Vocabulary quiz

My cute little hexagonal-column knickknack pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my knickknack shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney knickknacks on them and how many times can I say knickknacks in one sentence?

OR:

My cute little hexagonal-column objets d’art pedestals arrived today and I organized them in artful clusters on my objets d’art shelf and then carefully displayed my carefully curated running and theater and Disney objets d’art on them and how many times can I say objets d’art in one sentence?

Mind the gap

When the contractor you hired to rebuild your bathroom from the studs out after a completely disgusting sewer backup all but destroyed your basement five years ago got his certification out of a gumball machine and the baseboards soon warp away from the walls like a trump from reality and now you have to tape the walls and hope your leftover white painters’ caulk matches the baseboard paint and that you have enough to fill the gaping chasms but the cement-griege wall color you picked still awesomely makes the bathroom look like a European Zen spa so at least there’s that.

Goodnight, Jakey

When you turn down two invitations to post-performance get-togethers because you’re exhausted and in dire need to sleep but you grab an ice-cold sparkling water when you get home and turn on your Roku YouTube channel just to unwind for a few minutes and then you get sucked into a vortex of Vox education videos and Dancing Through My Broadway Résumé profiles and now it’s freaking 4:00 am and WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH MY SENSE OF GOOD JUDGEMENT but through it all your show hair has stayed faithfully on point.

Look, I made a run-on sentence

When you’re taking a rehearsal break and your Hello, Dolly! rehearsal hat that totally doesn’t fit ESPECIALLY totally doesn’t fit when you’re lying on the floor but it’s on the same blue-tone colorway spectrum as your shirt and it’s sitting on your head like you’re a Fosse Pilgrim and that’s coincidentally your band name and you need a photo for your eponymous album cover anyway so here we are.

Beware the wiles of Bitch Kitty ...

This is the little game we play: She waits by the top of the basement stairs for me. I approach her cautiously from the other side of the planet. She growls lowly like a power drill without enough torque. I casually creep closer without making eye contact, as though all of my interest lies with a random sock that fell out of the laundry pile near her. She amps up her growling to sound more like a Kitchen Aid mixer struggling with its dough hook and a particularly hearty bread recipe. I make eye contact. She makes eye contact. I slowly, s l o w l y, begin the process of maybe kind of thinking about someday possibly squatting in her general vicinity to facilitate the hypothetical scratching of her ears. She shifts her growling into third gear, this time sounding like a vacuum with a strip of raffia stuck in its roller during post-Christmas clean-up. I get brutally murdered by a suspiciously nearby surgeon who promptly disarticulates my arms, rendering me profoundly incapable of living, breathing or furry-ear scratching. She shifts into overdrive, sounding almost exactly like the steamroller that all-too-conveniently appears from behind the aforementioned laundry sock to crush my disarticulated remains flatter than the aforementioned bread, which, in my selfish hurry to pet her, I completely forgot to do the part where you fold in the yeast and let the dough rise for three hours. I softly sing "Nothing's gonna harm you. Not while I'm around," which, through the restorative power of show tunes, revives me and rearticulates my arms. She rolls onto her back and does that adorable Fosse thing with her front paws (pictured here), all of which is the international symbol for "I trust you and I unconditionally love you so I'm showing you my vulnerable underbelly in the expectation you'll stop what you're doing and come rub it nonstop until President Pete takes office." I, blithely trusting her yet again, reach out tenderly, gingerly and gratefully to overcome my crippling yet understandable trust issues and finally—FINALLY—rub her soft, furry tummy in servile gratitude. She draws me in with her calculating eyes and her deceitful body language. I, emotionally scarred and spiritually broken by years of this unceasing abuse, finally—FINALLY—make finger-to-tip-of-tummy-furcontact, tears of grateful joy and social acceptance streaming down my face like healing waters spilling forth from the nose of a centuries-old Madonna statue in an Italian grotto. She, once again reaching the triumphant climax of our emotional Grand Guignol, rolls away from me, hisses like a steam brake struggling to stop a runaway train, waddles maybe three feet away, plops her geriatric belly firmly on the carpet, softens her hate-filled eyes to a dewy, inviting semblance of friendship and love, and meows plaintively as though to invite me closer to pet her. I approach her cautiously from the other side of the planet ...

CRASH!

You know when you’ve had a great day and you’ve fixed your broken lamp and you bought a new bulb for it and as soon as you get it screwed in you have big plans to touch up your baseboards so you can start moving furniture against the walls but instead the bulb flies out of your hand as you’re screwing it in and crashes to flesh-shredding dust all over your floor and by the time you get it all (you hope) cleaned up your great day is now your dejected night and you’re in zero mood to paint baseboards so you just whine about it all online and go to bed?

Shit.

When you order some totally awesome shoes that you totally don’t need

but they were 70% off plus your employee discount and you hoped they’d be ugly or uncomfortable when they arrived so you could just return them because god knows the LAST thing you need right now is more shoes but when they show up they’re just as totally awesome as they looked online and they’re totally trendy and totally comfortable so you’d be a total idiot to return them especially given how cheaply you got them but you have nowhere to put them and well, shit.

I’m tired of waiting

I have an 8K I want to run in three weeks and I need to train and my head pain is as low as it’s ever been over the last four weeks and I’m wide awake anyway and I’ve kept my running watch charged all this time just in case and I’m wearing my lifeguard shirt in case I drown so even though my ears are still screaming EEEEEEEEE in my head and my hair looks as lush as my hostas FUCK THIS HEADACHE PAIN—I’M GOING RUNNING!

I may be back in three minutes or three miles. Stay tuned ...

Racing ahead

Among the many, many helpful suggestions people have offered me about conquering this STU! PID! FUC! KING! headache—I’m actually quite humbled by your mass outpouring of concern and the sheer volume of suggestions and I’m sorry that I haven’t personally thanked you all—is trying a mega-dose of caffeine. I’m currently five and a half months pop-free and I’m not about to break my sobriety streak now and I’ve never been able to choke down coffee so I just chugged a 5 Hour Energy even though I don’t feel tired so I’m totally about to live that episode of Desperate Housewives where Felicity Huffman mainlines her kids’ Adderall and stays up all night organizing the toothpicks and doing her kids’ science projects for them—WHICH IN RETROSPECT WAS A SIGN WE ALL MISSED WAKE UP, PEOPLE!—and I still have to work a half day from home to make up for the negative-PTO deficit my NYC canceled flights caused and I really want to pull the weeds and fix the flappy visqueen and displaced pea gravel in our side hosta bed and find more things to clean with my awesome new happy-Mother’s-Day-to-me vacuum and paint my room and finish the build-out behind the house and fix the deficit before the sun goes down and hoo boy I’m off and running where did I put my running shoes oh there they are I’ll see you when we all get to Narnia look out toothpicks here I come!

EPIC. PURGE.

30+ years of extant pay stubs, boxes of checks from banks that no longer exist, investment statements from companies that long ago dissolved, oversize document packets from multiple refinanced mortgages, receipts from the days when they included complete credit-card numbers, tax documents older that the magic save-for-seven-years rule, rolled-over insurance policies, vested and cashed-in company stock options, long-forgotten parking tickets, repair documents for cars that no doubt now rust in junkyards, and even three neatly folded and carefully notarized wills from before I decided to leave everything I own to the Melania Trump Be Best Foundation For Whatever The Hell Be Best Is Supposed To Mean.

I know lots of it is perfectly safe to be dumped in our recycle bin, but I decided I’d feel safer if all of it were destroyed, so every piece of paper and possibly compromising detail of my life is now locked in a secure container and headed off to be brutally shredded—all for the low, low price of $1 per pound.

I won’t even tell you that it weighed in at a whopping 77 pounds and force you to do the math in your head. But I’m definitely keeping the receipt for the next 30 years.

GAH!

You know how when you somehow decide it would be an awesome, merry idea to send gushing fan letters on Instagram to some of the people you just saw on Broadway and you try to make your effusive gushing really clever because that’s a Very Special Skill you have and in your delusion your unbounded cleverness will make the Broadway people so flattered and touched and amused that OF COURSE they’ll read your gushing fan letters to their entire and entirely grateful casts who will probably hopefully maybe all respond to you with notes that are effusively thankful and not at all guarded because they’re trying to gauge whether or not to put out restraining orders on you—which just so happens to be something you literally joked about in your fan letters in an attempt to be Very Specially Clever—and the morning after you’ve sent your gushing fanboy letters you wake in a clammy-skin gray-sweat mortifying epiphany about the horrors you’ve unleashed and now you’re afraid to open Instagram in the mortal fear that your Broadway people HAVE in fact responded and you suddenly realize that the last thing in the world you want is to see what they might have to say to you either way because you’d actually rather instead be pushed by judgy cool kids into a volcano of feral she-wolves as swarms of angry syphilis bees eat your eyes?

Me neither.

When it’s your first day back at the gym in literally a week

because you’ve been working 24/7 on 9 to 5 and you didn’t even think about the fact that you’re still sporting last night’s wig-cap hair and sideburn glue before you left the house so you look either like a crazy person or a workout beast but there’s hardly anyone at the gym to notice you so you can safely take a number of selfies to choose from and yes this wrinkly one is the best of the batch but it’s not like I’m gonna land a boyfriend or even a date here today especially not with the cute guy I’ve been introduced to twice but who otherwise pretends not to see me even though he totally can’t pull off that attitude because one this isn’t a stand-and-model gay gym and two gurl you’re not THAT cute but anyway even though taking a whole week off literally made me feel fat and sluggish and old I clearly didn’t lose strength because I’m still lifting the same weights today and dare I say it I even feel like I could actually go up in weight and wow I’ve sure switched pronouns and cases here with wild abandon and is this what you call a run-on sentence?

I had a dream last night

that I was giving some sort of symposium on some sort of public policy and I noticed that Taylor Swift was sitting in the second row of the audience next to a woman I was pretty sure was Kathy Griffin but I wasn’t really sure and I didn’t want to ask and look stupid because of course I should know who Kathy Griffin is and it was weird that I knew who Taylor Swift was because I really know very little about her but anyway I got to a part in my presentation where I discussed people who are polarizing and I decided for some reason that I had no choice but to use Taylor Swift as an example so I called her out on being a polarizing public figure even though as I said I barely know anything about her but I couldn’t call out the woman who may or may not have been Kathy Griffin as a polarizing figure because again I wasn’t entirely sure the woman was indeed Kathy Griffin and again I didn’t want to look stupid even though Kathy Griffin is very much a polarizing figure and she would have been a much better example to call out and the look on Taylor Swift’s face when I called her out as being a polarizing figure was a mix of unwelcome shock and uncomfortable embarrassment and I kept saying she was a polarizing figure anyway and I don’t remember how the dream ended but here’s a picture of Bitch Kitty in a box:

Hy-pathetic

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

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

Ahem.

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

When you’re all psyched up for a killer leg workout

but when you warm up at the squat rack you feel the tiniest hint of a twinge of an old tendon injury deep in your awkward buttish region so in the interest of preserving your ability to walk you have to abruptly pick another body part to work out as you bob and choke in a bewildering sea of whatdoIdonowness so you decide to do chest and triceps but you’ve been thinking about destroying your quads all day so your head just isn’t in it but speaking of my head here’s an artistically composed pec-deck portrait of me and my phrenology shirt.

John Wilkes called ...

When you’re taking a selection of selfies in front of the telecommunications museum in the upstairs lobby of the theater as you wait to make your (surprise!) balcony entrance in Act II and a totally handsome and totally age-appropriate man comes out of the bathroom and catches you and you try to play it cool as he says hi and you I-would-NEVER-take-a-selection-of-selfies-in-front-of-the-telecommunications-museum-in-the-upstairs-lobby-say-hi back to him and as you pretend you’re being totally cool and normal you notice that he’s looking over his shoulder at you as he walks up the stairs to the balcony doors and you can’t decide if it’s because he thinks you’re weird or he wants your name so he can call you to ask you on a date and I’M IN THE PROGRAM UNDER DOUG THE CHRISTMAS COP AND YOU CAN FIND ME ON FACEBOOK!

We're all ...

red and yellow and green and brown and scarlet and black and ochre and peach and ruby and olive and violet and fawn and lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve and cream and crimson and silver and rose and azure and lemon and russet and grey and purple and white and pink and orange VOTE BLUE!

After surviving an invasion by a foreign royal lineage, beheading the Groom of the Stool (it’s a legit title! look it up!), tooting the court jester’s horn and making a gratuitous dictatorship pun,

I have hereby abandoned the royal wee, abdicated the porcelain throne and rejoined the peasantry in the Commonwealth of Arby’s.

These people

You should hear them all sing. No really. YOU SHOULD COME TO OUR SHOW AND HEAR THEM ALL SING. The talent in this show is humbling. And the people in this show are delightful. And I’m being all sappy because I’ve had two Diet Cokes so my guard is down and I’m so embarrassed that I let you all see me this way so I’m going to stop typing now so I don’t embarrass myself any further I could have danced all night on the street where you live wait why am I stringing together random song titles from My Fair Lady oh right it’s because I’m IN My Fair Lady and I’m in it with these lovely people plus a lot more lovely people so GET YOUR BLOOMIN’ TICKETS AND COME SEE US, PEOPLE I think I need another Diet Coke.

So ... burning man ...

Sometimes carefully laid plans for a weirdly cool Burning Man exhibit at the Renwick followed by a pilgrimage to see the Obama portraits at the National Portrait Gallery turn into a mostly-chatting-and-half-paying-attention-to-the-arty-stuff wander through the Renwick followed by three hours of catching up at (don’t laugh) TGI Friday’s (I SAID DON’T LAUGH) with a long-lost high-school friend who is now a hella-cool adult friend who will corroborate your story that your TGI Friday’s waitress was probably the shittiest waitress ever to work on a Friday or any other day and I seriously can’t remember the last time I’ve ever left a bad tip for anyone and I used to wait tables so I ALWAYS tip extremely generously and Gareth was my first-ever crush and I just had lunch with him but I’m burying this information deep in this blathery run-on sentence so you probably skipped over that part and saved us all a bottomless swamp of paralyzing awkwardness how ‘bout them Hawkeyes I’m on vacation puppies are cute THIS PART IS IN ALL CAPS anyway where was I oh yeah the Burning Man exhibit was truly cool and breathtaking and informative for those of us who until today had no earthly idea what the hell Burning Man is even about and I totally recommend it but we both heartily do NOT recommend the nearby TGI Friday’s (STOP IT WITH YOUR DERISIVE LAUGHING) especially the slimy booth that had a metal plate over the junction box where the sconce had mysteriously been removed Exhibit A: First Selfie and catching up with Gareth was truly an awesome way to end a truly awesome vacation even through we never got to the National Portrait Gallery but we did get a selfie in front of a nearby George Washington bust Exhibit B: Second Selfie don’t worry I told him a long time ago that he was my first-ever crush and his wife has reportedly come to terms with it and is totally not threatened by me OR IS SHE and he swears it’s not awkward anymore but let the record show HE WAS THE FIRST TO BRING IT UP TODAY BUT IT’S TOO LATE THAT SHIP HAS SAILED SO STOP MAKING IT WEIRD GARETH and the Obama portraits will have to wait until next summer but except for our gaspingly inept waitress today this trip has been pretty awesome.