How to have an awesome boys’ weekend

Step 1: Flowers

Well hello, knotty-pine-ski-lodge-with-towering-great-room-and-big-gay-Shane-photobomber-away-from-home!

I’ll take Things I Won’t Be Buying At The Galena Kitchen Store for $690, Alex ...

I’m off to my Gays Do Galena reunion weekend with some big gay Chicago friends I haven’t seen since our last reunion six months ago

To guilt them into enduring friendship, I’m bring multiple homemade (specifically, mom-made) pies in super-gay Longaberger baskets trimmed in super-gay fruit-print ruffles. Except we’re missing one basket lid, so we substituted a super-gay kitty towel.

Also: I’m bringing super-optimistic sunglasses in case we ever see the sun again.

I love to brag, but my ridiculously unnecessary impulse shoe purchase is way cooler than your ridiculously unnecessary impulse shoe purchase

The kick-ass new color-changing light posts on the Third Avenue bridge and the kick-ass new Breast Cancer Awareness pink uplighting on the Alliant Energy building are totally kick-ass. I swear.

They just look kind of yawn-ass in this iPhone photo.

Fun fact: I wasn’t the only person who found the sight so kick-ass that I stopped my car to try to capture it in a yawn-ass iPhone photo just now.

Remember when the republicans pretended to give a shit about character last year?

They sure worked hard to keep THAT charade up ...

Happy half birthday to me

Oh, the irony

STOP! TELLING! ME! THIS!, new iPhone platform software, because 1) you’ve told me every single morning since I installed you SO YOU’VE MADE YOURSELF PERFECTLY CLEAR, 2) I don’t give a shit and 3) you’re just reminding me how unimpressed I am overall with you ... especially with the new three-step scavenger hunt you’ve created for adding pictures to texts.

Thorry

Yup

Remember this photo?

It circulated on social media two years ago toward the end of trump's campaign. I wrote about how disturbing it was at the time--disturbing for its vulgarity, disturbing for its public invitation to apparently consensual rape, disturbing for the Zeitgeist of near-normalized, something-to-be-seen-as-humorous sexual assault that it represented.

It popped up in my Facebook memories this morning ... just as we as a country are being newly assaulted by avalanches of revelations about institutionalized, systemic, cavalierly-dismissed-male-privilege sexual assault wrought by Brett Kavanaugh and his ilk. The coincidence that this Facebook memory appeared now is odd in itself for its almost-years-to-the-date timing, but it's also horrifyingly disturbing for the fact that trump's 2016 pussy-grabbing braggadocio has been buried--albeit under two full years of his almost daily acts of catastrophic, psychopathic incompetence--to the point that we as a society have almost forgotten about it ... or at least become numbly inured to it.

Many of the facts of what I wrote two years ago have changed--I am now among the legions of people who have all but permanently ended relationships with trump-defending friends and trump-apologist newsfeeds, and I cringed as I saw that in this post I'd tempered my outrage over this picture and what it represented by mentioning cat videos and me looking at pictures of men in speedos--but my underlying incredulity, repulse and outrage have only grown in the last year.

Here is what I wrote, without being edited to reframe the snapshot of my mindframe and emotion a year ago. Re-reading it has both shown me how I've evolved in my white-male-privilege-I'm-never-going-to-do-it-and-it's-never-going-to-happen-to-me subconscious attitudes on the issue in the last 12 months and alerted me to the fact that I'm still not done purging those subconscious attitudes:

I subscribe to both liberal and conservative newsfeeds on Facebook and I have thoughtful, principled friends and acquaintances on here from multiple locations across the political continuum. As such, when I scroll through my personal Facebook feed, I see about 3% share-if-you-love-your-sister memes, 4% I-bet-you're-not-smart-enough-to-pass-this-egregiously-stupid-quiz clickholes, 9% adorable cat videos, 17% pictures of hot guys in speedos, and 943% political memes, forwards, rants and breathlessly dire warnings about the future of our very galaxy if X or Y becomes president. Aside from the occasional legitimate news article or mini essay from a thoughtful friend, most of what's on my feed is just noise between adorable cat videos. But it's still noise I pay attention to.

It's no secret that I have a visceral loathing for everything related to Donald Trump, from his willful ignorance to his inability to form a coherent sentence to his national isolationism to the sense of legitimacy he gives to racists, misogynists, homophobes and proud low-information voters. I realize there are deplorables on both sides of the aisle--along with gotcha pictures and footage documenting their collective stupidity--and I'm inured enough that I'm able to ignore the extremes in an attempt to form what I admit is a highly biased but still open-eared personal knowledge base as a citizen and voter.

But.

This picture of a Trump supporter in her hand-lettered shirt has appeared from multiple sources in my feed. At first I just scrolled past it like it was so much extremist noise. But it kept appearing, as more and more sexual-assault accusations piled up against Trump. It kept appearing as Trump dismissed some of his accusers as not hot enough for his tastes. It kept appearing as the idea of consent was thoroughly parsed by everyone from Morning Joe to Rush Limbaugh.

And this picture ... this gleeful woman giving pretty explicit consent for Donald Trump to sexually assault her ... this overweight woman presumably knowing full well that her body is nowhere near Donald Trump's beauty-pageant-level standards of attractiveness ... this judgment-impaired woman who not only found nothing wrong with wearing her message of consent with an arrow pointing to her vagina in public but who happily let herself be photographed in it by someone who obviously let it go viral on the Internet ... this picture thoroughly sickened me.

This woman willingly lowered herself to Donald Trump's lowest form of low. She let herself be mocked and vilified and humiliated on the world stage. And for what? Did she change anyone's vote? Did she elevate the national dialogue? Did she impress her family and friends? Did she advance her cause?

Was it worth it? Did she get her wish?

FIXED IT

Well, I was SUPPOSED to see A Star Is Born tonight

But they must have mislabeled the theater we went into, because instead we saw Bradley Cooper: A Study In Blue Eyes, Distracting Abs And All Around Male Perfection And Oh Yeah Lady Gaga Is Freaking Awesome Too But We Already Knew That So Let’s Get Back To How Much I’m Going To Marry Bradley Cooper.

The movie really is pretty awesome. The singing, the beautifully intertwined rhythms of joy and humor and emotion and pathos, the creative range of camera work, the slightly dusty palette ... THE SINGING. My only criticism is that it feels a titch long toward the end, and I found myself ready for whatever was going to happen to hurry up and happen before I started losing sympathy for the characters.

Plus their puppy kind of got uglier as it grew into a dog. But that’s just a kibble.

Make like a tree

While I will always hate fall—because it signals the death of summer and portends the hellscape of winter plus it somehow compels everyone to talk about pumpkin spice, which is neither delicious in anything nor funny in jokes—this tree is kinda pretty. Plus the weather was kinda perfect for a run just now. Plus I ran three miles at an 11:19 pace, which is faster than I’d mentally budgeted for.

Now I’m off to shower and work up a sweat anew at Elf dance rehearsal. Which also—but in a charming, jazz-handsy way—portends the hellscape of winter. But I choose not to think about that.

I’ve been super-duper-stupid-bad about training for my half marathon three weeks from now

Partly because I was defeated by my knee injury that killed my last half marathon. Partly because it got cold and I hate running in the cold. Partly because I’ve found myself burned out on running after this intensive summer. Partly because I’m really good at coming up with excuses to stay in bed in the mornings. Partly because it’s been so long since I’ve run that my running watch was dead this morning and needed to be charged. (Is that enough partlys? Partly.)

Anyway, none of this stops the looming half marathon from crushing my knees anew, so run I must. Plus if I’m going to run in yellow Mickey Mouse shoes, I need to do some trial runs in the three (yes, three. because I have a shoe-shopping problem. shut up.) pair of yellow running shoes I’ve bought over the years because they were yellow and not because they were good running shoes for my gait and stride.

And these shoes have a splash of pink at the heel, which offers a tantalizing hint-or-not-hint-I’m-not-telling about my questionable sexuality. Hmmm ....

So off I run!

It’s amazing how many of these custom-molded bad boys a fella can accumulate in less than a year

Also: Titanic coasters! For drinks on ice!

Is this what they mean by Funny or Die?

We don’t mess around with “Tempo di Boring Old Christmas Carols” in Elf

We also don’t stop at just one Finale.

Be a Buddy and get your tickets now at theatrecr.org

My gay agenda is uncharacteristically open today, but at least it's succinct and to the point