understandable, though, so bear with me as I tinker with requirements for registering and API keys and OpenID and everything else Echo assumes I understand.

Speaking of technology, I made a list of everything I want to buy in the next few months. Topping off the list: a new 13" MacBook Pro! But I need to 1) save up for it and 2) make sure there’s no fabulous new generation of computing technology being released two days after I buy it, like what happened when I bought my slow, clunky, instantly obsolete, so-embarrassing-that-geeks-beat-me-up iBook five years ago. Also on the list: an iPhone! Unless I decide to stay with Verizon and get a Droid. But I really want an iPhone. I just don’t want to deal with all the AT&T horror stories I hear about from all my cool iPhone-wielding friends. My cool iPhone-wielding friends who often have to stand by a window to make a phone call. But they have iPhones! And I don’t! Yet! Unless I get a Droid! Someone please tell me what to do! In a comment! Or an email! Or a comment and an email!

ChicagoRound: Tree Lights

Chicago is not shy about dolling up our downtown trees with little white lights in the winter. And this line of trees on Monroe Street looked especially striking in the snowy rain the other night:

It’s especially fabulous in person. If you’re in the Loop this winter, come to Monroe between Dearborn and Clark and check it out. And while you’re there, I thoroughly recommend eating at Italian Village, which you can see peeking through the trees right in the center of the picture. It’s a collection of three restaurants with decent food and over-the-top ambience.

21 years ago today

My friend Miriam Wolfe was murdered by the terrorist bomb that blew Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland.

I feel like I’ve told her—and our—story so often that I don’t know what more I can add to it. I had only a brief time to get to know her, but the person she was—and the way she died—still changed the paths my life followed.

I remind my friends about her at the end of my holiday letter every year. And in her memory I implore them to look around, take stock of the people who are important to them … and tell them. They may not have the chance tomorrow.

In which you may call me Scrooge

Holiday traditions I really, really, really don’t like:

Gift exchanges
The domestic partner and I don’t exchange Christmas gifts. Or birthday gifts. There, I said it. We’re both men of a certain age who merged our completely furnished households three years ago and we’re STILL getting rid of stuff. So we don’t need any more. We buy what we need for ourselves when we need it and we spend the holidays just loving and respecting each other, and we’re both perfectly happy with this arrangement. Besides, wrapping paper is wasteful and expensive. And bows take up valuable storage space. And you probably think I’m some sort of misanthropic, Tiny-Tim-kicking alien right now. It gets worse. Read on:

Candy canes
Sticky, slimy, sugary, gross in your mouth, gross on your tongue, gross on your lips … plus they probably have negative nutritional value. They’re the most repulsive candy this side of Sno Balls. Their only redeeming quality: They can function as an emergency breath freshener. Which is exactly the benefit I look for most when I indulge in a holiday treat.

Mall Santas
Is there anything more disturbing than plopping your kids on the lap of a creepy out-of-work actor in a crowded shopping center in the interest of begging for free toys and perpetuating a ridiculous cultural lie? No, there is not.

Live Christmas trees


Eggnog
Oh, whom am I kidding? I freaking love eggnog!

The war on Christmas
I know it’s extremely trendy for Christians to feel persecuted when Home Depot employees tell them to have happy holidays. There’s even a retarded web site where Christian consumers can rate their Jesus-worshipping experiences at major retailers as “friendly,” “negligent” or “offensive.” And even though I find the vast majority of religious expression itself to be offensive, I am profoundly appalled that people who call themselves Christians actually trot out this intellectually and spiritually repugnant abortion of logic and importance year after year after year.

Secular Christmas carols
File this under gray areas, but I’m the least religious person you know who loves sacred Christmas music. And I loathe most of the secular crap that pollutes every store and radio station from Halloween through Epiphany. I’ll happily enjoy “And the Glory of the Lord” or “O Holy Night” or even “The Little Drummer Boy”—and I’ll joyously sing along with every Messiah chorus at the top of my lungs—but I fight the urge to strangle children every time I hear “Holly Jolly Christmas” … and I’d rather join a convent than listen to “Here Comes Santa Claus” ever again. There is one secular song I actually love, though: “Carol of the Bells.” But probably because it's all dramatic and dour and it never once mentions Santa Claus. Merry merry merry MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Jake’s Mom’s Awesome Pie Crust

scant 2 cups Gold Medal flour
scant 1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup vegetable shortening (Mom prefers the Aldi or Walmart store brand since Crisco changed its formula)
5 tablespoons COLD water

Mix flour, shortening, and salt with pastry blender until like corn meal. Add cold water. Mix with fork and then with hands.

Roll into two crusts, adding a little flour as needed. Flip each crust once as you roll it.

Form one crust into a pie plate, rolling any extra dough under itself at the edge to create a thick lip. Pinch the edge at regular intervals or make indentations with a knife or spoon to create a pretty pattern.

To bake an empty shell, prick the bottom and sides with a fork, add pie weights and bake at 425 degrees for 8-10 minutes, watching carefully to prevent burning.


BONUS HOLIDAY RECIPE!
Eggnog Custard Pie

1 9-inch UNBAKED pie crust

filling:
2 cups eggnog
3 eggs
2 tablespoons brandy or rum
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

topping:
1 cup whipping cream
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon brandy or rum
Nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prick holes in the bottom of pie crust. Bake 15 minutes to partially cook.

Beat eggnog, eggs, brandy (or rum) and vanilla in large bowl. Add sugar, salt and nutmeg. Mix well. Pour into pie crust.

Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven, cover with foil and bake 30 to 40 minutes longer or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

To make the topping, beat whipping cream in a small bowl until soft peaks form. Add powdered sugar and brandy or rum. Beat until stiff peaks form. Garnish pie with whipped cream and sprinkle with nutmeg.

What recession?

Remember me? I used to write a blog here. But then the economy apparently got extra-awesome because my company got bombarded with new projects and for the last week and a half I've done little more than work, sleep and work out. And pee, because my protein shakes seem to go right through me.

But! Last weekend my folks came to Chicago for a fabulous Pie and Chanticleer Fest. We spent almost the entire weekend measuring, rolling and baking, and we whipped up 17 from-scratch pies (including a new favorite: eggnog custard!) and invited a bunch of family and friends over to enjoy them Sunday night. As usual, I took tons of pictures of the pies and only a handful of blurry pictures of our guests. But here's what our dining room pie station looked like all tricked out in Christmas crap and caloried crusts:

And here's my newest invention: the living-room pie station, which spread the pies to both ends of the house and forced people to spread out and socialize in rooms with nice comfy furniture instead of clotting around the dining room table where nobody can move. I must be some kind of civic-engineering genius ... not to mention a top-notch holiday decorator:

To cap off our weekend of holiday awesomeness, on Monday night the folks, the domestic partner and I (and an intrepid blog reader who recognized me and ran up to say hello but it all happened so fast I'm afraid I don't remember your name) piled into Chicago's soaring Fourth Presbyterian Church (third row center!) for what was probably my 20th concert by Chanticleer, a 12-voice a cappella men's choir that sings everything from early music to small-c classical to modern jazz and quite frankly would provide me with the ideal lifetime career as a singer if only it had the occasional kickline. And I had the occasional high F. Or at least a stronger passaggio. Anyway! Chicago's annual Chanticleer holiday concert has become a required first step for putting me in the holiday spirit, and this year all but pushed me over the edge of noëlic delirium with a concert that took us from a rollicking "Esta noche nace un Niño" to Franz Biebel's transcendent two-choir "Ave Maria" to a shimmering new (to me) work by Arvo Pärt that left me breathless and light-headed.

And I have a new wish: I want to sing with Chanticleer. As in sit in a room for two or three or four hours with these men and sing through their repertoire as though I were one of them. I don't want to solo. I don't (OK, actually I do) want to perform. I don't even want to make a fuss. I just want to sit in the middle of their shimmery majesty and actually (attempt to) contribute to it for a glorious few moments of my life. I honestly think the happiness of it all would kill me, but I can't think of a better way to go than by climbing the Biebel amens to whatever afterlife I imagine could barely hold a candle to the 12 heavenly voices leading me there.

I think something peed on my shoes

Seriously. Ever since I got home from Thanksgiving in Iowa with my family, I’ve noticed a vague catbox-like effluvium wafting around my person. Except for yesterday, when I didn’t wear the shoes I wore all during Thanksgiving. Clue!

It’s especially noticeable when I take my shoes off before climbing into bed. And when I open my gym locker after my shoes and gym bag and coat (and lunch, the implications of which I don’t even want to contemplate) have been cooped up there together for over an hour.

My folks and my sister’s family both have cats. Non-Jake-liking cats. (Non-most-everyone-liking cats, for the record.) I always make gestures of friendship and love when I see them because who doesn’t want the affection and good graces of a cat? And their cats always rebuke me with all the fire and brimstone their malevolent little feline selves can muster. So this trip, figuring I had nothing to lose, I got kind of hostile with my folks’ cat … the cat that had the most unsupervised retaliatory access to my shoes during my trip. Clue!

I emailed the basic facts of this case to my mom and sister this morning, and they both responded in indignant defense of their adorable little non-shoe-peeing-on kitties. But I still have my suspicions. And my clues. And my personal cloud of shoebox-whiff.

I just moments ago stitched these clues together, and since I’m a little averse to bending down and smelling my own shoes—especially at work—I’m going to wait to do the sniff test when I’m in the privacy of my own bathroom tonight. In the mean time, I’ll walk around terrified that other cats—especially office cats—will walk up to me and feel compelled to mark me as their own once they smell the (alleged) malevolent Iowa cat pee all over me.

But to show I’m not bitter—at least as bitter as I probably smell—I’m ending this post with a cat-positive YouTube clip featuring people who sing way better than an alleged shoe-peeing cat I won’t name here:

We got a new toy on Black Friday!

While I officially have a visceral loathing for the term Black Friday, I have a newfound love for the magical savings it brings me!

We've had a TV sitting in front of our fireplace—which is really the only place for the TV in our living room—since we moved into our Two-Bedroomed, Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo three years ago. We've been meaning to replace our embarrassingly old-school, 2002-era TV with a giant flat-screen TV that would free up our fireplace for actual fireplace-type activities like providing burning-wood-based warmth and ambiance, but the flat-screen TVs we'd been admiring were all in the $1,500 price range. Until Black Friday! My mom found a 42" baby on sale for $600 in, of all places, her grocery store in Iowa. So we bought it, lugged it back to Chicago today in an upright position—just like the box instructed us, though it meant pushing our seats so far forward that our knees were in our armpits, turning our four-plus-hour drive into an extended BigWheel-in-the-driveway flashback—and spent the entire evening—along with 17 buckets of swear words—mounting it over the fireplace.

It turns out you need an advanced degree in aviation engineering to install a flat-screen TV, but we finished our degree online in only one night and got the whole thing attached to the wall and plugged in ... and it actually works!

Unfortunately, we still need to find a place to stash the cable box. And bury the cables in the wall. And install a mantle. And buy a new DVD player. And (ahem) hook up the VCR. Because we still have a few favorite shows on tape. And we just spent a ton of money on a flat-screen TV so it's not like we can afford to replace them with DVDs right now. Do not judge us.

But in the mean time, we have some shows to watch. And crackling fires to light. And ambiance to enjoy. And bills to pay. But we don't want to think about that part right now.

Addiction, Inc.

They say that getting tattoos is like killing hookers in the basement. You tell yourself you can stop any time you want, but then Sarah Palin doodles on a restaurant placemat with her crayons and gets a billion-dollar book deal while you toil away as a middle-management writer who actually knows how to operate a pen and then Carrie Prejean tells you it’s un-Christian for you to get married while she spanks her vajesus on camera for boys she barely even knows (which there technically isn't a commandment against but then she lies about it, which there is) and the cosmic inequality of it all makes your head spin and one day you look down and holy shit there’s another dead hooker in your basement. Or another tattoo on your arm.

I don’t have a basement, so you get one guess (unless you’re Sarah Palin or Carrie Prejean, in which case you get 74) as to which of the above two scenarios happened to me.

Here’s a hint, for those of you still looking for your rogue-colored crayon or the integrity you think somehow may have gotten lodged up near your cervix (which is not, for the record, a Latin way to say crucifix or a lens setting on your video camera):

This new tattoo—my sixth, which equals one for each marathon I’ve run … and is still two fewer than the Carrie Prejean sex tapes that we know about—was a bit of a well-planned impulse purchase.

I knew what I wanted:
• A Celtic knot whose structure and symmetry would offset the tribal abstraction snaking down the back of my other shoulder and arm
• A big round shape that would cover my entire deltoid for dramatic effect … and continue motivating me to get as pointlessly big as possible at the gym since people would be noticing my fancy shoulders (well, at least my one fancy shoulder) more
• A dangling element that would peek coquettishly out of my shirtsleeve
• Enough wrapping action that it could be seen when I greet people head-on:

Unfortunately, in my little live-and-die-by-the-calendar mindset, I’d also convinced myself I’d walk into a tattoo parlor on my self-imposed get-a-tattoo day, describe what I wanted and get it seared into my flesh on the spot. Which is exactly what happened … except the tattoo didn’t turn out as I’d kinda been picturing it. (Emphasis on kinda, which really didn’t give any tattoo a fighting chance to be what I wanted, right?) And so for the first week I had it I really didn’t like it. Especially because it kinda (there’s that word again) looked like a baroque apostrophe. Or a dialogue balloon from a Gallic cartoon.

But! The darn thing has generated endless praise from friends and strangers alike. It peeks out of my shirtsleeve just the way I wanted. It seems to make my shoulder look thick and round and manly (and fancy!). And the more I see it, the more I’ve started to really dig it for its nontraditionalness. And the fact that the whole apostrophe/dialogue balloon imagery has a quirky relevance for a professional writer … especially one who actually knows how to use a pen. Plus, it’s done. And even though I kept the receipt I’m pretty sure I can’t return it.

Of course, there are still hookers out there (Hi, Carrie!) so I know I'm still gonna want more tattoos. But I may limit myself to one per marathon from this point forward. (Emphasis on may. Even though I was born in April. And I tend to run marathons in the fall.) And next time I will definitely spend more time working with a tattoo artist getting exactly (more or less) what's in my head on paper before I start enshrining half-baked ideas on my body in ink and blood and fancy punctuation marks.

I am totally winning the race to Christmas!

The living room tree is up! And it turned out relatively even! Just like last year!

The dining room tree is up too! And this year's assembly phase was a lot more successful than last year's toilet brush / sparkle factory mishap. Because I assembled the branches in the right order this year. Just like a big boy! But the tree somehow still looks kind of ... squatty. But it's done and I'm way too old to start over and somehow make it less squatty because at 41 you never know when you're gonna keel over as dead as the three strings of lights I had to throw away this year. Good thing I had three packages of backup lights in my Big Box of Way Too Much Christmas Crap. Which means I get to do stock-up shopping during the Christmas Crap Clearance Sales! And that is totally worth having a tree that looks like a gay fire hydrant.

This is gonna hurt

My personal trainer has started his own blog. To his everlasting credit, he asked me—the keeper of all empirical truth and the best and most humble blogger in the entire known universe—for a few pointers. And he listened to my most important recommendation, the one I never listen to myself: Keep it short.

His blog is still pretty new, but he seems to update it frequently. And he packs his entries with thoughtful, useful, short workouts and nutrition recommendations. And I can personally vouch for most of the workouts because he inflicts them on me before he releases them to the general public.

So in the spirit of spreading the gospel of good workouts, I send you to Hank’s blog: H4 Training. And if you follow his tips and suddenly find yourself getting crazy wicked hot, please send pictures.

Comcast responds

Via email:
Thank you for contacting … Comcast. … I can understand your frustration with the incomplete installation of your two DVS's. I would be happy to look into this situation for you and help you to resolve the problem. Could you kindly reply to this email with your full service address and account number? … I appreciate you providing us with the opportunity to assist you. Thank you for contacting Comcast. We appreciate your business.

Via blog comments:
Jake, Thanks for sharing your blog and I sincerely apologize for the unacceptable experience. It was a simple task to do, but unfortunately we have failed completing it. If you don’t mind, will you please let me now the phone number associated with the account? This will help gather more information about your experience. Best regards, Comcast Customer Connect National Customer Operations

Via phone:
[I didn’t make a transcript, but I got a call with more of the above apologies and promises to help.]

We have had some extremely frustrating experiences with Comcast—especially with our Internet service—but their employees have always been courteous and helpful, and they’ve always (eventually) resolved our problems. It’s still a little appalling that there have been so many problems in the first place, but I wanted to state for the record that Comcast is making an admirable effort at customer service.

In fact, I told them three times that they didn’t need to contact me about this issue because I don’t like to make a fuss and in the big scheme of things some simple cable-connection corrections were no problem for me. I just wanted to let them know that their installers didn’t know what they were doing.

And guess what? The woman I just talked to on the phone credited the installation (or, technically, non-installation) fee back to us. Which seems completely fair. I hadn’t even realized they charged us $60 to come out and plug some wires into some holes.

So thank you, Comcast, for taking the trouble to correct your errors. I’m sure your Internet search-bots will find this post, so I won’t email it to you. Besides, it probably does more for your company out here on my blog.

Not winning means you're NOT a winner

Dear Comcast,

You guys came out and installed two DVRs in our house a couple weeks ago. Your technicians not only installed them wrong—crossing the RCA cables for BOTH DVRs so our speakers buzzed like motorcycles—but they also completely disconnected our DVD players. Plus, doing all that shoddy work took them over half a day.

I wasn't there when they did their "work," but I'm smart enough to figure out how to connect a DVD player and match colors on RCA cable plugs so I've fixed everything.

Inept cable installers aren't the end of the world. But for the prices you charge I'd expect a little more competence from your employees. And despite my snarkiness here, I'm not filing a complaint or asking for an apology. But I thought you'd like to know how your employees are representing your company and your product.

Jake