Throwback Wednesday: Old And Dysmorphic Edition

When you’re feeling old and invisible at your Pumped-Up Unabridged Encyclopedia of Hotness Gym, instead of working out, do something actually productive and emotionally healthy: Re-post a pic of yourself and your shirtless shoulders and your saucy instep from a long-ago gay cruise.

I worry that we’re creating unhealthy body-image issues here for both women and men, but I can’t think that right now because I got a show to do!

Also: Super-cute Snoopy rainbow shirt!

#bodygoals

Meowch

I woke up in a mild bipolar crash that was still bad enough that it gave me a powerful headache and what felt like a fever. I decided to skip the gym to sleep so now I feel fat. Then I decided to take the morning off to sleep so now I feel guilty for missing work. Then I got a raspberry seed wedged in my teeth when I finally ate something. Then I somehow nicked the top of my ear while shaving the side of my face. Because WHO DOES THAT? Now I'm at work and I'm groggy but functional and here's a funny cat picture:

Shoes before cruise!

The domestic partner and I decided to take this year off from gay cruises … so of course 2011 ends up being Atlantis’ 20th anniversary of cruising and of course it books the mega-hella-massive Allure of the Seas for its epic 20th anniversary cruise and of course all our friends in the known universe will be frolicking beSpeedoed on that ship next month without us.

But! Gay cruises are expensive once you factor in airfare and hotels and port adventures and glitter. We figure we’ve spent up to $3,000 each for every cruise we’ve been on – and we don’t even drink alcohol or have to carry bail money for drug busts.

So while our friends booked the best balcony rooms and stopped eating carbs and invested in new Speedo wardrobes, we stuck to our financial guns. And we’ll be landbound next weekend when they all set sail into the warm Caribbean.

Plus we’ll also be $3,000 richer than everyone else.

And there’s only one way to celebrate saving $3,000 on a cruise: spending $400 on clothes!

To assuage my disappointment in not cruising this year, I gave myself a $200 $300 $400 allowance to go hunting for some new shirts, pants and shoes that were 1) appropriate for the casual-funky-slightly-dressy sartorial look I’ve imposed on myself for work, 2) comfortable to wear and easy to wash, and 3) big enough to accommodate my slowly (very slowly) growing physique.

And thanks to the awesome deals at Filene’s Basement and Nordstrom Rack—not to mention the attitude and/or incompetence of the Puma Store employees that alienated me, the almighty consumer, into not spending $260 on their full-priced stuff—I eventually stumbled home with two pair of shoes, two pair of pants and ten (twelve? fifteen? I honestly lost count) shirts.

As usual, I wanted dressy gym shoes I could wear to the gym without looking too dressy and to work without looking too gymmy. And I found these fabulous Pumas (but not in the attitude-and/or-incompetence-riddled Puma Store) marked down to $49 from $80:

My years of brutal personal-trainer workouts and mountains of chicken breasts and gallons of protein shakes are slowly (very slowly) paying off, because I’m slowly (very slowly) growing in all the places I’d hoped I’d grow. And a lot of my short-sleeve shirts that looked merely questionable for work two years ago now look downright desperate the way the shoulder seams ride up and the sleeves barely cover my arms. So I made a point to buy (still fitted) shirts in sizes bigger than you typically find in the American Girl Store.

But! This week when I was searching online for synonyms for the word “plus” (for a client’s product-naming brainstorm! honest!), thesaurus.com made some rude assumptions about my motives when it placed its paid advertisements on the results page:
Dear thesaurus.com: Suddenly wearing bigger shirts does not make me a big girl. I’ll thank you for keeping your interpretations of my shopping and/or word-searching habits to yourself.

While I was updating my look (and abandoning Atlantis) I also decided that the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange Atlantis gym bag I’ve carried around with me every day for the last four-plus years was looking kind of … um … tacky.

I leave the house at 6:00 every morning and carry my whole day in that bag—including clothes, dopp kit, protein shakes, water, pain relievers, healthful lunch, healthful snacks and reading material for the bus—so it’s a permanent part of my person. And formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange doesn’t really match my classy, not-frat-house-dwelling personality. I wanted to find a plain black bag with no logos on it, but that’s like finding an article of the Constitution Michele Bachmann has actually read. So I settled for the bag on the right, which is significantly classier and more not-frat-house-dwelling than the formerly-garish-but-now-grungy orange thing on the left, which found a new home in the garbage can moments after posing for this picture:

So now I have two (three? I honestly lost count) weeks of cool new clothes to wear and a new bag to carry and two new pair of shoes to choose from—which means I'll embark on an exciting new sartorial adventure every morning for at least two weeks—so who needs a stupid cruise with stupid hot men in stupid Speedos on a stupid mega-hella-massive ship with live performances by stupidly hot Cheyenne Jackson? Harumph.

New Year's Resolutions

Update my blog at least once every 21 days
Done.

Figure out how to convert my commenting to Blogger
Before Blogger offered a commenting feature, I used a free commenting app called HaloScan, which last year converted to a pay program called Echo. But I get about 5 comments per post, and now Blogger offers free built-in commenting capabilities … so it seems dumb to pay for the feature. Unfortunately, Echo offers NO help in shutting off its commenting app, which seems to have hijacked the DNA of my entire blog. So the five of you who want to comment on this post are just gonna have to hold tight until I can figure everything out. Since Echo has a lock on my commenting link but not on my credit card, you can comment all you want but I can't access your comments to approve them.

Write and mail my epic holiday letter
At this point I have a Word doc that lists all the months in order from 2010. So I’m almost done.

Gain at least two pounds a month in the gym
I started the year around 205, including bad holiday weight. I was 208 this morning, which seems to be good weight. Or at least I’ve-been-very-good-in-the-food-department weight. Then again, it could have been post-intense-workout water weight. But still. 208! Woot!

Outgrow some clothes
I mean in the vain-gymrat way. In December I reached the point where some of my narrow (not skinny—I’m not that delusional) jeans clung to my quads and calves and wouldn’t fall back down to cover my ankles when I stood up. So they’re currently at the bottom of the jeans pile. And my lats (which is vain-gymratspeak for the sides of my back) have gotten so wide (but never wide enough!) that I’ve had to do the douchebag cut (armholes down to the waist) on most of my workout shirts, which were already douchebaggy because I’d cut all the sleeves off.

Stop obsessing about getting bigger in the gym
Kidding!

Give up soda
I haven’t had a Coke Zero (my vice of choice) since January 2. I miss it worse than John McCain misses his integrity, but this attempt to quit comes with a built-in incentive: Drinking soda seems to have become a trigger for migraines and heartburn, and I haven’t had an episode of either since I quit filling myself with delightfully fizzy adventures in processed chemicals. Late last year they (the migraines and heartburn, not the delightfully fizzy chemicals) started kicking in at least twice a month, so I’ll jump on any bandwagon that looks like it could reverse that trend.

Buy some new ChapStick®
I've been reduced to digging out the last dregs from my current tube with my masculinely short fingernails. For the last month. It's probably time to pony up another couple bucks for a fresh tube.

Judge more people
I had jury duty yesterday, so I came this close to sitting in judgment over a whole world of miscreants. Unfortunately, every trial that day settled without going to court. So I was denied my right to pass judgment and send miscreants to the hoosegow. Though it did give me the opportunity to use miscreants and hoosegow in my blog.

Volunteer more
I was so impressed with the way the Center on Halsted GLBT community center went out of its way to help us when we filmed our It Gets Better Project video marathon there last October that I took its volunteer training class so I could give something back to the center in thanks. Unfortunately, all the volunteer opportunities available so far have been during my workday or have required degrees in law or social work ... or have specified that volunteers have legible handwriting. Seriously. And as a man with the handwriting of a drunken toddler, I assume I would be laughed out any note-writing events on behalf of any nonprofit organization with even Sarah Palin standards of capability. But! I’m on the Center on Halsted email list and I keep waiting for something to pop up that I can contribute to. In the mean time, I’ve gotten myself on the marketing committees for two big GLBT events in Chicago: Lambda Legal’s Freedom to Marry event in February and TPAN’s Chicago Takes Off in March. Watch this space for details about both events. They should appear every 21 days.

I have discovered the tenth circle of hell

It’s the Circle of One-Armed Pull-Ups. And it’s populated by horribly vain gymbunnies with distractingly wide lats. And the searing pain in those lats is the source of all the fires in all the rest of hell.

But while we’re on the subject, I’m still gonna brag that I did three sets of 10 one-armed pull-ups on each side this morning. And I am now reduced to typing this blog post with my nose. And can one of you be a dear and come scratch my elbow for me? Thanks.

I also discovered a new weapon in having kick-ass workouts last night. (Sorry … this post looks like it’s gonna be all about my undying vanity selfless dedication to physical fitness. I probably should have warned you sooner.) My friend Jason just joined my gym, and he asked me if I could work out with him to kick-start his own mission to gain size. And I, easily flattered into anything if you tell me how big I look always willing to spread the gospel of physical fitness, readily agreed. So last night I took him through my favorite chest and triceps workouts. He’d never done any hardcore lifting, and he wisely refrained from trying to look like an asshole a hero by lifting more weight than he could manage.

I, on the other hand, can’t say the same thing about myself. I lifted close to my maximum weight because I had a spotter to show off to my friend how freakin’ macho I am. But vanity wins again! Because I gave myself one of the best chest and triceps workouts I’ve had in a long time. And then this morning my trainer pushed me down the stairs and ran over me with his Zamboni of Destruction pushed me down the stairs into the tenth circle of hell with a back and biceps workout that could kill an actual human. Which means he finally got the pitch that my vanity is way more important to me than my personal comfort!

Now all I need is the feeling to come back in my upper body. And Ryan Seacrest to try and high-five me. And to learn to type faster with my nose. And for one of you to finally come scratch my freakin’ elbow like you promised. It itches like hell.

So we met with a nutritionist last night

It turns out that a sheet cake and a fork do NOT make a balanced breakfast.

With all the workouts we’re doing to get cruise-ready by March, we want to make sure we’re eating right so we’re not sabotaging all our sweaty, exhausting efforts. We’re pretty sure we have healthful diets and responsible eating habits, but three facts remain: 1) We’re ultimately just guessing what foods are helping and/or hurting us, 2) We still have a frustrating layer of poochiness around our middles and 3) Rick Warren is a total douchebag assclown.

SO! Now we’re writing down every damn thing we eat in little food diaries the nutritionist gave us. And by “food diary” I mean “sheet of paper with lines on it.” But “food diary” sounds way more legitimate. In any case, we’ll give them to the nutritionist early next week, and she’ll tell us what we’re doing right and what stupid misguided things we’re doing that are unwittingly condemning us to the body fascism G-list. Which is the gay D-list. But with a G. For “gay.” Get it? Why do I have to explain everything to you people?

In the mean time, we’re sticking to the delicious and delightfully varied chicken/turkey/cottage cheese/broccoli/spinach/egg white/protein shake meal plan we devised for ourselves. And we’re still pooching over our waistbands like the chicken/turkey/cottage cheese/broccoli/spinach/egg white/protein shake muffins we are. BUT! Now we’re writing it all down on paper. And that’s a recipe for success. Get it? Ingredients? Written down on paper? Making a recipe? Sheesh, you people are slow.

Tranny hot mess!

No, I’m not entirely sure what that means. Or if it indicates that something is good or bad. Or even if it’s what the kids are still saying these days.

But every time I see my hair in the mirror, I do not see something that looks gender-confident, cool or organized.

I’m happy to report that the bumpectomy sites on my head are healing nicely, but the Polysporin® gobs are making an oilfield of my hair. And I didn’t plan my haircut schedule very well around the bump removal; I’m well into the fluffy phase that signals I’m overdue for a trim, but I’m not sure I should have a barber poking around my wounds with a pair of scissors or running a #1.5 guard over my stitches just yet. So I’m just left to hope that the paparazzi leave me alone until the stitches come out on Friday at 10:00 am and I can get to a haircut store to restore order on my noggin.

While the stitched-up wounds still sting a little, the bumps are definitely gone! So my staff of milliners and phrenologists can finally stop with the wringing of hands and the gnashing of teeth. I’ve also had three good runs since the surgery, and the sweat on my head hasn’t seemed to cause any healing issues. We cranked out eight miles on Saturday morning at our 9-minute-mile target marathon pace—which I am clearly not quite ready for—but then I ran four easy, breezy miles this morning ... and when I finished, my fancy new GPS-enabled running watch told me that I’d done them all at an 8:51 pace. Which is, for me, actually pretty huge. The crowd goes wild!

Plus, I’m wearing my muffin-top jeans today that usually fit only in the latter stages of marathon training. And they’re not cutting off any vital circulation. So far. In fact, they feel pretty comfortable. But I’m still leaving my shirt untucked. And I’m politely declining every request to retrieve something off a high shelf. Because I may be a tranny hot mess, but I’m not about to be a Love-Handle Larry. Whatever that means.

How to go on a big gay cruise

Packing
The week before you travel, lay out all the clothes you think look good on you. Look at everything you have spread out before you, pick up one thing you think you could live without for a week … and then go borrow a bigger suitcase from your friend Jim. Put back one pair of socks, two T-shirts and a pair of foo-foo trendy shoes, though, just to show the world you are indeed mature enough not to overpack like a debutante at a cat show.

Traveling
Discover when you check in at the airport that you can upgrade to first class for only $130. Splurge and enjoy your first-ever trip in the world of legroom, warm towels and rubberized chicken.

Spend a day in Miami before you board your ship. Buy more clothes while you’re there, including two pair of foo-foo trendy jeans with faux-Gothic embroidery and bleachy wrinkles built right in. Think how awesome your new jeans will look with your foo-foo trendy shoes—the ones you didn’t pack at the last minute.

Boarding the ship
Fight the gridlock caused by the Miami Marathon to get from your hotel to the ship. Curse the scheduling gods.

When you get on the ship, notice immediately how everyone else worked harder than you did to look amazing in a Speedo. (Seriously—out of 3,700 passengers, easily 1,000 of them on our ship had achieved physical perfection. A perfection that sends even the most well-adjusted man into a downward spiral of self-doubt and eating disorders. A perfection that makes you wonder if there were any beautiful people left on land anywhere on earth the week we were sailing.) Smile bravely and cease breathing for the rest of the week to avoid letting your stomach pooch out even for a second.

Emergency drills
Before the ship leaves the dock, you will be required to don your bulky orange life vest and congregate with herds of other bulky-orange-vested passengers in various parts of the ship. If this were a real emergency, you would be issued coordinating shoes and accessories since nothing in your wardrobe goes with bulky orange.

Manwatching
You can’t help but stare. So you don’t even try not to. And you will eventually see some semi-famous people: That Italian guy you think is named Oliver who was on the cover of Instinct magazine last summer. Adult-entertainment behemoth Matthew Rush, who is so big and cartoony-muscular he makes the ship tilt when he leans against the railing. And some scruffy cutie people keep stopping to take pictures of though you can’t for the life of you figure out who he is or why he’s famous, though you think you might have seen him on TV or in a movie somewhere.

You will also notice with amusement that everyone—from the feyest spa queens to the hairiest musclebears—will have gotten pedicures before the cruise. Everyone but you, that is.

Eating
Weigh the options of pigging out vs. eating responsibly to maintain your manly figure. Discover that while the meals are generally outstanding on the ship, the desserts tend to have a Little Debbie quality to them, so they’re easy to avoid.

Learn from a ship employee that for the gay cruises, the ship goes through infinitely more egg whites, skinless chicken breasts, skim milk, fruits and vegetables than they do for a general cruise. And they run out of vodka and Diet Coke faster than normal.

Spa services
Take a spa tour the day you board the ship, though you have no intention of ever forking over any money for such frivolity. Find yourself much poorer by the end of the day, though, after suffering through a microdermabrasion procedure that’s not unlike having your face resurfaced by angry sandpaper-wielding poodles.

Entertainment
In addition to the usual shipboard entertainment, your gay cruise organizers will also pack the ship with a range of gay lounge acts, gay stand-up comedians and foul-mouthed drag queens. And then they’ll bring in relatively big-name entertainers. For instance! Charo, who shakes her boobs and sings along shamelessly to her own recorded voice and swears like a Castilian longshoreman. Also! Alec Mapa, the guy who runs the modeling agency with Gabrielle on Desperate Housewives. One more! Joan Rivers, who is not afraid to make fun of everyone—and who is hysterically funnier on script than when she ad libs on the red-carpet shows, though she has a weird habit of pulling her microphone away too early so some of her jokes just disappear into a fog of missed words.

Dancing
There will be dance parties on the ship on most afternoons and every night. There will often be multiple dance parties on some nights, because the gays like their dancing. These dance parties will all have specific, costume-requiring themes, including under the sea, military, Mardi Gras, disco and white. These parties will also take place on the top pool deck under a starry sky and a shimmering moon. Then the sun will come up, and the parties will be moved to an indoor nightclub area so they can go sometimes as late as noon. And if you close your eyes and click your heels three times, you might actually convince yourself that the people who can dance from midnight to noon get all their energy from Diet Coke.

Speaking of chemicals, the people on your cruise will be at their friendliest on the dance floor for some unnamed reason. At the very least, they will insist on knowing your name and where you’re from. And they will request this information while you’re dancing in front of a bank of speakers larger than an industrial refrigerator and louder than a televangelist declaring his heterosexuality.

Making friends
You will hang out with the friends you came with for the first couple days, and then you’ll all scatter to the winds as you meet more and more people on the ship. If you’re lucky like me, you’ll meet up with some really cool guys from some new country called “Canada” who will become your new best friends for life—or at least for the duration of the cruise.

You will also be stopped on the beach in Haiti one day by a blog reader from Manchester, England, who will totally make your day just by recognizing you and saying hello.

Keeping in touch
Before you start your cruise, you will have printed little business cards with your picture, your room number and your phone number/email address contact information, which you will hand to people as you meet them at dinner, the pool, on the dance floor, etc. You will worry that printing only 30 cards will have been a big mistake, though you will honestly distribute only about 10 cards, mostly to the people you came with so they can find your cabin. And you will usually forget to bring your cards with you when you leave your cabin anyway.

Photography
The ship employs photographers who will take pictures of you doing everything you don’t want photographed: chewing food, letting your belly pooch out when you’re in a bathing suit, dancing in a costume that in retrospect makes you look more silly than creative, etc. These photographs will be available for purchase for $10 each in the ship’s photo store. Or you can have them destroyed completely free.

You can also bring your own camera on the cruise, but it will never once occur to you to actually pull it out of your suitcase and use it. This is why it’s good to travel with friends who like to take pictures with their personal cameras that are much better than yours and then post those pictures for you to buy on various photo-sharing sites. Please wait a few days for examples.

Tanning
You will scrupulously slather yourself with SPF 45 every time you go out in the sun all week, except for the last day when you forget to bring it with you and you borrow your friend’s SPF 8. Then you will burn yourself on your upper thighs right where your new foo-foo trendy jeans crease at their pre-bleached crinkles and rub against your skin like an angry poodle wielding a microdermabrasion gun.

Coming home
As if the Miami Marathon didn’t provide enough gridlock when you boarded the ship, some local cultural event called the “Super Bowl” (I think it’s a plumbing fair) will again clog (HA! CLOG!) the streets when you’re fighting your way back to the airport after you leave the ship. In the rain.

You will also wait at the airport with people coming home from other, less fun, cruises—the kinds of cruises where children romp untethered outside their cages and grown women think it’s perfectly acceptable to line their heads with crooked, beaded cornrows to commemorate their afternoon visits to rocky, tourist-infested Caribbean beaches.

You will wear white when you get back to work the next day, simply because you find white to be the best color to go with your office décor. Even though the only white things you own are really quite summery and it’s 900 degrees below zero in Chicago.

Re-entry into polite society
It’s impossible. You will resent lines at the lunch counter. You will silently mock people with no visible sunburn. You will realize at a 1:00 meeting that that’s the hour you usually rolled out of bed for the last whole week. You will question the necessity of females—unless they have unnaturally high hair and suspiciously low voices.

But you will be glad to be home. And you will have already booked the same cruise for next January because you saved a couple hundred bucks by booking it on the ship. Which about pays for your microdermabrasion, which for some reason I keep spelling with an -ian as though it were a new breed of angry Oriental poodle.

And in one year when you take off on your next gay cruise adventure, you’ll have your damn boyfriend with you so you two can share the fun and the excitement and the relaxation and the bleary-eyed exhaustion and the unhealthy body-image issues together. And it will be even better than this year!

Going on vacation is a full-time job

WHEW. As if buying a place and ripping out the closets and having the floors redone and changing addresses on every investment and credit card and magazine and découpage club and all those other new-home obligations weren’t enough to suck my life dry, I’m also leaving tomorrow on a week-long cruise through the Caribbean. And it’s wearing. me. out.

Worst of all, the boyfriend won’t be joining me; this trip was booked and paid for a good six months before we even met. It started when my friend Jeremy invited a handful of friends to come help him celebrate his 30th birthday in the Caribbean sun. Of course, they told two friends … and they told two friends … and suddenly there are at least 20 of us with bottles of Wella Balsam packed into our carry-ons.

And since this is a gay cruise, the basic stress factors—the current rules about toothpaste in carry-ons, the amount of Advil and Immodium and even more embarrassing OTCs I should pack, etc.—are multiplied exponentially. It comes as no surprise that gay men—at least gay men on cruises marketed as giant nautical eating disorders—are hyper-aware of their bodies and how they compare to the bodies around them. And when one is (hypothetically) 38 years old with a new condo to worry about and a busy job and extremely limited time to hit a gym, one’s hypothetical body-comparing anxiousness level has a tendency to grow. Hypothetically.

And then there are the costume parties. It seems that Atlantis, in addition to being the purveyor of gay cruises, is also an active lobbyist for the Federal Every Citizen Must Buy Ten Pieces Of Luggage Act. It’s not enough to bring shorts and tank tops and flip-flops and extra sunscreen on an Atlantis cruise. No! You also have to pack elaborate costumes for parties with the following themes: military, Mardi Gras, under the sea, not pretty enough, del Fuego, disco, not popular enough, and white. The boys in my touring party and I have dug around and found some fun group costumes to wear, but as I ponder the logistics of packing feathered masks and ruffled shirts and soldier boots and white top hats, my lugging-suitcases-to-looking-fabulous cost-benefit analysis takes me way past the point of diminishing returns. The ruffled Mardi Gras shirts we found are pretty cool, and they pack well, so they’re coming along. But the white top hat/waiter coat/bow tie combo is more of a packing liability than a fun way to attend a white party. And since in fashion you’re either in or you’re out …

But! Since the boyfriend didn’t have the foresight to book this trip as my roommate last January even though we weren’t scheduled to meet until July, his punishment involves getting our new floors refinished while I’m gone. Which seems fair to me: As I’m engaged in the exhausting act of holding in my stomach for a week, he will be leisurely getting quotes and coordinating the acts of sanding, staining, refinishing, cleaning and check writing here at home. And when I return, there will be lovely new floors. Just like magic!

In any case, there will most likely be no new posts here until I return on the 4th. So you’ll have to go back and re-read this post every day to tide yourself over. You may want to pace yourself and just read half a paragraph a day to ensure you don’t get bored. And take a break on the 1st to mentally wish my mother a happy 66th birthday.

Be good while I’m gone!

I see towers where there were trees

A lot of things have changed for me in the last few months. Big things:
• New job
• New living arrangement
• New boyfriend (if six months qualifies as “new”)
• New underwear*

*I told myself when I was unemployed that when I finally got a new job, I’d reward myself with some fancy Calvin Klein and/or 2(x)ist underwear. Then I kind of went overboard in my celebratory glee. I think I’m set on underwear for a good five or six years now.

This week is bringing some other new stuff as well. Big stuff. In addition to the new Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo that the boyfriend and I close on this Friday (woo-hoo!), I have also become a member of an entirely new gym.

“Wow,” I can hear you say. “Jake joined a new gym. Alert the media!” I can totally hear you saying that. And frankly, I don’t like your tone.

But as of Friday, I am no longer a member of Crunch, the gym that has been frustrating me on many levels for the last six years. And why did I stay with such a discombobulated organization for so long? (There’s that tone again.) Well, because I used to get a corporate discount. And the gym was in the basement of my office building. And with my work schedule, convenience trumps competence if I’m going to make any gains in the self-absorbed world of physical culture.

But we lost our corporate discount last year. And my rapidly aging bod had developed a marked level of indifference toward every piece of equipment at my Crunch. And when I got laid off and started a new job last fall, my old gym was suddenly in a very inconvenient location.

So I joined a new gym last week. It’s a mere two blocks from the Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo, so it’s very handy. It’s considerably cheaper than my old gym, so it’s practical. It has so many different kinds of equipment, my rapidly aging bod doesn’t stand a chance of getting bored. And it’s populated with actual homosexuals—albeit the kind who pretend not to see you but still surreptitiously check you out in the mirror. Hey, homosexuals! I know how to use a mirror too! So I can totally tell you’re playing little reindeer games!

On the other hand, this gym is also home to veritable herds of Men of a Certain Age who show up every day to throw weights around in a desperate attempt to stay physically relevant in our youth-obsessed culture. My people!

My Crunch membership expired on Friday. But somehow I had it in my head that it expired on Tuesday. So when I showed up bright and early Monday morning for one last futile attempt at getting a pump off their equipment, I discovered I was no longer a valued customer. But the lady behind the desk waived me in anyway. So we are officially parting company on a good note.

And I’m about to get so huge with all this new gym equipment that they won’t even recognize me when I come back to visit.

You say you want a resolution

There is no easier way to set yourself up for documentable failure than to post a list of new year’s resolutions on your blog. When I compare my 2006 goals with my actual 2006 accomplishments, though, I don’t come off as much of an achiever. Then again, I’m not Dubya, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Foley, Tom DeLay, Ted Haggard, Paul Barnes, Rick Santorum or Mel Gibson. Or Britney Spears. So I still feel like a winner.

In any case, here are my 2006 resolutions, followed by relevant quotes from the news reports, police blotters and gossip rags that document their ignoble outcomes:

Take a tap class with some regularity. I took one class in 2006. On Valentine’s Day. Right after doing a massive leg workout. And I was pretty rusty. So the class wasn’t one for the record books. Or the photo albums. But I choreographed a tap number for the chorus Christmas show, so by some definitions I taught a tap class. Does that count?

Practice the piano more / learn a new piano piece from scratch. Oh, my goodness! Is that Brad Pitt over there?

Read ten books. Um … I got three-tenths of the way there:
• American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (Steven Biel) Interesting, but I was hoping for more behind-the-proverbial-scenes information, and this book was more of a look at the sociological impact of the painting on the American Zeitgeist.
• The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) Great story. Sloppy writing. I actually liked the movie much better, if only because it didn’t contain Brown’s clumsy, adjective-laden descriptions of stuff.
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Erik Larson) I was hoping for more gore and less horticulture, but the book was thoroughly engrossing no matter what it was discussing.

Stop saying it’s 2007. I was shooting out 2007s prematurely at this time last year. I learned to stop, and I’m sure you’ll be relieved to learn I’ve had no trouble transitioning back into 2007 mode this week.

Travel someplace fun. In 2006, I hit Disney World twice, Iowa many times, Indianapolis, a couple Chicago suburbs … and I went on tons of business trips to New York City, the Twin Cities and even Cleveland. And it was all fun.

Decide once and for all if I’m on the right career path. And then follow up on that decision. Wow. THAT problem kind of solved itself this year. (For those of you just joining us, my career path this year went from boredom and frustration to layoffs to unemployment to a new job (in the same industry) that I really, really love.)

Keep shooting for my four-hour marathon goal. Yeah. I’m almost certain that’s Brad Pitt over there.

Find a bigger condo. Check. Now that I’ve survived more than three months of New Construction Purgatory and Bad Developer Smackdown and I’m in the middle of Negligent Property Owner Negotiation, the boyfriend and I should be happily ensconced in our Two Bathroomed One Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo by the end of January. Please.

Add at least five pounds of muscle to my upper body. Brad! Over here! I saved you a seat! (Move over everyone! Brad Pitt is joining us!)

I got shushed!

I’ve been getting up at some godawful hour every morning to trudge to the gym before work. Because with the new job and the awesome boyfriend, it’s the only time I can guarantee myself a workout. And if I don’t get my regular workouts in, I feel both fat and skinny. Which makes me irritable. And nobody likes to be around a fat, skinny irritable guy. Least of all me.

I have a bit of a head cold, so I wasn’t in the mood for anything super exertiony this morning. So I worked my core: abs, obliques and lower back. Lower-back exercises are pretty much limited to hyperextensions, where you balance the front of your hips on a little ledge and raise and lower your torso with a weight hugged to your chest. Someone from a smarter sexual orientation might think ahead and realize that repeatedly swinging your head above and below your heart when it’s full of snot would be perhaps a really stupid thing to do, but some of us gay types place tight little waists (or at least the pursuit of tight little waists) over sinus comfort on any hierarchy of importance.

I have no idea why I just gave you a belabored explanation of hyperextensions, but meandering off topic seems to be a hobby of mine. In any case, I was at the hyperextension bench this morning when a woman came up to me and started talking to me as though she knew me. And I had no clue who she was—most likely because she had on a baseball cap and no makeup and it was morning and I was bleary-eyed and snot-headed and I’d just done 20 hyperextensions. And I was a gay and she was a girl and all girls pretty much look the same to me. But we started talking and—like anyone who has a conversation at Crunch—we had to kind of yell over the loud thump-thump music Crunch seems to view as a basic fitness requirement.

So as we were chatting, some woman with her back to us on a stair-stepper at least 10 yards away started yelling something shush-y over her shoulder in the general direction of us and/or the entire western half of the gym. The woman was one of those working-out-is-an-event types: coordinated outfits instead of workout gear, an obvious application of hair and skin products even for a pre-dawn workout, and stacks of fashion magazines as standard-issue cardio tools. She had a bank of TVs in her face, a thump-thump speaker right over her head, a whirring stair-stepper under her feet and a Cosmo spread out on the reading stand in front of her. And yet our very top-line conversation (remember, I had no clue who my conversation companion was, so it’s not like the stuff we were talking about was interesting enough even to distract Dubya from his animal flash cards) was distracting her to the point of shushing faraway strangers speaking at a volume not unlike any other she’d hear in a loud gym.

On the other hand, my conversation companion was so engrossed in our non-conversation that she didn’t even notice the shush fascist. And, apparently happy with the interaction we’d just shared, she eventually said her good-byes and sauntered off to the rest of her workout. I tried to shoot the shush fascist a look that said both holy shit are you in need of a good slapping and your shoes SO don’t match your headband, but she had gotten herself caught up in one of those 20 Insignificant-To-The-Rest-Of-The-World Things He Does That Are Nevertheless Grounds For Divorce Cosmo articles, so she didn’t notice.

And I made a point to grunt through my last 10 hyperextensions. Which is surprisingly hard to do with a head full of snot.

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 …

I feel an eating disorder coming on

My neighborhood is pretty devoid of life. We have lots of high-rise and mid-rise multi-family dwellings, so we’re theoretically packed with people. We have a dry cleaner and two banks and two storefront convenience stores and a whole grocery store and a Curves and a dentist and two restaurants and an Enterprise (who promises to pick us up) and we’re a block from the friggin’ beach, so we’re theoretically a hotbed of potential sidewalk culture.

But the people I see on our sidewalks are few and far between. And they’re usually clustered at the bus stops.

Oh, yeah. We have bus stops. Lots of them. One on every corner.

And each of our fancy new Chicago bus stops includes room for two six-foot-tall backlit advertisements.

And the two neighborhood bus stops I walk by the most are covered in six-foot-tall backlit abs. Sexy, flat, rippled, hunka-hunka-burnin’ man abs that taunt me every time I just try to go about my everyday, relatively-nice-abbed business:


Full disclosure: Google couldn’t find me the exact Equinox ad from my neighborhood bus stop and I was too lazy to go take a picture of it myself, so the Jeremy Bloom image on the left is merely proxy abs.

And while the image on the right isn’t supposed to inspire me to do everything in my power to achieve a body like the one the model is sportin’, the whole no-meth message is lost on me the moment I lay eyes on his sixpack. And by the time my eyes have traveled slowly up to his soft, perky man nipples, I find myself wanting whatever magic substance he’s using to achieve such ripped masculine charms. So: not the best choices by the ad agency.

In any case, this daily, two-pronged absault (HA! ABSAULT!) makes me want to renounce my four-pound jars of Jif and devote my life to the worship of Dysmorphia, the bitch goddess of ridiculous self-image issues.

Which, in some ways, has helped keep me pretty honest in my gonna-be-half-naked-on-stage-in-April workout and diet regimen. Seriously! A trainer at my gym helped me revamp my workout in January, and it’s kept me in a constant feel-the-burn, watch-the-muscles-grow state since then. And I’ve kept my EZ-Bake Oven fired up to cook all kinds of vegetables and egg whites and lean-cut meats, and I’ve been satisfying my insatiable sweet tooth with fresh fruits and sparkling waters and skim-milk puddings. (This diet tastes better than it sounds. Honest.) And everyone knows that low fat + high protein + good calories + ass-kicking workouts = abtastic results. Right?

Right?

Well, kind of. While my abs stubbornly remain more ironing board than washboard—which is infinitely better than washtub—my legs and shoulders are showing gradual improvements … enough that two people have complimented me on them in the last week alone. And I didn’t even have to pay them.

In summary: I’m in no danger of dating becoming an Equinox model or killing a crystal meth poster child in my basement. I actually love plain, unflavored steamed vegetables. Jeremy Bloom and the guy he's proxying make me feel fat. In more than one place. And Dysmorphia Pudding would make a great drag name.

Getting back

So I read this article that listed 10 ways to exercise when you think you have no time. Some of the ideas I’ve been doing for years, like taking the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator. Some of the ideas are a little out there, like doing calf raises while you brush your teeth. (I actually walk around the house while I brush my teeth; I’d read on some other list* that it makes you brush longer so you do a better job of cleaning.)

* There was no word on the physical benefits of endless list-reading.

And one idea struck me as kind of fun: doing butt clenches while you’re standing on the train or bus. I am a natural buttless wonder, and anything that could firm and tone my sagging assets (HA!) while I was being otherwise unproductive sounded like it might be a good idea.

So I’ve been trying it for the last week. Please don’t laugh.

The list included no instructions, so I’ve had to make it up as I go along. And I’ve discovered there are two ways to flex your butt muscles: the way that kinda forces your knees to go out to your sides and the way that kinda forces your butt to expand to the back. Assuming you have any butt to expand to the back.

So I’ve been standing nonchalantly on the bus every night, trying to look like I’m engrossed in my New Yorker or in the fascinating world outside the window, and alternately squeezing and pursing my sad little mancheeks: knees out, butt back, knees out, butt back!

And sometimes I just hold one of the squeezes for as long as I can stand it, doing the fabled isometric exercises I learned so much about from the Charles Atlas ads in the backs of the comic books I bought as a kid just so I could stare at the Charles Atlas ads.

And all the while I’ve been doing this, my ears have been on high alert for the sounds of giggling or pointing or—worst of all—the accusations of nosy children: Mommy! That man’s butt is moving! Does he have angry chipmunks in his pants?

And I’ll be damned, but it seems to be working. I have yet to develop one of those cantilevered melonbutts you see on the bodybuilders these days, but I do feel an ongoing burning sensation. And it’s the kind of burning sensation you actually want to have in your underpants region.

I took no “before” pictures to chart my progress. Mostly because 1) it’s almost impossible to take a decent picture of your own butt and 2) I really don’t see a compelling reason to record an image of the poor little thing for posterity. (HA! Posterity!)

But believe me: If my butt gets firm and round and toned and able to crush a chipmunk skull in one squeeze, I will so be showing you pictures of it.

Just as soon as I get caught up on my New Yorkers.

I have always been a skinny person.

I graduated from high school at 6'1" and 155 pounds, and I graduated from college four years later at 6'1" and 155 pounds. Tired of being ignored by the guys I was attracted to, I joined a gym soon after graduation. Then I was a skinny person who worked out obsessively five days a week. I slowly bulked up, but I have never become much more than a skinny person who filled out a shirt a little bit better than before.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to laugh at my horrifying skinniness. And then to laugh even harder at my pathetic attempts to hang out with hot guys pretend I was some kind of athlete by joining my high-school gymnastics team.

And nobody is better at gymnastics than a bag of bones. Especially a bag of bones with no gymnastics training.

In 1982, I became a freshman. At the time, freshmen were the big kids at the junior high school instead of the little kids at the high school in my home town. There had been some kind of join-the-gymnastics-team recruitment demonstration at a junior-high assembly that year, and my delusional little mind somehow reached the conclusion that competitive high-school gymnastics was something I should really get involved in.

And, for some reason, they let me in.

The team was small that year, but it comprised some really good gymnasts. And me. And while the other guys spent our afternoon workouts perfecting their tumbling routines and swinging majestically over the high bar and soaring over the vault without aborting in midair like big girls, I putzed around on the one piece of equipment where they planted me because we really needed another body to compete on it: the pommel horse.

After the rings, the pommel horse is the only piece of equipment that requires tremendous upper-body strength and almost no visible shoulder bones when you’re wearing a droopy gymnastics leotard tank top. And I was just as bad on them as you’d expect. Especially because I had no idea what I was doing.

I actually competed on the pommel horse in every meet we went to, though. And I always got a courtesy score, which is a nice way of telling you you suck but you get a nice 2.0 (or maybe it was a 3.0) anyway so you can head home to your parents with some shred of dignity.

But enough about me and my dubious talents. I have a picture of the team:

I am on the bottom left, for those of you who really can’t tell. See that boy sitting to my left? Biggest. Crush. Ever. See the boy in the bottom right? He came in a close second in Jake’s Gymnastics Crushoff. (Both of them were seniors, though. Popular seniors. And I was SO not on their radar.)

Here’s another picture of us, the moment we they actually won the state championship:

Take another look at my arms. Are those the arms of a gymnast? Are they even the arms of anything bigger than a cockroach?

Ironically, though, my presence on that state-winning team actually earned me a JV letter—before I even physically attended my high school. That’s right, bitches—I’m a letterman.

The next year—not having fully absorbed my lesson in humility and droopy leotards—I went out for gymnastics again. Unfortunately, our dreamy superstar seniors had all graduated, and our remaining superstars weren’t enough to carry us to state victory again. And, of course, I hadn’t bothered to look into any kind of ongoing gymnastics training over the summer.

Notice once again what a non-athlete I look like in our team photo. And check out my wrist wraps! They’re code for Jake means business. Just as soon as he irons the unsightly wrinkles out of his special pants.


Fortunately, the Iowa high-school gymnastics program was killed the next year, saving me a mountain of embarrassment—and clearing up my evenings for more productive things. Like dance rehearsals.

And my post-graduation gym workouts eventually beefed me up from 151 pounds to a peak of 201 pounds and back down to a 190–195 range, where I currently stay.

And I just met with a new trainer today, who revamped my entire workout and kicked my droopy-pantsed ass. I just may look like a gymnast by summer.

January adventures

1) I cooked dinner for The Cuddler last night. And I didn’t burn it. (The funny thing is he actually watched me cook—with great intensity—as though I knew what I was doing and he might learn something. The joke’s on him, though; I can make exactly three things—all of which usually turn out dry and tasteless—and he’ll get nothing but disappointment if he’s looking to me for a culinary education.) After dinner, he indulged me in my newest obsession: an hour on the couch wrapped—BONUS!—in each other’s arms watching CSI. So you can tell right there he’s good people.

2) I’ve seen some amazing stuff on stage in the last few days. Last week Eric and I got comp tickets to see Dance Chicago, a festival of the best work by the best companies in the city. I am now madly in love with Melissa Thodos & Dancers, especially their works choreographed by Paul Christiano, who uses bodies both as props and as instruments of expression—all with a bold, breathtaking synergy of kinetic energy and poetry. The show also featured some kick-ass, bone-rattling, pound-the-floorboards tap by M.A.D.D. Rhythms. Tap rocks. Especially the way this group does it.

Then this week Matt and I saw All Shook Up, a cheesy musical working its way to Broadway next month. A blatant ripoff of the Mama Mia! format—a silly story written to string together a canon of unrelated songs by one artist (in this case, Elvis instead of ABBA)—the show is eminently predictable, sillier than most but a whole lot of fun. And it features some fabulous sets and powerhouse singing, especially from this handsome fella, whose golden voice is eclipsed only by the piercing beauty of his eyes.

3) I take off Wednesday morning for five days in Iowa with my family. On the docket for this visit: spending a day with my nephew’s kindergarten class, watching my niece’s hit-buckets-with-spoons music class, hours and hours of canasta with any available adult, quality lap time with either of two very friendly kittens, Mom’s home cooking (which, unlike mine, has actual flavor), and a stop at my favorite grocery store (what kind of freak has a favorite grocery store?) on the way home to stock up on milk that costs less than $4 a gallon.

4) The lipo is healing better than I’d expected. I’m happy with the results as they are now, and my doctor says there’s still two more months for the “considerable” swelling to go down. So my waist is only going to get smaller. (But I’m not breaking out the International Male catalogs until I know just what my new measurements will be.) I consider myself fully healed, save for a tiny bit of tightness and some residual numbness around my midsection, and I’m working out at about 90% intensity. The best part: My sad little butt looks almost … butt-like now that it’s not hidden under a gooey pile of love handles.

5) I’m choreographing some numbers for a drag show (January 29 around 8 pm at Hydrate, if you want to go) that’s a fund-raiser for the Chicago Spirit Brigade. My dancers are working their butts off and looking pretty fierce—and the go-go boys backing up one of the numbers are smokin’ hot. And I can make them do whatever touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things I want because I am the all-powerful choreographer! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

6) I just wrote my name in the snow.

Guess what I'm not wearing today:

1) Pants
2) My grandmother's lacy underthings
3) John Ashcroft's sweaty wifebeater that I got on eBay for $17 (a steal!)
4) My freakin' lipo girdle

If you guessed 1 or 2, you're weird. But in a killing hookers in the basement fun kind of way. If you guessed 3, please never read my blog again.

If you guessed 4, you are hereby invited to celebrate a lifetime of ungirdled freedom with me. Woo-hoo!

I just got back from my 11-day checkup—the one where the doctor is supposed to tell me I'm healing nicely but I need to keep squeezing my kidneys down into my rectum wearing the girdle for another week. But instead, he said I'm healing nicely and I am hereby allowed to celebrate life with my tits to the wind (that's just an expression, for the record—I don't actually have tits and if I did I wouldn't let them flap in the wind because it might hurt innocent passers-by attract amorous lesbians and they can be harder to get rid of than fundamentalists and once you have an infestation of either there goes the neighborhood because suddenly it's all flannel and Dockers everywhere you look and you start to feel out of place in your discount couture and god knows nobody wants that) and he doesn't want to see my bruisy, swollen ass again for two months.

So I marched triumphantly—albeit slightly unsteadily since my core muscles had forgotten how to hold me up during the evil Girdle Regime of 2005—out the door and into the street. And I came straight home to blog about it since I have no actual human friends who want to hang out with me to park myself in front of a TiVo hard drive packed with CSI reruns since I have no actual human friends who want to hang out with me.

I also have full permission to head back to the gym but I've decided I like being lazy and I'm going to lounge around and see if I can regrow all that fat which I plan to do tomorrow over lunch. Though I don't think I want to change my shirt in the locker room just yet; my bare midsection is still a little disconcerting to behold—even for the pervy homos who think nobody can tell they're gay straight guys.

In the mean time I'm left to contemplate just how freakin' hairy my tummy gets when I don't shave it. (I've been shaving everything but a saucy little trail that leads south from my belly button for at least 10 years, and I'd forgotten what a teddy bear I'm capable of being. But I didn't shave for a couple weeks before the surgery to pre-empt any itching issues. And I'm not shaving any time in the near future because now my tummy's kind of like that science experiment you did in third grade where you rubbed a piece of Wonder bread on the dusty blinds ostensibly to make mold grow but more likely because the janitor was too lazy to clean the blinds himself because he was busy killing hookers in the basement and I'm curious to see how hairy it actually gets.)

Anyway, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Jake's gonna finally stop bitching about his freakin' girdle Jake's gonna finally stop bitching about his freakin' girdle. Although, given the shaky state of his core muscles at the moment, your sigh will most likely be louder than his.