Goodbye, Dolly!

And goodbye, $200-each-month storage unit!

And hello, $2,400-each-year-sudden-windfall-liquidity! Let’s go to Paris!

Exhibit A

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 ...

BY AGE 50 YOU WILL ALSO HAVE:

* Bags of plastic bags hanging on the back doorknob

I’m still writing B.C. on my checks

I’m still writing B.C. on my checks. And I’m not even sure I’m Y2K compliant. New Years are rough for me.

I got 40 quarters last night to put in my super-masc quarter cup so I have them handy—and pretty—for our the honor-system pop fridge at work.

Also: We use the Chicago Manual of Style at Nordstrom, but I’m a lifelong AP Style guy so I brought in my AP Stylebook to keep it real. CMOS gives me the hives.

Exhibit A

My deductible-overpayment refund finally showed the hell up in the mail

If the idiots at the insurance company hadn’t been so criminally negligent to overcharge me in the first place, this wouldn’t have even been an issue. It’s highway robbery!

But at least now I can catch up on my other bills ... assuming they aren’t overcharging me too ...

It should not take:

* A password change
* A security question change
* A hide-and-seek link on the website
* A sudden requirement to download an app
* A five-minute wait for the app to download an upgrade
* A Digital Security Device activation code sent via text
* A Digital Security Device activation code sent via email
* A message with a little red stop sign saying that my account online activity has been suspended
* A phone call
* A third Digital Security Device activation code sent via text
* A customer service rep named "Dave" who asks me how to pronounce "Iowa"
* A four-business-day wait
* Plus a seven-day wait for my check

To close an untouched-for-eight-years online account with a balance of $107.69.

HSBC: You suck.

Earning interest

I just had my annual review with my financial advisor, and he’s mapped out a number of highly plausible scenarios where as long as I meet certain milestones regarding retirement and Social Security I’ll be able to live comfortably until I’m 92, which is awesome because 92 WHAT THE HELL 92 I DON’T WANT TO LIVE TO BE 92 ACK KILL ME NOW INSTEAD NOW NOW NOW!

Then I came home to Bitch Kitty shifting her feline wiles into ovpurrdrive trying to get me to come close to her and let my guard down under the pretense of getting to rub her irresistibly furry tummy and finally be her friend only so she could shatter my illusions of mammal-kingdom self-worth by abruptly hissing at me and ripping my veins out. Which would at least save me from living to be 92.

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 resolution: Stop spending money

Especially on stuff. We have plenty of stuff. Too much stuff. We don’t need more stuff. Besides, our addiction to gym memberships and personal trainers is quickly slimming down our financial reserves while it slowly (oh, so slowly) bulks up our vanity muscles. But we’re not about to abandon our dreams of being huge, so we’re gonna slash the budgets for our other household departments. Like our bloated Department of Stuff.

Corollary: Drink up all the half-finished buckets of protein shake powder in our Cupboard of Delusions before we buy any more:
I’m amazed how quickly we’ve managed to accumulate so many not-quite-empty buckets of protein shake powder. You’d think we’d finish one, then buy another, finish it, then buy another, etc. ad nauseam. But you’d be wrong. Because ad nauseam is not just a hard-to-spell-correctly Latin expression. No matter how delicious (or revolting) we find a certain flavor or brand of protein shake, it eventually makes us gag. So we move on to something different for a while. Etc. Ad nauseam. And all that nausea eventually leads us to ad more buckets of half-finished protein shake powder to our collection. Ad! Nauseam!

Corollary: Use up all the lotions and soaps and other tools of our ablutions that are accumulating in our little medicine cabinet before we buy any more:
This accumulation is more insidious than the protein shakes. When you’re a gay man of a certain age, people buy you fancy soaps and lotions as gifts. Or you get them free when you make large purchases of soaps and lotions—which we all do—at fancy soaps and lotions stores. Or you simply steal them from hotels. And so the pile grows. But! It’s currently dry skin season, so my dirty, thirsty dermis will be absorbing the stuff in our cupboard with unprecedented levels of greed over the next few months. And I should emerge on the other side of winter with cleaner, softer skin and way more storage in our bathroom.

Caveat: Buy more stuff. I made a list of all the stuff I still intend to buy in the new year. And it’s not pretty. And quite a bit of it is not terribly optional. To wit:

• Fireplace mantle
• Gas fireplace insert
• Living room valances
• Living room rug
• Four dimmer switches
• Front door soundproofing
• Door knocker that doesn’t look like a dog penis
• Tattoo that doesn't look like Newt Gingrich*
  
• Master bedroom valances
• Master bedroom dresser
• Master bathroom renovation
• Guest bedroom stencils
• Guest bedroom curtains
• Guest bedroom nightstand
• Guest bedroom stripper pole*
• Dining room curtains
• Dining room chair upholstery
• Kitchen sink disposal
• Kitchen sink water heater
• MacBook Pro
• iPhone
• Your grandma’s underpants*
• Wiper blades for my car
• Airfare/hotel for the cruise
• 13.1 Marathon registration
• Rock ’n’ Roll Half Marathon registration
• Chicago Half Marathon registration
• New York City Marathon registration
• Airfare/hotel for New York City Marathon
• Six gallons of premium cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, one giant spoon and a hammer to beat away anyone who wants to share*

* I just put that in to see if you were still reading

Could you just DYE?

This weekend, the domestic partner and I are taking our friends Matthew and Craig to my hometown to give them a tour of some of the haunts of Grant Wood, who is most famous for teaching art at the high school that was later attended by a certain Chicago blogger with a readership in the tens if not the fifteens but who is also also (much less) famous for painting American Gothic.

While we're there, we'll also be attending my sister's annual Halloween gala, which is normally attended entirely by heterosexual parents of pre-teens. The four of us wanted to make a splash as the token homosexuals, but we're far too lazy to dress up as The Golden Girls or the Sex and the City girls or anything for that matter that involves the word girls and/or frighteningly large high-heeled shoes. I thought it would be fun to go as a boy band (mostly because I wanted an excuse to get another tattoo) but nobody was down with that idea, yo. Then I suggested The Costume Idea That Everyone Loved But Me: the Australian singing sensation known as The Wiggles. Or, for those of you who aren't pre-teens or parents of pre-teens, these dorks:
On the plus side, everyone at the party, being parents of pre-teens, will know EXACTLY who we are, especially once I print four copies of the Wiggles logo to put on our shirts. On the even pluser side, the costumes look pretty easy; they're just black pants and mock turtlenecks in basic, easy-to-find colors, right?

WRONG. Mock turtlenecks—at least the ones that fit adult men–come in two colors in the United States: generic earth tone and white. But! The white ones we found are 100% cotton, so we can dye them, right?

WRONG. Apparently Chicago has fallen victim to the powerful anti-dye lobby, because I have been to the following stores this weekend and none of them carries any damn dye: CVS, Jewel, Dominick's, Whole Foods, Target, Home Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Walgreens, Walgreens, Walgreens (there are lots of Walgreens in Chicago ... just no Walgreens with any damn dye).

But! My sister reports that she found some dye in Cedar Rapids, so we'll be dying our shirts once we get there this weekend, just in time for the party.

Also but! We didn't feel like sewing all that colored piping onto our black dress pants, so while I was at Home Depot I got a package of colored electricians' tape. Unfortunately, it doesn't come in teal (or the purple option we found in some other Wiggles photos), so one of us will have to be a green Wiggle.

Speaking of green, every year on our emploanniversaries, my company gives us each a $100 bill for every year we've worked there. So I just got an envelope with two crisp $100 bills in it. I put the bills in my wallet and got to work fantasizing about all the fun, frivolous things (Shoes! Halloween decorations!) I was going to buy this weekend with my bounty. Besides some damn dye, I mean.

So imagine my crestfallenness, then, when I reached in my wallet at DSW on Saturday to find ... only one $100 bill. I have no idea where the other one went. Maybe I gave it to a cabbie thinking it was just a $20. Maybe I was robbed by a thief in the night who just took one bill out of my wallet and left everything else of value in the entire house. Maybe I spent it on something I have no recollection of. In any case, it's gone. But it's not like it was really mine, so while I'm disappointed it disappeared, I'm not destroyed by it.

In other words, it's not like losing it is gonna make me dye. At least not until we get to Cedar Rapids.

Divisible by eight

One hundred and twenty
The surprise refund I got (or, technically, have been promised will be deposited in my checking account) from the IRS last week. As you may recall, in April I got a letter from the IRS informing me I owed them almost $5,000 in unpaid taxes, fees and interest on the more than two-year-old rollover of some underperforming mutual funds into an IRA account. Three weeks, 100+ pages of cost-basis documentation and $600 in tax attorney fees later, I sent a check to the IRS for $1,100—along with a couple pages of detailed tax-attorney math—instead. And last week—FINALLY—the speed demons at the IRS sent me a letter informing me that I'd in fact overpaid and I should be expecting a $120 deposit in my checking account sometime in the next century. Which, if you're going to get a delinquency letter from the IRS, is the best kind to get.

Sixteen
The number of miles we ran Saturday morning. And by "ran" I mean "staggered pathetically through." As always, I blame the heat. But not as always, I wasn't the only one who choked.

Here is my pace group before the run, filled with confidence and innocence and hope:

Here we are around mile 7, when I'd started falling back so much that people felt compelled to run back and get me:


Here's Matthew coming out of the bathroom near our turnaround. I'm including the picture here because Matthew thinks he looks good in it. And because Matthew totally went potty!

And here's a picture of our finishers. Notice who's not among them. I mean besides Dick Cheney:

At our turnaround, I decided to run at a pace I could handle and wait for a slower pace group to catch up with me so I could join them. Unfortunately, I discovered I couldn't keep up with three successively slower pace groups. So I plugged along and ran the last five miles on my own. I did finish, but I clocked in a good half an hour behind my peeps.

One half
The number of my nipples that started chafing before the run was over. I have always been the miracle boy who never sweats and rarely has chafing issues ... and suddenly on top of my exhaustion, discomfort and prolonged wall-hitting Saturday morning, my right nipple started to feel like it was about to be rubbed bloody by my shirt. I'm sure part of the problem is my nipples were laser-hard in my last mile ... along with the goose-bumpy skin all over the rest of my body as I started into the early stages of heat exhaustion. But I was also wearing a moisture-wicking running shirt that was dripping with sweat and water. And—to me, at least—moisture-wicking shirts are more scratchy and irritating than cotton. Which is as welcome as a gay in a Vatican bathhouse among true runner circles. But I like the gays, so I usually run in cotton.

In any case, I took my shirt off for the last mile, something I haven't done since 1) I turned 40 and 2) I started wearing a heart monitor, which I think looks as ridiculous as a divorced Republican presidential candidate at a "family values" rally. Of course, Matthew was waiting at the finish line with his camera, so now there's a photographic record of what I look like with a broken headlight and an electric chair restraint holding up my moobs:

Adult math

So I sold some decade-old, underperforming mutual funds in February 2006 and rolled what I got out of them into an IRA.

And either I made some grand assumptions about IRA tax exemptions or my investment guy didn’t fully explain the tax ramifications of selling mutual funds (or some combination of the two), but I never declared the income on the sale.

In my defense, I honestly don’t think I received the 1099s on the mutual funds a year later when it was time to do my 2006 taxes. And since I wasn’t expecting them, I certainly didn’t look for them. Besides, some 1099s are buried in other statements and are easy to miss. Pet peeve!

Imagine my surprise, then, when a couple months ago I got a letter from the IRS—right as this year’s tax season was heating up, natch—demanding $4,749 in back taxes, interest and penalties on the undeclared income. ACK! How am I supposed to pay for shoes now? And show tunes? And firearms?

Never one to panic, I assumed the whole thing was a mixup and I did not, in fact, need to write a check to the government for almost five thousand dollars. Kind of like the time 20 years ago when I got a summons to appear in court to explain my delinquency from traffic school because someone with a license plate one digit different from mine had been cited for an improper lane change and the violation had not only been entered in some database with my license plate number BUT! it had also been mistakenly entered three times and apparently three improper lane changes makes you some devil-in-a-domestic-partnership threat to society. Improper lane changes: the gateway drug to puppy-kicking, child-eating and Huckabee-licking.

Whew! Where was I? Oh, yes: Deal or no Deal has to be the stupidest show on television. Almost as stupid as John Hagee’s unhinged rants about Hurricane Katrina being his god’s punishment for gay stuff. His god who, despite his celebrated powers of omnipotence, obviously has terrible aim since the hurricane left the gay neighborhoods of New Orleans high and dry while it destroyed the poor and black neighborhoods. But apparently facts aren’t all that necessary when you’re a goat-blower who blames the gays for things in a frantic effort to distract people from your goat-ball breath.

Dang. Once again I’ve wandered off topic. Blame the gays! Oh, wait: I was in the middle of explaining why I was pretty sure I didn’t owe the IRS five thousand dollars. It was because the IRS waited a whole two years to contact me about it, and I’d kind of forgotten it had even happened.

But a full three or four hours of phone calls and emails and more phone calls later, I had a good 150 pages of information about the original purchases and subsequent sales of the mutual funds in question. Then I dumped it all on the desk of a tax accountant, who pored through everything and worked his cost-basis magic and finally this morning came up for air with two conclusions: 1) the mutual funds were really, really sucking when I finally sold them and 2) based on the actual losses I incurred, I really owe the IRS a mere (by comparison) $1,168 in taxes, interest and penalties. Which, according to my dubious math skills, is 66% less, or roughly one week’s worth of shoes.

So let this be a lesson to you all: shitty mutual funds + poorly explained tax ramifications = scofflaw. Also: IRS math = never in your favor. One more: tax accountant = lucrative gig. Stay in school, kids!

Who’s butch NOW?

I just bet $11 in an office Splendid Bowl pool. Apparently the Splendid Bowl is some kind of sporting event that will be happening this weekend while I’m busy folding and ironing doll panties or whatever it is I do on the weekends.

And now I’m flush with Splendid Bowl FEVER! I hope my team wins!

The Noble Experiment Ends

Fifteen years ago, a young citizen emerged, bright-eyed and optimistic, from the ivory towers of higher academia and wandered out into the world to seek his fortune. Thanks to scholarships, miserly careful spending and sometimes up to three concurrent part-time jobs, he’d managed to make it through four years of college (and a misguided semester of grad school) with no loans and a small pile of money in the bank.

It was the dawn of the first Bush presidency, though, and eight years of Reaganomics had left no suitable jobs that were worthy of our hero’s august credentials. Indeed, our hero’s local paper, which usually featured a good 10 or 15 pages of job openings, offered only one page of jobs for most of the first year of his bachelor’s-degreed existence. Our hero had to fight to land a job as a waiter that first summer … and he had to live his first few years out of college with his parents. But that’s not really the point of our story.

The point is this: Our hero was going to be RICH and HAPPY and have a fulfilling career and a fabulous boyfriend and maybe write a semi-popular blog just as soon as blogs got invented.

But it takes money to make money, and our hero was determined to start early with his investing. So, acting on a hot tip from a rich friend with a distractingly round butt, our intrepid hero bought $377.31 worth of stock (including a $43.93 commission) in an up-and-coming company that developed disposable surgical supplies. The wave of the future!

But disposable surgical supplies never managed to capture medical consumers’ imagination, and the up-and-coming company spent the next decade bouncing around from merger to buyout, devolving from promising superpower to parts-is-parts corporate jetsam.

And one day, our hero woke up to news about a company called Tyco whose corrupt CEO and CFO had been shamelessly and quite conspicuously robbing the company and its investors blind … and our hero suddenly realized that—thanks to all those corporate buyouts—he was now one of those bilked investors.

And thanks to his minuscule initial investment, our hero owned a mere six shares of Tyco, which over the years earned him quarterly dividends that ranged anywhere from 8¢ to 60¢. And—thinking back to that original $43.93 commission (in 1992 dollars)—our hero believed that selling off his meager holdings would involve modern commissions completely eclipsing whatever value remained in his initial investment.

Until.

Until last week, when our hero casually mentioned his predicament to his investment advisor, who casually mentioned that the current investment company would probably buy back his meager holdings with only minimal feeage.

And when our hero called the 800 number and navigated clumsily through the frustrating voice-activation menu, he learned his investment advisor had been right! For a mere $15 selling fee (plus a bonus commission of 10¢ a share plus certified postage of $8.37), he could cut his losses, be free of the embarrassing stocks and laughable dividend checks, and probably see about $150 in cash within a few weeks.

Which is still a net loss of $225 (before inflation), but our hero trusts that the loss will also include some modest benefit on his tax return, which is always better than a kick in the pants and a case of the clap.

And thus our hero’s noble experiment ends. His lesson? Rich friends with cute butts do not investment advisors make. Plus: Well-managed mutual funds, diversified IRAs and licensed investment advisors can help you grow your wealth steadily and reliably. And jettison bad investments with minimal financial impact.