You’d think the reason that all those stupid birds finally stopped pecking at our windows is that they finally banged all their little brains into catastrophic cerebral failure

But you’d be wrong.

Because the REAL reason that all those stupid birds finally stopped pecking at our windows is that WE TAPED UP PAPER OWLS. THAT WE PRINTED FROM THE INTERNET.

My Screamy Headache Man T-Shirt and I are back in the gym for my first time in exactly two weeks

(I didn’t say “the” first time because he may have been here without me in that time. I have more important things to keep track of than the comings and goings of my leisure apparel. Besides, trying to talk to him is a frustrating exercise in unproductivity; as you might surmise from his rather unambiguous name, it’s hard to get anything out of him but blood-curdling screams about his damn headache. Over and over. All over the Internet. And nobody should have to put up with that.)

Anyway, I’d hoped that my energy-chemical-explosion pre-workout shake might have an effect on my headache pain—which is significantly lessened today—but all it’s done is made me have to pee more. I worked out doing things that kept me relatively vertical—mostly back and shoulder stuff—so I’m at least hoping to have crippling workout pain—which is the pain I like—in those areas when I wake up tomorrow. After getting up to pee six times in the night, of course.

Internet! Legend!

It’s back!

Two years ago when I was a lonely Twitter novice trying to get followers using every devious means I could figure out, I posted anything I could think of under the trending hashtags (a strategy that still has yet to reel in any followers) in an attempt to charm strangers across this flat earth of ours with my weirdness.

To wit: #igot7selcaday. Your guess is as good as mine what the hashtag means, but that doesn’t matter when you’re desperate for Twitter validation. It turns out—and I swear on the Gospel of Sondheim that I am not making any of this up—that selca day is a weekly thing for Korean teens—stay with me here—where they photoshop themselves into pictures of a designated Korean boy band—which in the case of the above hashtag is Got7—and post them online for endless fun and meaningful enjoyment.

DO NOT DOUBT ME ON THIS.

Surprisingly, I was not able to figure any of this out from the #igot7selcaday hashtag or from the millions of pictures people were posting under it. Still not wanting to be left out of the party though, I posted a photo of ... me and Bitch Kitty.

Then I turned off my phone and went to a four-hour Follies rehearsal. And when I turned it on as I walked back to my car it all but exploded with the multiple thousands of likes and retweets and comments praising me for my brilliant parody and my clever thinking and my apparent dominance over the entire Internet. I still didn’t know what the hell was going on, but attention is attention and little red “like” hearts are little red “like” hearts and I WANTED ALL OF IT.

As with all drunken power orgies though—so I hear—the frenzy came to an end within 24 hours and I stepped down from my Internet-celebrity throne and rejoined the world of all you common people. But be assured, you common people, that my legend lives on and it still sparks random flare-ups of eternal praise ... like this comment I got out of the blue this morning. Which I think is eternal praise. Or just seben praises. Whatever. It’s still praise. So shut up.

Anyway, the key takeaway here is that I’m huge in Korea. And Bitch Kitty is in a boy band. And though this experience garnered me zero Twitter followers, IT STILL GOT OVER 10,000 LIKES. And that’s way more than seben.

You may all now bow and exalt.

Pro tip:

If you know where to look, the Internet is practically tuft-upholstered in sumptuously detailed scorched-earth rainbow unicorn paintings starring betophatted cats ensconced gallantly on their noble annihilative steeds.

Bro, do you even lift?

There is no fate worse than tossing a purple jelly bean in your mouth and discovering too late that it's actually a black jelly bean.

No, actually there's no fate worse than smugly and happily trying to force a hastily written bill through the Senate -- so fast that many party-line-voting Senators later admitted they hadn't even read it -- that takes away people's access to healthcare without providing a viable, bipartisan, medically reviewed replacement when this picture of your skinny-leg-Barbie-weights-stupid-backward-bro-hat-whatever-douchebag-gesture-you're-making-with-your-hand self is always and forever circulating on the Internet.

Ya sure, you betcha!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
Philadelphia
The South
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Thursday in the audience without the fiancé

We gave ourselves a week off from the gym after we got home from the cruise. Of course, that week stretched to two. And it would have made it to three if I hadn’t found myself wide awake this morning at 3:00. The fiancé had just left for another long trip* and I was suddenly alone and very wide-eyed in our big bed.

*For the record, this marks our second Valentine’s Day apart. But every day in our house is like Valentine’s Day (blogsickness bags are located in the seat pocket in front of you) so we don’t mark the official Valentine’s Day by exchanging any more saccharine text messages than we would on any random Thursday.

So there I was all alone in our big bed. And I did what any lonely, red-blooded man would do in my situation: I fired up my laptop. And there, by the warm, flickering glow of my screen, I furtively played with my impressively lengthy—and uncomfortably hard—list of Scrabulous!™ games on Facebook. Then I answered about 10 emails that had been languishing in my inbox. Then—since it was already 6:00 and my alarm was within an hour of going off anyway—I got dressed and headed to the gym.

It wasn’t until I was well into my 20-minute stair climb that I looked down and realized it was a good thing my husband-hunting days were behind me. Because in the dark this morning I somehow ended up dressing myself like a bar mitzvah clown: white running shoes, yesterday’s black dress socks, yesterday’s moss green undershirt and terrorist-alert orange running shorts that had climbed clear up my thighs to celebrate the invention of static cling. I was definitely looking less than my best. And husbands, my lord, are weak.

My day has been a sleep-deprived fog ever since, though I’m proud to report I did manage to assemble a reasonably color-coordinated office ensemble in time for work.

And now it’s almost 8:00 pm. And while I’m still at work, the fiancé is nestled snugly in a Broadway theater digesting a faux-Mexican dinner while watching a British revival of an American musical about a French painter. I’m engaged to the goddamn U.N.

But before he got his passport stamped, he sent me a saccharine Valentine’s Day text message telling me how much he wishes he could be sharing all this with me tonight:

I'm a little woozy

I spent the day refinishing our dining room table, and the vapors are giving me the vapors.

Actually, by "refinishing our dining room table" I mean "sanding and restaining two legs that had gotten all alligatory" so by "spent the day" I really mean "spent a grand total of about 35 minutes" because the entire surface area I worked on was about two square feet, and those 35 minutes included two coats of stain. In my defense, though, I'll probably need a third coat of stain and some kind of sealant that will probably have to cover the whole table to give everything a consistent sheen. Which could conceivably take a few hours. Which almost adds up to a day. If you use certain kinds of math.

In any case, the freshly stained legs look pretty amazing. And by "amazing" I mean "like the alligators had never attacked in the first place." Which is all you really hope to achieve in a project like this.

Besides, I don't have much time to be rubbing away endlessly at a beat-up old (yet marvelously polished and well cared for) dining room table; I've recently discovered Scrabulous!™, the highly addictive but not officially sanctioned Facebook version of Scrabble®, which is probably my favorite game in the whole world. OK, my second favorite game in the whole world, right after Too Many Shoes!®, the highly addictive shopping game that apparently doesn't have a finish line.

In any case, I've been on Facebook for about a month, and just last weekend I discovered Scrabulous!™ and its magical powers over every last moment of my life. On Scrabulous!™, you can play multiple not-officially-Scrabble® games with multiple people all at the same time. You add a word when you're logged on, see, then your opponent adds a word when he or she is logged on while in the mean time you log back on every 13.5 seconds to see if it's your turn again. Fortunately, there doesn't appear to be a limit to the number of games you can have going at once, so I'm currently playing ... um ... 15 games. ("Hi. My name's Jake. And I'm a Scrabulous!™aholic.") And I'm getting my ass kicked in two of them. (My former friend Bill is at this writing walloping me 365 to 128, with an "existed" that netted him 94 frigging points. But I got 8 points for "hen," so I'm catching up.)

I hope the magical pull of Scrabulous!™ wears off (or the copyright infringement jury finds for the plaintiff) before the spring thaw, though, because I just registered to run the 2008 Chicago Marathon. And I probably should eventually step away from the computer and do some training for it.

This will be my fifth* marathon, and I'll run it at the age of 40—a tidy little divisible-by-five coincidence that means nothing, though it passes a few marginally interesting pieces of information along in what trained writers would call exposition. And if I run it in four hours, there will be additional divisible-by-fourness to add to the math fun. Whee!

*For those of you keeping score at home, I have entered four marathons so far and, thanks to last year's mid-marathon cancellation, finished only three. BUT! I've kept an emergency replacement marathon in my back pocket all this time; I ran a full marathon-length training run a few summers ago. So I can still say I've run four complete marathons without perjuring myself if I get called before the marathon tribunal. Assuming such a tribunal exists and for some reason I get called before it.

My peeps (I use peeps to show that I'm down with the kids, yo) and I aren't running with the AIDS Marathon program this year, though. Their training program focuses on getting you across a finish line instead of reaching a time goal, and I really want to beat four hours this year. Plus, I really hate asking people for money. (So click the icon near the top right of your screen and sponsor me in Hustle up the Hancock already so I can stop asking. Ahem.) Plus, some Saturdays I'd really rather run at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of 5:00 in the morning. Somebody's going to be 40 awfully soon, so somebody needs his beauty rest.

Speaking of rest, it's pretty late on a school night, so somebody had better stop blogging and get some sleep.

Just as soon as he checks his Scrabulous!™ games, of course. Because words are more important than sleep. Especially when they give you triple-word scores.

No posts for five days means Jake's a dull boy

It's just that there hasn't been much to talk about this last week. Nothing interesting, at least.

Oh, there was the Iowa caucus where most of my lifelong-Republican family members participated as Democrats. (Stay the course, Dubya! It's totally working!) And I bought some of those giant bleach tablets for our toilet tanks. And I drank an entire alcoholic beverage (Mike's cranberry lemonade!) on Saturday night as I played Uno with some friends.

But otherwise, there's just boring stuff to report. Like the fact that I'm STILL writing my Christmas letter, now with the goal of getting it in the mail before June. And that the fiancé and I are eating every chicken breast and raw vegetable in sight and running to the gym every moment that's not nailed down because in two weeks we'll be on a gay cruise and people might know that we had cookies at Christmas.

And I joined Facebook. Which I like much better than MySpace. Because the kids on MySpace add huge sound files and busy background art and unreadable fonts to their profiles, and I just don't approve. And MySpace seems to be infected with email viruses and Asian teenage hookers who pester me to be their friends.

On the other hand, Facebook has a clean, readable, unmodifyable layout. And profiles of people I haven't even thought about in 25 years. And groups with names like Stephen Sondheim Could Kick Your Bitch Ass. And pictures of my friends' parties. Parties that I was conspicuously not invited to. But you can totally tell in the pictures that the people aren't having any fun because I'm not there. Because they have their arms around each other to hold each other up to stave off the collapsing weight of my absence. Even though they're smiling.

Of course, I have no beef with Friendster. Except that nobody uses it anymore. Then again, how does a person "use" a social networking site? I mean beyond the wasting-time-online definition of "use"—a definition that could never be applied to blogging. Especially to information-filled posts like this one.

This week’s adventures. So far.

MONDAY
After spending the last few months of 2005 logging 80-hour weeks at work and none at the gym, I was starting to look like Ann Coulter. Except with less back hair. So when I reclaimed my life in January, I also revamped my workout philosophy and my diet, trading the moderate-intensity, one-body-part-a-week program I’d been using for at least 10 years for one that involves maximum weights, lifting to failure and hitting every body part at least twice a week. My diet was already pretty good for what I was trying to do, but I amped up my lean protein consumption, packed the majority of my carbs into the mornings and afternoons, and started chugging creatine and Muscle Milk. Just like the vapid circuit boys big boys at the gym. Oh, and I switched to diet soda. Even though I hate it. But I couldn’t justify all those empty calories. And once in a while I just crave that caustic blend of chemicals and carbonation.

The result? I quickly regained what I’d lost in November and December, followed by a lengthy plateau … and then on Monday I hit three big-boy milestones:

Big-Boy Milestone #1: I hopped on the scale at the gym and discovered I’d finally crossed the 10-new-pounds-what-I-hope-is-muscle plateau. (You can expect to gain about 1.5 pounds a month on a good workout program, and I’ve averaged out to 2.5.) So I’m now tipping the scales at 195 pounds! And the crowd goes wild! I’d never really done squats before January, so the majority of that new muscle is in my legs and in my still kinda sad little butt. And as marathon training gets more intense, I’ll probably lose most of what I gained by July. But still. 10 pounds! Woo-hoo!

Big-Boy Milestone #2: I bench pressed 225 pounds ALL. BY. MYSELF. You get 225 by adding one 45-lb bar and four 45-lb plates. The big boys bench press at least 225 all the time, but us trying-to-be-big boys see it as a pretty major landmark. After years of nothing more impressive than 185, I’d been benching 225 with the help of spotters for at least a month. But on Monday I couldn’t find anyone I wanted an excuse to talk to to spot me, so I did it on my own. And I got three sets of three reps with no trouble at all. And the crowd goes wild again!

Big-Boy Milestone #3: I survived my one thousandth listening-to of Kelis’ tender love ballad, “Caught Out There.” My gym apparently has one CD in its sound system, so at least once a workout I get to hear Kelis’ clever wordplay and thoughtful insights into the human condition, a fine example of which appears in every chorus: “I hate you so much right now! I hate you so much right now! Ugh. I hate you so much right now!”

TUESDAY
I joined MySpace last week just for fun. While Rupert Murdoch found enough value in it to buy the site for $580M last July, I found little more than an interesting diversion in it—a way to post pictures, write goofy things about myself and link to legitimate friends and fake muscleboy profiles alike. (It’s amazing how many 21-year-old supermodels with removeable tattoos there are in the world—and how many of them really, really really want to be my friend.)

So I was pleasantly surprised when two of those attractive strangers emailed me and quickly proved themselves to be articulate, intelligent and fun to talk to. One of them lives half a continent away, but the other lives just a couple blocks from my office. So we met for dinner on Tuesday. (A Norwegian and a Jew walk into a Thai restaurant…) And we had an awesome time together. Even though I felt compelled to order a diet soda. After three hours of conversation just flew by, he walked me to my bus stop and waited for my bus with me. Such a charmer. Best of all, our next dinner date is already on the calendar.

WEDNESDAY
After last night’s freakish hailstorm had cleared and the frog-size chunks of ice had melted, I ran five miles hopped over five miles of giant puddles with a guy in my marathon pace group. On the way back to my place we stopped at my friendly neighborhood Dominick’s (motto: The bare minimum is often too much to ask) for dinner supplies, then we invited a guy from a different pace group (fraternizing! with the enemy!) who lives a few blocks from me to join us for spinach-raspberry salad, stuffed chicken breasts and what was left of my homemade low-fat custard after most of it boiled over onto the stove. Stupid low-fat custard.

Then the three of us spent the evening solving the world’s problems over white wine while we gazed out my window and enjoyed my spectacular view. Which might not be mine much longer, because I’ve been condo shopping. And I may have found The One. Stay tuned for all the super-expensive details …