She’s pretending that she doesn’t REALLY want the treats she was just begging for because *I* put them on the floor for her

#BitchKittyGames

Leg Day always goes better

when you’re halfway done and you can already barely walk because you timed it just right and snagged the good quad machine that destroys all things good and holy in you except your encyclopedic knowledge of Sondheim trivia and your will to live with under 100 pairs of super-cute shoes.

Also: Pink + Provincetown + muscle-cut + T-shirt is code for gay + gay + gay + T-shirt.

OMG

Three antiques workin’ 9 to 5

Well, one 1979-era antique hand-glazed, home-kilned ceramic office mug—WHICH IS THE BEST WE COULD DO PEOPLE BECAUSE IT WAS PRE-PINTEREST AND WE PRETTY MUCH HAD TO WING IT WITH OUR RUSTIC-BEAUTIES-OF-THE-EARTH CRAFT PROJECTS—and two non-antique people who couldn’t POSSIBLY have been alive in 1979.

#9to5Musical

Ways.

You had me at “big stupid dictator playdate"

And then again at “HA HA hashtag sad.”

Today’s epic shit show would be deliciously funny if it weren’t about OUR BIG FUCKING ARROGANT CORRUPT RACIST INEPT IGNORANT ENTITLED SHITHOLE MAN-BOY PRESIDENT. And, by extension, all the big fucking arrogant, morally corrupt, racist, proudly ignorant shithole congresspeople and talking heads and voters who still obstinately defend him.

His signature looks like a KKK rally

When you’re rubbing your hair goo between your hands to soften it before you put it in your hair like a thinking person

but in a brief and profoundly regrettable moment of not paying attention you accidentally rub it all over your face as if it were lotion, you know that at least the viciously dirty and vengeful Michael Cohen isn’t telling the nation what a corrupt, evil, entitled, cognitively inept psychopath you are so you know you’re still going to have a good day. Even though after three scrubbings your face still feels a tad waxy and smells vaguely of bergamot and citrus.

Good night!

When everyone throws file folders all over your office set in an early-days-of-OSHA musical, mark my words:

People will slip and fall and possibly even end up taking helicopter selfies.

For your reference: Green spike marks are for rolling office furniture, pink spike marks are for rolling office walls and I’d better figure out what the hell yellow spike marks are for before someone else gets hurt.

#9to5

Has it really been only three years? It feels like billions and billions.

Good morning!

GOOD LUCK UNSEEING THIS

#TotallyCrushing

And not just because of that super-cool jacket.

GREAT MOMENTS IN OSCARS HISTORY:

Allan Carr—the producer who brought us the mega-hit movie Grease in 1978, struggled mightily to keep disco relevant long enough to prevent his 1979 not-at-all-gay-porn-so-stop-giggling movie musical Can’t Stop the Music (featuring the Village People, Bruce Jenner in a wardrobe of distractingly cropped T-shirts, and a “Y.M.C.A.” musical sequence that drove a million ‘70s boys into the filthy homosexual lifestyle) from tanking, and then depleted Broadway’s entire reserves of sequins and taffeta when he made La Cage aux Folles the toast of the town in 1983—sabotaged his entire storied career and everything he’d achieved in life 30 years ago when the “antithesis of tacky” Academy Awards ceremony he produced opened with a now-and-forever-infamous-laughingstock parody of “Proud Mary” sung (extremely poorly) by (I am not making this up) Rob Lowe and (stay with me here) Snow White to celebrate (I said stay with me) “the youth of Hollywood” and (of course) get sued into oblivion by Disney.

Fun fact: He *did* that year change the convention of “And the winner is ...” to “And the Oscar goes to ...”. So there’s that.

#neverforget

It’s not a proper manly musical until you’ve been issued your own personal cigar prop

I. HAVE. ARRIVED.

I wish I’d written this truly inspired silliness,

if for no other reason than to have a plausible backstory explaining why I’ve never tickled the ivories to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony on any of my parents’ anniversaries.

And so all this helicopter knowledge won’t go to waste.

I LITERALLY JUST HAD TO PROP DOOR OPEN WITH MY LEG SO I COULD GET OUT OF MY DAMN CAR

Sunday, February 24, 2019, will now and forever be heralded kingdom-wide The Day The Handsome, Age-Appropriate, Height-Compatible And OK Yeah I’ll Say It Totally Hot Guy At The Gym Looked Up, Locked Eyes With Me, Smiled And Said Hello OF HIS OWN ACCORD

Granted, he was getting his coat to leave the gym as I was hanging mine up after just coming in, so maybe he was smiling because he knew he was totally dodging a bullet. But BABY STEPS, PEOPLE!

If there’s one thing Bitch Kitty loves, it’s exercising her muscles

Note to self:

Guys who get up and come to the gym first thing on a weekend morning are clearly disciplined about their fitness and clearly disciplined about their health and clearly disciplined about their distracting hotness and clearly disciplined enough to put down their damn phones and do their damn workouts.

Flashback Friday: Hustle Edition

Fun fact: “Hustle up the Hancock” is a cool name for a race up the almost 100 flights of stairs in Chicago’s John Hancock Center.

Other fun fact: “The Social Climbers” is the coolest Hustle up the Hancock team name ever invented by a team captain named Jake and emblazoned in a custom design on the team’s T-shirts.

Fact: Climbing almost 100 flights of stairs on a freezing February morning is really not all that fun.

Other fact: Though is feels like 700 hours of gasping and quad-screaming, the climb actually lasts only 20ish minutes.

One more fact: John Hancock Insurance removed its name from the John Hancock Center in February 2018, leaving the building with the stirring—and instantly memorable—name 875 North Michigan Avenue ... and this year causing Hustle Up the Hancock to be renamed the less alliterative but more badass Hustle Chicago.

Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to achieve the holy confluence of isolation, gumption and aim that it requires to take a reasonably flattering gym stealthfie of this artistic and compositional caliber? DO YOU?

No, you do not.

Open letter to One Direction: No matter how many times you mushmouth through that stupid chorus, never in this or any other language does “hotel rooms” rhyme with “rendez-vous.” Sheesh.

An ice DAMN in the gutter that makes icicles that look like STYX and are as long as the word MEPHISTOPHELES and one even has a FORKED TONGUE

Winter in Iowa is finally showing its true colors.

The 9 to 5 dancer guys are known 24/7 for our maturity and photogenic-ity

And this handsome group is only part of our little army of not-goofy hotness. You should come check us out at some 8:00 performance!

PRO TIP:

When you wear your scowly face T-shirt to the gym, it does the metaphorical heavy lifting for you so you can maintain your usually sunny/quirky/goofy face no matter how hard you work out.

Assuming you actually put down your damn phone and actually damn work out.

I laid out my Bitch Kitty Laptop Bag Trap With Optional Strap Loop Corral first thing this morning when I decided to avoid the snow and work from home

And eight hours later SHE FINALLY PARKED HERSELF ON IT FOR A PHOTO OP.

I totally feel like Robert Mueller right now. Except I'm snaring smarter animals.

It’s snowy af out there so I’m writing about high fashion while wearing my JCPenney sweats in my ultra-plush, Space Needle-like home office

Which is actually in our basement. And it’s quite cozy ... minus anything resembling a loving cat, of course.

It’s my first time benching this big-boy weight!

I’ve been able to do only six reps per set, but I’m kind of amazed I’m able to do it at all without destroying a shoulder or breaking a hip. Plus it’s easier to sneak a pic of my weight plates than it is of my nostrils and chins.

Repeat that. REPEAT THAT!

How to be a theater person:

1. Repeatedly check your score and sing along with the cast recording to memorize your music for a show as you fold and put away three weeks of unfolded laundry.
2. Have three weeks of unfolded laundry because you’ve been in another show.
3. Stumble on your souvenir tearaway thong and souvenir backup tearaway thong from said previous show as you’re folding all that (clean! I swear!) laundry.
4. Instead of figuring out where the hell to put your souvenir tearaway thong and souvenir backup tearaway thong (DAMNIT, AUTOCORRECT! Not once in the last four tries have I intended to type thing!), artfully arrange them with the score of your new show on a bed of unmatched socks to post them dramatically but tastefully on Facebook.
5. Panic that you’ve already forgotten all the music you’ve reviewed and learned as you’ve folded and put away. Because your mind is clearly too busy trying to figure out where to put your souvenir things.

The United States National Emergency Advisory has finally calibrated the severities of potential threats to our country, our Constitution and our very survival and issued this easy-to-follow chart for our clearly doomed citizenry

#NotesFromNationalEmergency

In times like these, it’s comforting to know we have a forum where we can find solidarity, courage and strength in our shared struggles

Oh, look!

It’s another squinty-in-the-inescapable-snow-glare-selfied Iowan standing in front of a ginormous mountain of snow to show everyone Holy Shit Look How Much Snow We’ve Gotten, Most Of Which I Have Personally Shoveled!

Happy Presidents’ Day to our first 44 presidents!

Well apparently I’m never going upstairs again.

Bitch Kitty’s powers are so strong that not only have they imprisoned me in my basement dungeon until a handsome prince (preferably wearing a speedo and singing show-tune duets in a comfortable key) comes to rescue me, but they’ve also turned our staircase walls into shiny molten caramel.

I made a meme ...

I thought I had a six-hour rehearsal for 9 to 5 yesterday and then a six-hour rehearsal today

But now that it’s all said (sung?) and done and I’m double-checking my math, it was six hours yesterday and a mere four hours today. My bad.

The show is really going to be spectacular. And exhausting. If my tired old ass can even keep up. And after this weekend’s (mere) ten collective hours of rehearsals, I’m dead. But it’s a happy dead.

As usual, my friend Dale nails it

“I see it in the Facebook feeds today and hear it in the locker room all of the time, you know the 'both parties are wrong, all politicians are crooks'. Nope sorry, not having it, there are differences. Let’s just talk about El Presidente, I mean Individual One. How about: attacks the Intelligence services, praise dictators, sides with White Nationalists, fails to disavow the KKK, attacks women based on their weight and looks, uses twitter to conduct foreign policy, asks foreign enemies to hack into a Presidential candidate’s email, fabricates a racist story about the former President’s birthplace (birtherism) , already has played more than 138% more golf than Obama, failure to criticize the Saudi Prince for the killing of an American journalist, on pace to beat Obama’s travel record (bigly), failed to release his taxes like he said he would, Trump’s use of Executive Orders, lied about Inauguration crowd size, lied on his business dealings with Russia, said Mexico would pay for the wall and then claimed he never said it, criticized a former decorated Prisoner of War, criticized the family of a deceased Gold Star family, criticized Navy admiral, William H. McRaven the former Navy SEAL commander who oversaw the mission to kill Osama Bin Laden, talk of grabbing women by their genitals, made fun of reporter with disabilities, attacks the media daily, pulling out of International Treaties on Climate Change, Nuclear weapons, and International Trade, attacked a Judge because of his ethnicity, virtually curtailed press conferences, large swaths of executive time, wait I almost forgot about lying about paying off porn stars and now a fake National emergency. I mean what will it take? This is your guy? Thirty-six indictments, nine guilty pleas so far, campaign chair going to jail for the rest of his life. These are all great guys, the kind you want running the country, right? Please don't say both sides do it ever again...this is not apples to apples, this is comparing apples to treason. There are differences and they matter."

Howard Dean: Demanding a border wall “is a ridiculous argument by a ridiculous person who’s pretending to be the president of the United States”

Howard is in FULL-NO-BULLSHIT MODE tonight. And Chris Cuomo needs to stop smoldering at me through my TV and propose already.

Reppin’ 75 lb dumbbells on the incline bench because I’m a BEAST

and reppin’ Iowa Public Radio on my shirt because I’m an INFORMED NEWS CONSUMER AND CITIZEN:

When you went to bed an hour ago

but you stumbled into a click hole of Disney-secrets videos and now it’s late and you’re tired and you really need to turn the damn lights off and go to damn sleep but first you take a totally staged helicopter selfie in which you look totally unconvincingly tired and JUST PUT DOWN YOUR DAMN PHONE AND GO TO SLEEP, JAKE. Sheesh.

Boilerplate

Today’s episode of Surviving Leg Day was brought to you by OutOfYourLeague.com, the dating site where everyone else is half your age and going through life on a supermodel scholarship; the How Not To Light Your Gym Selfies podcast, which we promise to listen to one of these days; a grant from the Black El Camino T-Shirt Badassery Council; the words “abductors” and “lumbar region”; and the generous support of thousands of don’t-skip-leg-day memes posted by social-networkers like you.

SWEAT POO

I JUST GOT MY FIRST LUMP-FREE (LUMPLESS? DE-LUMPED?) HAIRCUT!

Behold my newfound normalness!

Two generations of the Full Monty diaspora, now populating the 9 to 5 bass section

Or if you want to make it creepy and weird, you could call us Malcolm and the Brotherhood of the Harold Sandwich. But don’t call us that. It’s creepy and weird.

God, I hope you get these

Bendy people try to stand out so they can dance like clones.

The way you do your hair is a metaphor for the idea that it doesn't matter what you look like.

A group of women with 50 years of age differences who've never worked together and who've probably never even met somehow simultaneously remember the choreography and staging to a generations-old song. Oh, and something about a coffee cup.

All the neighbors' cats disappeared so ...

Dude can't commit.

Mom makes too many sandwiches and moves out.

Dude dots Dot, dies.

Cats with stupid names pretty much do nothing.

Pray for a tech malfunction if you want to see some dicks at the end.

Six boobs and a garage-door opener.

Tons and tons of plotlines about French people--half of whom are poor and uneducated--who for some reason all sing in perfect English.

Dancing guys in tight jeans take a stab at cultural harmony.

Slinky Fosse choreography makes the plot irrelevant.

Drag queens overcome adversity and teach everyone a valuable lesson about discrimination and tolerance.

Then, 40 years later, the exact same plot happens again.

Hy-pathetic

If a guy in a perfectly broken in Banana Republic circa 2010 faux-1978-throwback compass-and-fleur-de-lis-crest-collection cornflower blue crewneck T-shirt crafted from 100% soft, breathable cotton (I’m being purposefully vague here to protect everyone’s privacy) bench pressed 3 sets of 10 reps at 185 lbs without a spotter in his uncharacteristically empty gym so there was practically nobody there to see it, would it still make a sound on social media?

Hypothetically, of course. BECAUSE ONLY A FERAL JUNGLE-BEAST MONSTER COULD EVER BENCH PRESS 3 SETS OF 10 REPS AT 185 LBS WITHOUT A SPOTTER.

Ahem.

(Confidential to whomever inflicted this abomination on the world: “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” is neither creative nor clever nor meaningful nor of intrinsic or extrinsic value nor worthy of the music-listening population’s attention. Especially in a would-be headbanger gym. I hate you with the white-hot fire of a thousand competent lyricists.)

Hey, big spend-purr!

I’m working from home in my ultra-plush, super-cozy basement office today, and I figured that since Bitch Kitty liked sitting on my laptop bag so much the last time, I’d set it out again for her—and this time arrange it so she also had a space to sit inside the shoulder strap if she wanted to mix it up a bit.

She hadn’t even shown her face (or her bitch ass like last time) by noon so I sweetened the pot with a crisp $5 bill, but she apparently can’t even be enticed to sit by me with the allure of untold lifetime wealth.

I’d admire her willpower if I could just find my dignity first ...