Epic pants purge! With the discerning help of my fashion-maven niece!

From the left: Give-away shorts. Give-away jeans. Keep shorts. Keep jeans.

So. Many. Clothes.

When the doors are off the closet and you can see in one glance how obscenely huge your collection of clothing is, it’s very easy to start purging. Those hangers on the left mark my progress before it occurred to me to take a picture to hold myself accountable. If I get the entire left half open, perhaps I could put some shoe cubbies there.

Really, new Pride shirt that I slept itchily in last night?

Is all of this even remotely necessary?

Brand new Pride couture and assorted mannequin boobies

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.

In the midst of all my heartless, unsentimental purging of once-beloved shoes and clothing

... I may or may not have just ordered some pride apparel I totally don’t need.

We are going through TONS of clothes in an epic March to the Purge

which is supposed to be a Civil War reference but it’s not a very good one so if you don’t get it I’ll totally take the blame for making a not-very-accessible allusion but anyway Bitch Kitty has found one of our giveaway piles and decided to send everything remotely dark to Goodwill with a complimentary layer of white fur.

How many super-redundant superhero shirts (including one that says CAPTAIN AWESOME but sadly no longer fits) does one super-hoardy man-boy need?

Jake and the Amazing Heterosexual Theater Date

Just two dudes seeing a musical. About clothing. With an obsessive focus on its color palette.

Nothing suspicious here.

Captain America socks vs Union Jack shoes. Who would win?

Flashback Friday: Jake Regrets Edition

No words.

Things I may or may not have but let's not kid ourselves totally got out my credit card and bought on Amazon:

At first glance this looks all Christmasy

But it’s really NOT!

It’s predominately blue and snowy with only minor accents of it-looks-like-Christmas-but-it’s-not red. You could wear it fesively ALL WINTER. Unfortunately, I found the picture on a meme site and I have no idea where to buy the sweater. There really IS a War on Christmas.

Happy Thanksgiving

from Bridget, trump’s chin and my greenish jeans that I’m slowly coming to accept are never going to go with anything

Unfortunately, it never goes out

I hadn’t counted on being able to stop at home between work and my Sunday in the Park with George callback tonight. Now I’m tearing through my meager sartorial trousseau and obsessively rethinking my callback wardrobe. I need to look stuffy and reserved enough to be a plausible Jules yet athletic and devastatingly handsome enough to be discovered and fanboy profiled in some dreary socialistic periodical. I think I’ll wear something nice with swans.

I’m gettin’ belted

ROUND 1: The two tiny anchor screws suddenly come loose and fall out of the buckle of my favorite (because it reverses from a handsome gray to a versatile black) belt within a few days of each other.

ROUND 2: The ultra-patient, ultra-helpful man at Ace Hardware spends more than 15 minutes trying every tiny screw in every drawer of the vast hardware aisle looking for replacement screws that have the right gauge, thread size and length before declaring that my only option appears to be industrial-strength adhesive.

ROUND 3: I squeeze gooey globs of Liquid Nails into the buckle, push the strap in, carefully wipe off the bit that squishes out, and lock it all in a vice for 36 hours to set and dry.

ROUND 4: While getting dressed at the gym yesterday, I confidently and a little bit excitedly thread one end of my newly repaired favorite belt through one — ONE! — belt loop ... and the buckle promptly falls off the other end.

ROUND 5: I celebrate an impromptu Show Your Co-Workers Your Underpants Day at work for the next eight hours.

ROUND 6: In — of course — bright red underpants.

Jake’s favorite belt: 6

Jake: 0

Seizing the day

I was supposed to leave this morning for my annual summer vacation to visit friends in D.C. and stay at their best-porch-on-the-planet beach house in Rehoboth, DE, but I had to cancel a few weeks ago due to work issues. A lot of cool things have popped up on my calendar here in Cedar Rapids this weekend though, so I'm more or less OK with missing my trip.

But I still missed work this morning thanks to a rough descent into a bipolar depressive episode that started last night. I talk a lot about being bipolar on here and on social media, and every time I think I should stop someone messages me out of the blue to thank me for being so open and honest about it. Enough people have confided in me the stories of their struggles with mental illness that I sometimes worry I won't remember everyone in my mental checklist of kindred, struggling spirits. I've developed close, supportive friendships with a lot of these people though, and our check-ins and conversations and even drives across town just to give hugs are so dear and so valuable to me that I'll probably never stop talking about my own struggles.

So here's this morning's report: I woke up at 6:00 in a motivational black hole with a fiery headache and enough disorientation that I knew enough to skip the gym -- which is huge because some days working out is the only thing that keeps me human -- and to let my boss know that I'd come in after lunch, if at all today. Then I went back to the kind of non-sleep that feels like you're staying awake getting more and more exhausted compounded by the stress of feeling worried about getting more and more exhausted. But when I woke up around 11:00 my head was clear enough that I could look at the episode objectively and summon the coping and pushing-through skills I've learned over the last decade and I showered and ate and made it to work, where I've been surprisingly productive ... albeit profoundly exhausted.

So to all the people I know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the people I don't know who are dealing with mental illness and to all the rest of you curious enough about my struggles today to have read this far: You will fight this battle all your life. You will get meds that don't work, you will get meds that actually make things worse and you will find meds that you'll notice start to make improvements ... though you'll spend ages waiting cynically for them to fail you. In the mean time, learn what helps you stabilize yourself and what helps you push your way out of the wet wool blankets and the rolling fogs that trap you. As soon as I felt coherent this morning, I texted one friend who right now is in a bottomless depressive episode so we could both not feel alone in our struggles and I texted another friend who as far as I know is not having an episode just so I'd know that someone who deeply understands what I'm going through is at the very least thinking about me. And then I picked out a shirt that says carpe diem on it and I know that it's totally goofy bordering on stupid, but if I'm wearing a shirt that means something to me on a certain day or in a certain situation, I feel compelled to go out in the world and show it to everybody. 

And after what my head put me through this morning, I need everyone to know -- no, I need to SHOW everyone -- that I'm seizing the hell out of the rest of my today.

Sploosh

I just managed to spill my protein shake all down my front, on my seat belt, in my lap, on the steering wheel, in my cup holder, in my stick shift well, down the side of my seat, and deep in the crevices of my emergency break. My car is going to STINK on the next hot day.

DAMN YOU, ECLIPSE!

Do you like the shirt I totally randomly picked to wear on this totally random day?

The color is a sunny orange-yellow that's partially eclipsed by shadowy blue-gray stripes. It's most certainly not a metaphor for anything and I certainly would never wear an abstractly themed shirt to match the events of -- again -- a totally random day, not that those things are even considerations for anything. I just like this shirt.

Also: I'm partially eclipsing the sunny orange-yellow wall behind me in this selfie. Which is just a totally random observation. Enjoy your totally random day. I know I will. Because I like the totally random shirt I'm wearing.

Back to my long-neglected bed

I've been sleeping on the couch next to my mom as she slept in a recliner recovering from shoulder surgery since July 3. But she's finally been given the all-clear to sleep in her bed again, so I'm finally returning to mine ... which has been slowly buried under a mountain of clean laundry that I didn't feel in a rush to fold over the last seven weeks. And instead of folding it now, I naturally just pushed it to one side of my bed and photographed it to post on my blog.

And yes, that's a new space kitty T-shirt from Walmart at the foot of the pile and do not judge because I'm sure there are plenty of weird hobbies you have that are keeping you single at 49 too.